Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Founder, World Wide Web
Founder, World Wide Web Foundation
Co-Director, Web Science Research Institute
Tim Berners-Lee is the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium and the 3COM Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he leads the Decentralized Information Group (DIG). He is co-Director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) launched in 2006 to help create the first multidisciplinary research body to examine the World Wide Web and offer the practical solutions needed to help guide its future use and design. He is a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation, started in 2008 to fund and coordinate efforts to further the potential of the Web to benefit humanity.
A graduate of Oxford University, England, in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, an internet-based hypermedia initiative for global information sharing while at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory. He wrote the first web client and server in 1990. His specifications of URIs, HTTP, and HTML were refined as Web technology spread. Berners-Lee was elected to be a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and has received widespread international honors He received the rank of Knight Commander (the second-highest rank in the Order of the British Empire) by Queen Elizabeth II, and was named the first recipient of Finland’s Millennium Technology Prize. He also received the IEEE/RSE Wolfson James Clerk Maxwell Award, and, in April 2009, he was awarded a honoris causa doctorate by the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.