Tom Vest is an Internet technology professional with extensive public, private, and nonprofit sector experience designing, provisioning, building, and interconnecting high capacity production IP networks in Europe, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. His current consulting engagements with the OECD Economics & Statistics Division, ICANN, and the RIPE NCC Science Group straddle a broad range of strategic Internet measurement, development, and policy matters.

As CAIDA’s Senior Analyst for Internet Economics and Policy, Tom assists with the enlargement/realignment of Internet measurement efforts to better address important public policy questions. As Research Program Manager for Packet Clearing House (2004-2006), a nonprofit research institution that pioneered the localization of Internet routing and DNS delivery in developed and developing countries, Tom was responsible for designing and coordinating global research on routing economics, network security, and the impact of telecommunications policies on Internet resource production. The former Tokyo-based Senior Network Operations Manager for America Online Inc., Tom was responsible for design, deployment, local management, and interconnection/peering for AOL’s Transit Data Network (ATDN) in China, Australia, and Japan. Before moving to Tokyo, Tom was responsible for coordinating AOL’s international peering and interconnection efforts, and for planning, implementing, and interconnecting remote points of presence and distributed host complexes in Europe and South America.

Tom is a former member of the U.S. State Department’s Global Information Economy (GIE) Working Group, and former Program Co-Chair of the Asia regional network operators forum, APRICOT. He has secured, managed, or conducted research on Internet economics, network security and management, and international trade in media and services on behalf of the U.S. Departments of Education and Homeland Security, Cisco Systems, The Open Society Institute, the Pacific Council on International Policy, the USC Center for International Studies, and the Santa Monica College Academy of Entertainment and Technology. An ABD Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California, Tom has presented excerpts from his forthcoming doctoral dissertation, Measuring the Wealth of Networks, at CAIDA, ISI, NANOG, APNIC, TPRC, OII, ISPCon, the FCC and NTIA, and the UC Berkeley SIMS Distinguished Lecture Series.