Joe Touch is an independent consultant and the Principal Scientist at the Aerospace Corporation. He was previously with the University of Southern California’s (USC) Information Sciences Institute for over 25 years, most recently as its Postel Center Director and as a Research Associate Professor in USC’s Computer Science and EE/Systems Departments.
He received a B.S. in biophysics and CS from the Univ. of Scranton in 1985, an M.S. in CS from Cornell Univ. in 1987, and a Ph.D. in CS from the Univ. of Pennsylvania in 1992. His interests include network and distributed systems architecture, virtual networks, optical computing, optical communication processing, and high-performance network security. He holds 5 US patents and has published over 150 papers in conferences and journals.
Joe is in Sigma Xi, an ACM Distinguished Scientist, an IEEE Senior Member and Communications Society Distinguished Lecturer, and an OSA Senior Member and Traveling Lecturer. He is active in the IETF in the Transport, Internet, and Security Areas, and served on numerous conference committees. He pioneered a “first principles approach to computer networking” course based on his Recursive Network Architecture, which is under development as a textbook and has been taught at both USC and UCLA.