Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web and director of the World Wide Web Consortium, spoke to a full audience in Cabot's ASEAN auditorium yesterday as a part of the Snyder Presidential Lecture Series.
Berners-Lee is credited with inventing ENQUIRE, the program he would later use as the basis for creating the Web, in 1980 while consulting at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), a world-renowned particle physics lab located on the border between France and Switzerland.
Under Berners-Lee's eye, what began merely as an efficient method of sharing information within CERN soon evolved into what we now know as the World Wide Web.
University President Lawrence Bacow said in his introduction that Berners-Lee has truly become an individual who fits the character of the Snyder Lecture series, an individual who "embraced unconventional ideas ... that really moved the world.
"These are people who made a difference in their careers," Bacow continued.
He said that as the inventor of the World Wide Web, "it's fair to say that it's impossible to calculate the impact Tim has had on modern life."
Speaking with great energy about his creation, Berners-Lee delivered a lecture that sought to advise future innovators in computer and communication sciences, and at the same time address his own principles, hopes and fears concerning the future of the World Wide Web.
Berners-Lee referred to "philosophical engineering" when speaking about the differences between computer science and other sciences, such as physics, in which the rules are set.
Berners-Lee said that whereas a physicist's job is to discover the rules that govern his or her field, in computer science, "we make the rules."
This ability, he said, allows for nearly limitless levels of innovation in a field that has come to permeate the fabric of everyday public life.
In making this point, however, Berners-Lee cautioned the audience to remember that as engineers, "we have to be very aware of the macroscopic results of microscopic changes," reminding the audience of the responsibility placed on the shoulders of its future innovators.
He went on to call for the preservation of the universality of the Web, speaking out against censorship.
"It's really important that the Web doesn't embody just Washington D.C.'s version of what's acceptable and what is not," he said.
According to Lee, the Web represents an important opportunity to share information of all types and engender public discussion and debate - an openness he felt should be protected.
Berners-Lee used Wikipedia, Google and blogging as examples of promising recent developments in information-sharing technology.
He also cited his own Semantic Net, a new network that utilizes universal methods of encoding data in an effort to make information more accessible.
Even the structural shape of the Web is important, he continued, using the familiar metaphor of a spider's web to illustrate the importance of what he sees as one of the Web's biggest strengths: the versatility and reliability of the flow of information in the current configuration, verses the inherent bottlenecking and reliability issues associated with the use of a system that could be modeled by something like a tree-diagram.
Berners-Lee said that it is the decentralized nature of the Web that makes it so effective and allows for the isolation of problem areas and the re-routing of information to ensure a continuous stream.
At the same time, he stressed that decentralization must not come at the cost of fragmentation, touching on those difficulties associated with adapting the Internet to Web-capable cell phones and PDAs, as well as new browsers and Internet providers.
Ultimately, however, it will be the next generation of computer science engineers that determines the course of the World Wide Web, Berners-Lee told the audience.
