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Tom Leighton co-founded Akamai Technologies in August 1998. Serving as Chief Scientist and as a Director to the Board, Dr. Leighton is Akamai's technology visionary as well as a key member of the Executive Committee setting the company's direction.
As one of the world's preeminent authorities on algorithms for network applications, Dr. Leighton's work behind establishing Akamai was based on recognizing that a solution to freeing up Web congestion could be found in applied mathematics and algorithms. Akamai has demonstrated this through the creation of the world's largest distributed computing platform that dynamically routes content and applications across a network of over 18,000 servers. Dr. Leighton's technology achievements at Akamai earned him recognition as one of the Top 10 Technology Innovators in U.S. News & World Report.
A Professor of Applied Mathematics at MIT, he has served as the Head of the Algorithms Group in MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) since its inception in 1996.
Dr. Leighton holds numerous patents involving content delivery, Internet protocols, algorithms for networks, cryptography, and digital rights management. During the course of his career, he has served on dozens of government, industrial and academic review committees; program committees; and editorial boards. He is a former two-term chair of the 2,000-member Association of Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Complexity Theory, and a former two-term editor-in-chief of the Journal of the ACM, the nation's premier journal for computer science research. From 2003 to 2005, Dr. Leighton served on the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), during which time he chaired the Subcommittee on Cybersecurity. Dr. Leighton is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Engineering.
Dr. Leighton has published more than 100 research papers, and his leading text on parallel algorithms and architectures has been translated into several languages. Dr. Leighton graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a B.S. in Engineering. He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from MIT. | 