Wendy Hall | |
|---|---|
 Hall in 2011 | |
| Born | Wendy Hall (1952-10-25)25 October 1952 (age 72)[5] London, England, UK |
| Education | Ealing Grammar School for Girls |
| Alma mater |
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| Known for | Web science |
| Spouse | [5][3] |
| Awards | Suffrage Science award (2016) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | |
| Institutions | |
| Thesis | Automorphisms and coverings of Klein surfaces (1977) |
| Doctoral advisor | David Singerman[4] |
| Website | users |
Dame Wendy HallDBE FRS FREng MAE FIET[7] (born 25 October 1952) is a Britishcomputer scientist. She isRegius Professor of Computer Science at theUniversity of Southampton.[8]
Wendy Hall was born in west London and educated atEaling Grammar School for Girls. She studied for undergraduate and postgraduate degrees inmathematics at theUniversity of Southampton. She completed herBachelor of Science (BSc) degree in 1974, and herDoctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in 1977.[5] Herdoctoral thesis was titledAutomorphisms and coverings of Klein surfaces.[9] She later completed aMaster of Science degree inComputing atCity University London.[5][2]
Hall returned to the University of Southampton in 1984 to join the newly formed computer science group there, working inmultimedia andhypermedia.[10] Her team invented theMicrocosmhypermedia system[11] (before theWorld Wide Web existed), which was commercialised as a start-up company, Multicosm Ltd.[12]
Wendy Hall and Hugh Davis led the Multimedia Research Group at the University of Southampton, which created commercial systems near the beginning of the hypertext and database system era, including:
These systems used a separate server to hold a linkbase and recorded links from anchor points within a Word or pdf document, similar toVannevar Bush’s original vision of hypertext documents.[13]
Hall was appointed the university's first female professor of engineering in 1994. She then served as Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science from 2002 to 2007.[14]
In 2006, along withTim Berners-Lee,Nigel Shadbolt[15] andDaniel Weitzner, Hall became a founding director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI).[16] Now known as theWeb Science Trust, the WSRI was originally a collaboration between theUniversity of Southampton (ECS) andMIT (CSAIL) which aimed to coordinate and support the study of theWorld Wide Web.[16][17] The WSRI's activities helped to formally establish the concept ofWeb Science,[17] and Hall is now executive director of theWeb Science Trust.[18]
Hall was President of theBritish Computer Society from 2003 to 2004[1][19][20] and of theAssociation for Computing Machinery from 2008 to 2010.[21] Since 2014, she has served as a Commissioner for the Global Commission on Internet Governance.[22]
In 2017, Hall was appointed Regius Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton.[23]
In 2020, she was appointed as Chair of theAda Lovelace Institute by theNuffield Foundation – the organisation's independent funder, succeedingAlan Wilson.[24]
Since 2022, Hall has been theEditor-in-Chief ofRoyal Society Open Science[25] and served as the Chair of theRoyal Society Publishing Board from 2017 to 2022.
Hall was appointedCommander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the2000 Birthday Honours. She was promoted toDame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the2009 New Year Honours.[26][27][28]
Hall also has honorary degrees fromOxford Brookes University,Glamorgan University,Cardiff University,Open University of Catalonia[29] and theUniversity of Pretoria.[10]
In 2000, she was elected a Fellow of theRoyal Academy of Engineering (FREng)[7] and is a member of the Academy of Europe.[30] She is a Fellow of theBritish Computer Society (FBCS) (also serving as president) and a Fellow of theInstitution of Engineering and Technology (FIET). In 2002, she was appointed a Fellow of theCity and Guilds (FCGI). Hall was elected aFellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2009.[31]
Her nomination for the Royal Society reads:
Distinguished for her contribution to understanding the interactions of humans with large scale multimedia information systems. Her early ideas which developed in parallel with development of the world wide web, www, are now forming key elements of subsequent development into the Semantic Web. Her most recent work focuses on the development of a new field of Web Science focused on understanding and exploring the various influences, science, commerce, public, politics which drive the evolution of the www. Her research is aimed at both understanding the evolution of the web and engineering its future.[32]
In 2006, she was the winner of the ABIE Award for Technical Leadership from theAnita Borg Institute.[33][34]
In 2010, she was named a Fellow of the ACM "for contributions to thesemantic web[35] and web science[36] and for service to ACM and the international computing community."[37] In 2016, she was named a Kluge Chair in Technology and society at the Library of Congress.[38] She is a member of the Advisory Council for theCampaign for Science and Engineering,[39] and a member of theAcademia Europaea.[40]
She was one of the 30 women identified in the BCS Women in IT Campaign in 2014[41] and was featured in the e-book of these 30 women in IT, "Women in IT: Inspiring the next generation" produced by the BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, as a free download e-book, from various sources.[42]
In February 2013, she was assessed as one of the 100 most powerful women in the United Kingdom byWoman's Hour onBBC Radio 4.[43] In herDesert Island Discs in 2014, on the same radio channel, she chose Wikipedia as the book she would most like if abandoned on a desert island.[2] She won theSuffrage Science award in 2016.
In addition to over 500 peer-reviewed journal articles, Hall co-authoredFour Internets withKieron O'Hara andVint Cerf in 2021.[44]
Hall is married to Peter Chandler, a plasma physicist.[5][2]
