The Web was once for everyone. Thirty years ago, the Web was launched as an open, common, universal infrastructure that anyone with a computer and a modem could use to communicate, publish and access information. In recent years, however, it has radically diverged from the values upon which it was founded.

The medium that was designed to bring together the world’s information and support a plurality of voices—the many, without privileging the few—is increasingly dominated by a number of platform companies, who have established business models and built services that generate huge profits. There are increasing concerns of the concentration of powers that enable the dominance and controls of a few.

In this talk, Prof Ruben Verborgh, Visiting Fellow of the Oxford Martin Programme on Ethical Web and Data Architectures, will be joined by Prof Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Prof Sir Nigel Shadbolt, to discuss how new forms of technical and legal infrastructure are being developed and deployed to provide a more equitable and ethical treatment of individual users in the age of AI. They will outline the challenges of achieving better data autonomy, providing individuals with better rights to data privacy while enabling them to benefit from the exciting possibilities of digital innovations.

This event will be followed by a drinks reception.

Event fully booked

Please note this talk is in-person only and will not be livestreamed.

Professor Ruben Verborgh
Visiting Fellow, Oxford Martin Programme on Ethical Web and Data Architectures

Ruben Verborgh is a Professor of Decentralized Web Technology at IDLab of Ghent University – imec and a Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Martin School within the University of Oxford. He is the Head of Data Interoperability at Inrupt. His professional mission is to support all participants within the Solid ecosystem on their journey to restore data-driven innovation and to put people back in control of their data. He has co-authored two books on Linked Data, and contributed to more than 300 publications on Web technology for international conferences and journals.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Director, Oxford Martin Programme on Ethical Web and Data Architectures

Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. As co-founder/CTO of Inrupt he has developed the Solid Protocol, pioneering open-source technology to provide data sovereignty for citizens, governments and companies. He is the founder of the World Wide Consortium (W3C), and co-founder of the Open Data Institute. Sir Tim is an Emeritus Professor of Computer Science at Oxford University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and has been the recipient of several honorary degrees and awards, including the Seoul Peace Prize and the Turing Prize.

Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt
Director, Oxford Martin Programme on Ethical Web and Data Architectures

Prof Sir Nigel Shadbolt is a leading researcher in Artificial Intelligence and one of the originators of the interdisciplinary field of Web Science. He is Principal of Jesus College Oxford and Professor of Computing Science at Oxford University. He is chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founded with Sir Tim Berners-Lee. He was knighted in 2013 for ‘services to science and engineering’.

With over 500 publications, he has researched and published on topics from cognitive psychology to computational neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence to the Semantic Web.

He is a Fellow of The Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the British Computer Society.

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