FutureEverything: Keynote: Dame Wendy Hall The Emerging Science of the Web and Why it is Important? May 14, 2010

Wendy Hall is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK, and was Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science from 2002 to 2007.

After undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in mathematics at the University of Southampton, she came back to Southampton in 1984 to join the fledgling Computer Science group. Her computing research career began at this time with pioneering work in multimedia and hypermedia, both at that time emerging disciplines.

Her team invented the ground-breaking Microcosm hypermedia system, which pre-dated the Web, and for which a patent was granted. The research was commercially exploited through a start-up company, Multicosm Ltd, and the software was an ITEA'95 award winner and a BCS IT award winner in 1996. The company is now called Active Navigation Ltd and focuses on Web-based link services.
Wendy Hall was the founding Head of the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia (IAM) Research Group in the School of Electronics and Computer Science at Southampton, which has now achieved worldwide eminence. Constantly at the forefront of strategic development in education and research, she was appointed the University’s first female professor of engineering in 1994, and in 2002, she was appointed Head of School.

Her research interests now include the development of web technologies (particularly the Semantic Web), hypermedia systems and link services, advanced knowledge technologies, digital libraries, decentralized information systems, and human computer interaction. She has published over 350 papers in areas such as hypermedia, multimedia, digital libraries, and distributed information systems.
She is founding director, along with Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Nigel Shadbolt, and Daniel J. Weitzner, of the Web Science Research Initiative, which was launched in 2006 as a long-term research collaboration between the University of Southampton and MIT.

She has achieved many external and professional awards and marks of recognition. She was awarded a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours list in June 2000, and became a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng) in the same year. She is a Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS) and a Fellow of the Institute of Engineering and Technology (FIET). In 2002 she was made a Fellow of the City and Guilds. She holds honorary degrees from Oxford Brookes University, Glamorgan University, Cardiff University, the University of Pretoria and Loughborough University. In 2008, she was given the rare honour of being made a Guest Professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.

She became a Dame Commander of the British Empire in the 2009 UK New Year's Honours list, and was recently elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Official Website: http://www.futureeverything.org/festival2010/Keynote_dame_wendy_hall