Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Most people know that Thomas Edison invented the light bulb and that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone. But have you ever heard of Tim Berners-Lee?
Probably not, yet the work of Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, may have the most profound impact of all. Why is his name unknown to most of the world? The answer lies in the type of life he has chosen to lead and the role he has chosen to play in helping to guide this emerging technology.
Fast-forward to 2001. Over 250 million people are using the Internet, a system virtually unheard of 10 years earlier, and Tim Berners-Lee is largely responsible. How could one person make it all happen?
For some clues, let’s go back to Tim’s early adulthood. Tim was especially interested in two things: computers and how the human brain organizes and links information. He wondered how the mind can almost randomly connect so many different facts. For instance, how can a song or a scent mentally link – or even transport – someone to another time and place? Tim was so fascinated by computers that, before graduating from the University of Oxford, he built his very first one from a kit using a television and an early microprocessor.
His life
June 8 1955---He was born in London, England. His parents were the quintessential computer geeks. As a matter of fact they met when they were working on the first computer to be commercially sold. It was natural that they encouraged him to think and work innovatively as he grew up. Tim Berners-Lee was raised in London and studied at the Queen's College at Oxford University.
1976---Tim Berners-Lee graduated from the Queen's College at Oxford University, England. Whilst there he built his first computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old television.
1976- 1978--- He spent two years with Plessey Telecommunications Ltd (Poole, Dorset, UK) a major UK Telecom equipment manufacturer, working on distributed transaction systems, message relays, and bar code technology.
1978--- Tim left Plessey to join D.G Nash Ltd (Ferndown, Dorset, UK), where he wrote among other things typesetting software for intelligent printers, and a multitasking operating system.
1979- mid 1980--- A year and a half spent as an independent consultant included a six month stint (Jun-Dec 1980)as consultant software engineer at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland. Whilst there, he wrote for his own private use his first program for storing information including using random associations. Named "Enquire", and never published, this program formed the conceptual basis for the future development of the World Wide Web.
1981-1984--- Tim worked at John Poole's Image Computer Systems Ltd, with technical design responsibility. Work here included real time control firmware, graphics and communications software, and a generic macro language.
1984--- he took up a fellowship at CERN, to work on distributed real-time systems for scientific data acquisition and system control. Among other things, he worked on FASTBUS system software and designed a heterogeneous remote procedure call system.
1989--- he proposed a global hypertext project, to be known as the World Wide Web. Based on the earlier "Enquire" work, it was designed to allow people to work together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext documents.
1990--- He wrote the first World Wide Web server, "httpd", and the first client, "WorldWideWeb" a what-you-see-is-what-you-get hypertext browser/editor which ran in the NeXTStep environment. The program "WorldWideWeb" first made available within CERN.
1991-1993--- internet is at large. Tim continued working on the design of the Web, coordinating feedback from users across the Internet. His initial specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined and discussed in larger circles as the Web technology spread.
1994--- Tim founded the World Wide Web Consortium at the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Since that time he has served as the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium which coordinates Web development worldwide, with teams at MIT, at ERCIM in Europe, and at Keio University in Japan. The Consortium takes as its goal to lead the Web to its full potential, ensuring its stability through rapid evolution and revolutionary transformations of its usage. The Consortium may be found at http://www.w3.org/.
1999--- he became the first holder of the 3Com Founders chair at LCS which merged with the Artificial Intelligence Lab to become "CSAIL", the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He is a Senior Research Scientist within the Lab where he heads the Decentralized Information Group (DIG).
December 2004---he became a Chair in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton, UK.
2006---He is co-Director of the newly launched Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI)
Awards
• In 1995, Tim Berners-Lee received the Kilby Foundation's "Young Innovator of the Year" Award and an honorary Prix Ars Electronica
• corecipient of the ACM Software Systems Award.
• In 1997 he was awarded the IEEE Koji Kobayashi Computers and Communications Award, the Duddell Medal of the Institute of Physics, the Interactive Services Association's Distinguished Service Award. The MCI Computerworld/Smithsonian Award for Leadership in Innovation, The International Communication Institute's Columbus Prize, and an OBE.
• In 1998, he received the Charles Babbage award, the Mountbatten Medal of the National Electronics Council, the Lord Lloyd of Kilgerran Prize from the Foundation for Science and Technology, PC Magazine Lifetime Achievement Award in Technical Excellence, a MacArthur Fellowship and The Eduard Rhein technology award.
• In 1999, Time magazine dubbed him one of the 100 greatest minds of the century and he received a World Technology Award for Communication Technology, and an Honorary Fellowship to the Society for Technical Communications.
• In 2000, he received the Paul Evan Peters Award of ARL, Educause and CNI, the Electronic Freedom Foundation's pioneer award, and the George R Stibitz Computer Pioneer award at the American Computer Museum, and the Special Award for Outstanding Contribution of the World Television Forum.
