Robert Kahn has been named the recipient of the 2008 Japan Prize for Information Communication Theory and Technology. He and Vinton Cerf, a vice president of Google, shared the prize for creating a network architecture and communication protocol for the Internet. The prize, which is given in two fields each year, entails a cash award of 50 million yen, or around $470,000.

Kahn is president and CEO of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, a non-profit organization which he founded in 1986 after a 13-year term at the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. He earned his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton in 1964.

A member of the National Academy of Engineering, Kahn also is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the Association for Computing Machinery and the Computer History Museum. He is a former member of the President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee, the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine and the President’s Advisory Council on the National Information Infrastructure.