翻译：曲荟龙

审校：张清越

“So, the internet is really a network of networks that underlies critically so many things in our lives. But really 50 years ago it was an experiment that escaped from the lab. And it wasn’t really designed to be the global communications infrastructure it is today.”

“互联网将众多的小网络连接成为一个大网络，它在我们生活中的许多方面都起着至关重要的作用。不过事实上，50年以前，它还是一个刚刚从实验室走向现实世界的‘试验品’。而且它的设计初衷也并不是成为当今全球通讯的基础设施。”

Jennifer Rexford, a computer scientist at Princeton University specializing in computer networks. She spoke to Scientific American Editor in Chief Mariette DiChristina at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos.

詹妮弗·瑞克斯福德，是普林斯顿大学的计算机科学家，她主攻研究计算机网络。在最近举办的达沃斯世界经济论坛上，她与「科学美国人」杂志的主编玛丽特·迪克莉斯汀娜进行了交谈。

“So, it really planted the seeds of tremendous innovation around the periphery of the internet and the devices we connect to it and the applications we run over it. But ironically it didn’t plant the seeds of its own innovation.

And we suffer from that every day, from the fact that we have denial-of-service attacks taking down websites, we have performance problems, Netflix streams grinding to a halt and so on.

“互联网在其周边行业里衍生出数目众多的创新成果，比如我们连接互联网时使用的设备和我们日常使用的应用程序。”但具有讽刺意味的是，互联网自主创新的领域却是一片空白。拒绝服务攻击让众多网站瘫痪，网络性能的问题层出不穷，“网飞”流媒体停止运作，这些因互联网而产生的问题源源不断，导致我们在日常生活中不得不承受由此产生的不便。

“In my work on self-driving networks we’re bringing together two really exciting technologies: machine learning that’s transforming everything, by taking raw data into true situational awareness. And the second is programmable network switches that bring the same idea of enabling and lowering the barrier to innovation that we have at the outside of the internet to its basic underpinnings. So that we can learn how to sense and actuate better over time, so that the network can learn to detect performance problems and route around them. To detect denial-of-service attacks and block them before they do significant harm. So, the marriage of these two technologies is really happening now, and it’s a great opportunity to build an internet that actually is worthy of the trust that we increasingly place in it today.”

“我的研究对象是一种自主运作的互联网，在工作中，我们将两项令人振奋的技术连接在一起：第一种技术是机器学习，它通过将原始数据转化为对真实情况的感知信息，让生活中的方方面面都发生了改变。第二种技术是一种可编程的网络交换机，它使我们能够在互联网的外部，通过一些基础设施来实现创新。这样我们就可以不断学习如何更好地感知和改进互联网，从而使网络能够自主检测性能问题并解决它们。检测拒绝服务攻击，并在这些攻击造成重大损害前阻止它们。这两种技术现在正在结合，这是一个千载难逢的良机，我们可以借此建立一个更加值得我们信任的互联网。