EECS Seminar: The Web Was Done by Amateurs - On the History of the Web

Abstract: In 2012, Turing Award computer scientist Alan Kay released an interview in which he stated: ‘‘The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. […] The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs.’’ By looking at the history and present state of the Web, I will bring arguments to prove or refute Kay’s statement. Questions like: “How did the Web come about? Who are the heroes behind it? How did it evolve to what it is today?” will be addressed. The material is based on the book “The Web Was Done by Amateurs,” published in June 2018 by Springer-Nature.

Bio: Marco Aiello is a professor of computer science and head of the Department of Service Computing at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. An elected member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, he is an honorary professor of distributed systems at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands, where he was a faculty member from 2006 till 2018. He holds a doctorate in logic from the University of Amsterdam and in the habilitation in applied informatics from TU Wien, and a master's degree in engineering from La Sapienza University of Rome. In 2016, together with three former Ph.D. students, he founded the company SustainableBuildings BV, which was acquired by a Dutch energy company in 2020. His research interests are in smart energy systems, smart buildings, service computing and spatial reasoning.

Host: KJ Lin