World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee described his vision of a future in which computers understand, rather than only display, information in a lecture last night in McCosh 50.
In the talk, entitled "The Future of the Web," Berners-Lee both looked back on the first 15 years of the Internet and looked ahead to one that shares information and forms global communities in ways unfathomable today.
Computer Science professor Sanjeev Arora, chair of the University Public Lecture Series Faculty Committee, introduced Berners-Lee as an "idealist and a dreamer," saying that introducing Berners-Lee was "a bit like introducing the inventor of the wheel."
Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, in Switzerland.
Time Magazine named him to its 1999 list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century, and he has won numerous awards, including the Japan Prize in 2002. He was officially knighted in 1997.
Sir Berners-Lee now occupies the 3Com Founders Chair at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT and is a professor at the University of Southampton in England. His current work focuses on the Semantic Web, a project that he xplained and promoted during his remarks. The Semantic Web would allow computers to search websites more intelligently and perform actions, such as scheduling an appointment.
He said he and others have realized that for the Semantic Web to succeed, there must be "a paradigm shift all over again."
"The Semantic Web depends on putting data out there that other people will use in unexpected ways," he said. "That's what's really great about the Internet — the serendipitous use of it. Again and again, 'Look what I've found!' "
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