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WMF 2023

GUEST OF HONOR

SIR TIM BERNERS-LEE

Inventor of the World Wide Web

WMF 2023 in NUMBERS
+89
COUNTRIES
10
PAVILLIONS
+100
STAGES
+1.000
SPEAKERS
MAINSTAGE
+100 TALKS and SHOWS
+30
BANDS and DJS
+130
INSTITUTIONAL GUESTS
+2.000
STARTUPS and INVESTORS
+670
EXHIBITORS
+150
CREATORS

Sir Tim Berners-Lee was the guest of honor of the 11th edition of WMF - We Make Future, International Fair and Festival on Tech and Digital Innovation, which took place at the Rimini Exhibition Center from June 15 to 17, 2023, Italy.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA. Named one of Time Magazine’s ‘100 Most Important People of the 20th Century,’ he is the co-founder and CTO of Inrupt, which uses pioneering Solid technology to put individuals in control of their data and give organizations new opportunities to create value for customers in an open marketplace of innovation.

In 1989 while at CERN, Sir Tim invented the World Wide Web. Sir Tim is the Founder and Director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) which makes technical standards for the Web and the World Wide Web Foundation whose mission is that the World Wide Web serves humanity.

He co-founded and is President of the Open Data Institute in London and is a Professor of Computer Science at Oxford University, and an Emeritus Professor Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). In 2013, Sir Tim, along with Vinton Cerf, Robert Kahn, Louis Pouzin and Marc Andreesen, was awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for "ground-breaking innovation in engineering that has been of global benefit to humanity."

In April 2017, Sir Tim was awarded the Turing Prize, considered the "Nobel Prize of Computing”. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Science and the National Academy of Science. He has been the recipient of several honorary degrees and awards, most recently the Seoul Peace Prize in 2022 for his work promoting data sovereignty and leading the movement to “decentralize” the web.

"For the economic, social and political benefit of all, the Web must be recognized as a public good"

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is one of the Technology Leaders in recent history; the inventor of the World Wide Web, he initiated the historical revolution in online browsing, paving the way toward the hypermedia and hyperconnected society in which we live. His contribution to the development of the Web and associated standards has been fundamental to the growth of digital technology and the applications that come with it.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee's is a revolutionary invention that brought the Web into everyone's homes and radically shaped the social, economic, and cultural aspects of the past three decades globally. It created and gifted the world with an infrastructure that now connects some 5 billion people and has enabled the immensely valuable services offered today by tech giants such as Facebook, Google and Amazon.

The first web page
The first web page

After graduating in physics from Oxford in 1976, Sir Tim Berners-Lee joined CERN in Geneva, where in 1989 he proposed his plan for hypermedia global information sharing via the Internet and created the software needed to make it happen, with the help of Robert Caillau. The following year he created the first Web server, HTTPD (Hypertext transfer protocol daemon), and then the first browser/editor, WorldWideWeb, in the NeXTStep environment, made public on August 6, 1991.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee also contributed to the definition of other technologies fundamental to the functioning of the Web, including the first version of HTML, (Hypertext Markup Language) the language for writing Web pages, and the definition of URL (Uniform Resource Locator), the addressing of Internet resources, and HTTP, the protocol for transferring information on the Web.

Since 1994, Sir Tim Berners-Lee has been working at MIT in Boston, where he founded the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an organization that focuses on standard-setting and the development of new interoperable web technologies.

In 2004, he received the Millennium Technology Prize, and in 2017 he was awarded the Turing Prize, also referred to as the "Nobel Prize in computer science".

Currently, he is a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Computer Science Department at the University of Oxford.

The server used for publishing the first web page
The server used for publishing the first web page

One of the main battles shared by the WMF Community and the inventor of the Web is to defend net neutrality and advocate open standards that ensure accessibility and democratization of online browsing. Through the World Wide Web Foundation, Berners-Lee promotes initiatives against any form of inequality in opportunities to use and access the Web. He also co-founded the Open Data Institute with Sir Nigel Shadbolt in 2012, with the goal of showing the value of open data and advocating for accessibility and innovative use of data to drive positive change around the world.

His keynote at WMF - We Make Future was a unique opportunity: we listened to the views of one of the greatest visionaries of our time, one of the pioneers of the digital revolution. During the WMF, Sir Tim Berners-Lee shared his experience and his idea of web development, offering an analysis of current trends and future perspectives of his creature.