Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Nigel Shadbolt in conversation: "The Web, internet and data during the pandemic: lessons learnt and new directions"

Past Event

Date
 26 November 2020, 5:00pm - 6:00pm

Location
 Online

Event Recording:

In 2020, Governments around the world made the decision to lock down their country to help stop the spread of Covid-19. This led to teaching, meetings, conferences, contacting family and more being conducted from home via the internet.

How did this affect data being used across the world? Did the systems already in place stand-up to the pressure? Was our privacy compromised. As companies and families grapple with how much data they need, we find ourselves in the midst of these important moral deliberations. The pandemic is revealing just how complex the data inter-dependencies are when we need to respond effectively.

Join Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, and Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt, leading researcher in Artificial Intelligence (AI), as they discuss what we have learnt and in what new directions we need to head in the world of data architecture.

Tim Berners-Lee

Sir Tim Berners-Lee
Professorial Research Fellow, Department of Computer Science

Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web while at CERN in 1989. He is the Co-Founder of the World Wide Web Foundation, Co-Founder and President of the Open Data Institute and Founder of the World Wide Consortium (W3C). He is also a Lead Researcher on the Oxford Martin Programme on Ethical Web and Data Architectures.

Sir Tim is a Professor at Oxford University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is the Co-Founder and CTO of Inrupt, a startup launched to ensure the success of the Solid platform to give people control of their own data and to re-decentralize the Web.

In 2004 he was knighted by H.M. Queen Elizabeth and in 2007 he was awarded the Order of Merit. He was awarded the ACM Turing Award in 2017, referred to as the "Nobel Prize of Computing". Tim is a long time defender of Net Neutrality and the openness of the web.

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Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt
Principal, Jesus College

Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt is a leading researcher in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and was one of the originators of the interdisciplinary field of Web Science. He is Principal of Jesus College Oxford; Professor of Computing Science at the University of Oxford; and a Lead Researcher on the Oxford Martin Programme on Ethical Web and Data Architectures. He is chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founded with Sir Tim Berners-Lee. In 2009 he was appointed Information Advisor by the Prime Minister and, working with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, led the development of the highly acclaimed data.gov.uk website. In 2010, he joined the UK government’s Public Sector Transparency Board – overseeing Open Data releases across the public sector. He was knighted in 2013 for services to science and engineering.

Nigel has a degree in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of Newcastle and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. In 1983 he joined the Department of Psychology at Nottingham where he established and led an AI group. In 1992 he became the Allan Standen Professor of Intelligent Systems. He moved to Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science in 2000. At Southampton he researched the next generation of the World Wide Web and was the first Head of the Web and Internet Science Group. At Oxford he has researched human-centred AI across a wide range of applications.

Most recently he was asked to lead the setting up of the University of Oxford’s Institute of Ethics in AI. With over 500 publications, he has researched and published on topics ranging from cognitive psychology to computational neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence to the Semantic Web. In 2018 he published The Digital Ape: how to live (in peace) with smart machines, described as a ‘landmark book’. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the British Computer Society.