Interview with Wendy Hall

Wendy Hall is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, UK, and was Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science from 2002 to 2007. Her team invented the ground-breaking Microcosm hypermedia system, which pre-dated the Web, and for which a patent was granted.

Her research interests now include the development of web technologies (particularly the Semantic Web), hypermedia systems and link services, advanced knowledge technologies, digital libraries, decentralized information systems, and human computer interaction. She has published over 350 papers in areas such as hypermedia, multimedia, digital libraries, and distributed information systems.

She is founding director, along with Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Nigel Shadbolt, and Daniel J. Weitzner, of the Web Science Research Initiative, which was launched in 2006 as a long-term research collaboration between the University of Southampton and MIT.

She holds a number of prestigious leadership roles. She is currently senior Vice President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and was President of the British Computer Society (2003-2004). She is a member of the Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET) Council and Publications Board and also Vice-President of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). She is a member of IW3C2 and was executive chair of the 15th International WWW conference in Edinburgh in May 2006. In April 2007 she joined the Board of the British Library.