• In 2001 he received the Sir Frank Whittle Medal from the Royal Academy of Engineering.
• In 2002 he was the recipient of the Japan Prize from the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan.He shared the Prince of Asturias Foundation Prize for Scientific and Technical Research with with Larry Roberts, Rob Kahn and Vint Cerf; became a Fellow of the Guglielmo Marconi Foundation, and received the Albert Medal of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Art, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA).
• In 2004 Tim was listed in the new year's honours list for a knighthood (KBE) for services to the global development of the Internet and was knighted by H.M. the Queen on 16th July, 2004. Also in 2004 he was awarded the first Millennium Technology Prize and the Special Award of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
• In 2005 he received the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service for Mass Communications. the Die Quadriga Award and the Financial Times Lifetime Achievement Award.
• In 2006 he was awarded the President's Medal from the Institute of Physics.
• In 2007 he was awarded the Charles Stark Draper Prize from the National Academy of Engineering, the Lovelace Medal from the British Computer Society, the D&AD President's Award for Innovation and Creativity, and the MITX (Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange) Leadership Award. In June 2007 he was awarded the Order of Merit by H.M. the Queen.
He has honorary degrees from the Parsons School of Design, New York (D.F.A., 1996) , Southampton University (D.Sc., 1996), Essex University (D.U., 1998) Southern Cross University (1998), the Open University (D.U., 2000), Columbia University (D.Law, 2001), Oxford University (D.Sc., 2001), The University of Port Elizabeth (DSc., 2002) and Lancaster University (D.Sc., 2004). He is a Distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society, and a Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers., a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Royal Society (2001), a member of the American Philosophical Society (2004) and a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Engineering (2007).
Selected Publications
Berners-Lee, T.J., et al, "World-Wide Web: Information Universe", Electronic Publishing: Research, Applications and Policy, April 1992.
Berners-Lee T.J., et al, "The World Wide Web", Communications of the ACM, August 1994.
Tim Berners-Lee with Mark Fischetti, Weaving the Web, Harper San Francisco, 1999
Tim Berners-Lee, Dan Connolly, Ralph R. Swick "Web Architecture: Describing and Exchanging Data", W3C Note, 1999/6-7.
Berners-Lee, Tim. and Hendler, James "Publishing on the Semantic Web", Nature, April 26 2001 p. 1023-1025.
Berners-Lee, Tim; Hendler, James and Lassila, Ora "The Semantic Web", Scientific American, May 2001, p. 29-37.
James Hendler, Tim Berners-Lee and Eric Miller, 'Integrating Applications on the Semantic Web', Journal of the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan,
Vol 122(10), October, 2002, p. 676-680
Hendler, J., Berners-Lee, T.J., and Miller, E., ' Integrating Applications on the Semantic Web ', Journal of the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan, Vol 122(10), October, 2002, p. 676-680.
Nigel Shadbolt, Wendy Hall, Tim Berners-Lee, "The Semantic Web Revisited", IEEE Intelligent Systems Journal, May/June 2006, 96-101
Web Science Workshop Report12th-13th September, 2005. Hosted by the British Computer Society, London
Tim Berners-Lee, Wendy Hall, James Hendler, Nigel Shadbolt, Daniel J. Weitzner, “Computer Science: Enhanced: Creating a Science of the Web”, Science Vol. 313, 11 August 2006: 769-771Nigel Shadbolt, Wendy Hall, Tim Berners-Lee, “The Semantic Web Revisited”, IEEE Intelligent Systems Journal,
Tim-Berners Lee, Wendy Hall, James A. Hendler, Kieron O'Hara, Nigel Shadbolt and Daniel J. Weitzner, “A Framework for Web Science”, Foundations and Trends in Web Science, Volume 1, Issue 1 (also available as a book: ISBN: 1-933019-33-6 144pp September 2006)
Although he has had many opportunities to do so, Tim has not profited from his creation.
He drives an old Volkswagen Rabbit and works for a non-profit organization located at M.I.T., a leading engineering university. Married with two children, Tim leads a good life, one that is full of professional challenges. He is pleased with the road he chose to follow. Today, he helps set standards and guides the Web’s future, so he can be assured that it will remain open to all and not be splintered into many parts or dominated by one corporation. However, like Einstein who was concerned with his role in the development of nuclear power, Tim believes that technology can be used for good or for evil. “At the end of the day,” Tim says, “it is up to us: how we actually react, and how we teach our children, and the values we instill.”1 To this day, Tim Berners-Lee works hard to see that the technology he invented remains accessible to all people around the globe. That, rather than instant wealth, is his reward.
Quotes from Tim Berners-Lee:
1) Celebrity damages private life.
2) The important thing is the diversity available on the Web.
3) You affect the world by what you browse.
``Your name ; 4:55 PM
