This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Steve Mursky.

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.

Jennifer Rexford, a computer scientist at Princeton University specializing in computer networks. computer Forum in Davos. 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.

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 a 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

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