SPEAKER ORATEUR: TIM BERNERS LEE

Inventor of the World Wide Web

Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web. Now with the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he directs the W3 Consortium, an open forum of companies and organisations whose objectives are to realise the full potential of the Web.

Tim Berners-Lee graduated from Queen's College at Oxford University, England with 1st Class Honours in Physics 1976.

In 1984 he took up a fellowship at CERN, to work on distributed real-time systems for scientific data acquisition and system control. in 1989, hr proposed a global hypertext project to be known as the World Wide Web. This work was started in October 1990, and the programme "World Wide Web" first became available within CERN in December, and on the Internet at large in the summer of 1991.

Through 1991- 1993, Tim continued working on the design of the Web, co-ordinating 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.

In 1994, Tim joined the Laboratory for Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), as director of the W3 consortium which co-ordinates W3 development world-wide, with teams at MIT and INRIA in France. The consortium goal is to realise the full potential of the Web, ensuring its stability through the rapid evolution and revolutionary transformations of its usage.

In 1995, Tim Berner-Lee received the Kilby foundation's "Young Innovator of the Year" Award for his invention of the World Wide Web. He shared the ACM Software Systems Award in 1995 with Robert Cailliau, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina. He has an Honorary degree from the Parsons School of Design, New York (1996).

His Topics Include:
    The Web: Directions and Impact
    History of the World Wide Web
    Building Industries on the Web
    The future of the Internet
    Global Electronic Commerce
    Creativity in Cyberspace