Tim Berners-Lee

Tim Berners-Lee
Tim Berners-Lee is a computer scientist from London, England who created the first version of the World Wide Web. Berners-Lee was able to enable HTML documents to be read through web pages on the Internet in multiple places world-wide. Berners-Lee also acts as the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) with an aim to advance the Internet for everyday users, as well as to protect user information. While the internet first served as a way to transfer files from one computer to another via local connection, Berners-Lee identified a way to use these Internet nodes combined with hypertext to share information through domains.

Education
Tim Berners-Lee began his education at the Queen’s College of the University of Oxford in 1973. While Berners-Lee went on to create a legacy for himself as a Computer Scientist, he studied Physics in school. It was in 1976 that he graduated from this institution. After he graduated Berners-Lee worked for companies such as Plessey, and CERN where he worked on projects such as intelligent printer, multi-tasking operating systems, and the program Enquire. These works led Berners-Lee to be able to create a proposal for the idea of what comes to be known as the World Wide Web.

Notable Awards

 * Software System Award (1995) ACM
 * 100 Most Important People (1999) TIME Magazine
 * Knights of the British Empire (2004)
 * Inaugural Queen Elizabeth Prize (2013)

Current Work
While Berners-Lee still works with the W3C, him and his colleagues aim to find ways to create a user-friendly environment on the internet. With his current work focuses on tracking user data and user protection. While anyone can create hypertext files to be found on the internet, some give individuals false information and aim to harm the users by stealing their information. Berners-Lee has recently suggested there are 3 major problems with the current form of the World Wide Web.
 * 1) Fake News
 * 2) Losing control of personal data
 * 3) Political Advertising

Fake news is an issue directly related to the social media that web 2.0 introduced. Many individuals share news stories that potentially have no facts behind them, and individuals assume the stories are true. This can lead to a false representation of the world. The issue with user data is that often time individuals sign up for accounts on websites, and they do not realize that their user information is being gathered. Without the proper means to protect this data, users are potentially putting themselves in harms ways. Political advertisements, like fake news, create false representations that Berners-Lee suggests can take away from the democratic system in the United States and other Countries World Wide. There is also a focus in his work into filter bubbles, and how to break the barrier to these search bubbles for users everywhere. Berners-Lee current work focuses on ways to cut down on these issues in the Web.

Tim Berners-Lee Videos

 * The Next Web
 * The Year Open Data Went World-Wide
 * Magna-Carta for the Web

Personal Life
Tim-Berners-Lee is currently still married to his second wife, Rosemary Leith. He has two children from his previous marriage with Nancy Carlson, though they divorced in 2011. Tim Berners-Lee is a religious man and an active member of his church.