Director of the computer science division at RAND Corporation, Uncapher pioneered work on the technology of packet switching, in which digital messages are broken into small packets, sent over a network and reassembled at their destination. He founded the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) at the University of Southern California with DARPA funding. There, he hired engineers who helped to grow the early Internet. Packet switching R&D led to the military's ARPANET, and then to the Internet itself.

After several years at the RAND Corporation, Balzer left to help form the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute and served as a professor of computer science at USC and the director of ISI's Software Sciences Division. In 2000, after 28 years at ISI, he left to become the chief technical officer at Teknowledge Corporation and to open the new headquarters for Teknowledge's Distributed Systems Group in Marina Del Rey.

Ellis joined ISI as one of the first three founders - alongside Uncapher and Balzer - and led the development of the first packet radio terminal concept. A forerunner of the modern smartphone, this system proposed communicating by radio with the help of a keyboard and display screen.

Specialized in computer networking, Cohen was involved in the ARPAnet project and helped develop various fundamental applications for the Internet. In 1967, he developed the first real-time visual flight simulator on a general purpose computer. Cohen joined ISI to work on a packet-voice project designed to allow interactive, real-time speech over the ARPANet. The Network Voice Protocol project was a forerunner of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). In 1981, he adapted the visual simulator to run over the ARPANet. He started the MOSIS project in 1980.

Postel made many significant contributions to the development of the Internet, particularly with respect to standards. In March 1977, he joined the Information Sciences Institute as a research scientist. Together with Vint Cerf and Steve Crocker, Postel worked on implementing most of the ARPANET protocols. Cerf would later become one of the principal designers of the TCP/IP standard, which works because of the sentence known as Postel's Law.

Parker joined ISI in 1972 and was the hardware engineer for the team that invented what is now known as VOIP. He created an interface that enabled phone calls to travel over ARPANET for the first time. The interface linked the traditional phone system and ARPANET by converting phone signals from analog to digital and back. Digital transmission later became the communications-industry standard.

This Internet pioneer invented the Internet Domain Name System (DNS). He joined the Information Sciences Institute (ISI) of the University of Southern California (USC) in 1978, where he developed the first SMTP email server, proposed the DNS architecture in 1983, wrote the first DNS implementation (called "Jeeves") in 1983, and served as director of the high performance computing and communications division.

From 1983 until 1998, he was a co-PI of the Soar Project, a multi-disciplinary, multi-site attempt to develop, understand, and apply a cognitive architecture that models the fixed structures and processes that yield a mind, whether natural or artificial, and that is thus capable of supporting general intelligence. The most significant applications were intelligent automated pilots and commanders for synthetic battlespaces, as deployed in Synthetic Theater of War '97 (STOW-97). Rosenbloom was at ISI for twenty years, most recently as its Deputy Director.

Casner led the debuts of packet video with Danny Cohen, and transmitted via a satellite on the ISI building's roof in Marina Del Rey. Multicast transmission over the internet, or Mbone, was co-created by Casner in 1992. Two years later, Mbone was used to transmit a Rolling Stones concert worldwide via the net for the first time. He is the co-recipient, with Eve Schooler, of the IEEE Internet Award for their distinguished leadership in standards and formative contributions to Internet multimedia protocols.

Crocker has worked in the Internet community since its inception. He is the inventor of the Request for Comments series, authoring the first RFC. RFC is a theory of text organization that describes relations that hold between parts of text. It was originally developed at ISI and defined in a 1988 paper. The theory was developed as part of studies of computer-based text generation. Natural language researchers later began using RST in text summarization and other applications.

Braden’s research interests included end-to-end network protocols, especially in the transport and internetwork layers. He joined the networking research group at ISI in 1986, and was a project leader in the Computer Networks Division. He created the End-to-End Task Force, later known as the IRTF End-to-End Research Group. Among his contributions are: editing the Host Requirements RFCs, developing the Resource Reservation Protocol, developing T/TCP, and serving as co-editor of the Request for Comments (RFC) series.

Mann worked at ISI from the mid-1970s until 1990. He is especially well known for his work in text generation. He invented the Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST), which explains precisely what makes written texts coherent. RST becomes the basis for a large body of discourse-related natural language research.