Web inventor considers history and prospects of the World Wide Web

Tim Berners-Lee

Copyright: Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, courtesy National Portrait Gallery

Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, FRS, inventor of the World Wide Web, will be looking back and forwards at the Web's development, in his inaugural lecture at Southampton, which takes place on 14 March.

Tim Berners-Lee is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, Senior Researcher at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he leads the Decentralized Information Group (DIG), and Professor of Computer Science in the School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton.

A graduate of Oxford University, Professor Berners-Lee now holds the 3Com Founders chair at MIT. He directs the World Wide Web Consortium, an open forum of companies and organizations with the mission to lead the Web to its full potential.

With a background of system design in real-time communications and text processing software development, in 1989 he invented the World Wide Web, an internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing, while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. He wrote the first web client (browser-editor) and server in 1990.

Before coming to CERN, Tim worked with Image Computer Systems, of Ferndown, Dorset, England, and before that as a principal engineer with Plessey Telecommunications, in Poole, England.

Tim Berners-Lee is a Founding Director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) launched in November 2006 to provide a global forum for scientists and scholars to collaborate on the first multidisciplinary scientific research effort specifically designed to study the Web at all scales of size and complexity, and to develop a new discipline of Web science for future gnerations of researrchers. The other Founding Directors of WSRI are Professor Wendy Hall, Professor Nigel Shadbolt, and Daniel J. Weitzner.

Professor Berners Lee's lecture takes place on the Highfield Campus at 5 pm on Wednesday 14 March. Admission is by ticket only; to request a ticket contact enquiries@ecs.soton.ac.uk (tel.023 8059 5453).