Wendy Hall

Dame Wendy Hall
Born Wendy Hall
25 October 1952[1]
London
Residence New Forest[2]
Fields
Institutions
Alma mater
Thesis Automorphisms and coverings of Klein surfaces (1977)
Doctoral advisor David Singerman[6]
Known for
  • Web Science
  • President of the ACM (2008–2010)
Notable awards

[8](2000)

Spouse Peter E. Chandler[1][5]
Website
users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/wh/
Wendy Hall's voice
from the BBC programme The Life Scientific, 8 October 2013[9]

Dame Wendy Hall, DBE, FREng, FRS (born 25 October 1952) is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, England.[10][11]

Early life

Wendy Hall was born in west London. She studied for undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in mathematics at the University of Southampton. She completed her Bachelor of Science (BSc) degree in 1974 and her Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in 1977.[12] Her doctoral thesis was titled Automorphisms and coverings of Klein surfaces.[13] She later completed a Master of Science degree in Computing at City University London.[1][4]

Career

Hall returned to the University of Southampton in 1984 to join the newly formed computer science group there, working in multimedia and hypermedia.[14] Her team invented the Microcosm hypermedia system[15] (before the World Wide Web existed), which was commercialised as a start-up company, Multicosm Ltd.[16] 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 2002–07.[17] In 2006, Hall became a founding director of the Web Science Research Initiative, along with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Sir Nigel Shadbolt[18] and Daniel Weitzner, in order to promote the discipline of Web Science and foster research collaboration between the University of Southampton and MIT.

Hall was President of the British Computer Society from 2003 to 2004[3][19][20] and of the Association for Computing Machinery from 2008 to 2010.[21]

Since 2014, Hall has served as a Commissioner for the Global Commission on Internet Governance.[22]

Awards and honours

Hall was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2000 Queen's Birthday Honours. She was promoted to Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 2009 New Year Honours.[23][24][25]

Hall also has honorary degrees from Oxford Brookes University,[26] Glamorgan University, Cardiff University, and the University of Pretoria.[27]

In 2000, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (FREng).[8] She is a Fellow of the British Computer Society (FBCS) (also serving as President) and a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (FIET). In 2002, she was appointed a Fellow of the City and Guilds (FCGI). On 15 May 2009, Wendy Hall was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS).[28] 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 focussed 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.[7] ”

In 2010 she was named a Fellow of the ACM "for contributions to the semantic web[29] and web science[30] and for service to ACM and the international computing community."[31] She is a member of the Advisory Council for the Campaign for Science and Engineering.[32]

She was one of the 30 women identified in the BCS Women in IT Campaign in 2014[33] and was then 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. [34]

In February 2013 she was assessed as one of the 100 most powerful women in the United Kingdom by Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4.[35] In her Desert 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.[4][lower-alpha 1]

Personal life

Dame Wendy is married to Dr Peter Chandler, a plasma physicist.[1][4]

Notes

  1. ↑ The presenter Kirsty Young allowed her to have a copy of Wikipedia but, to be within the rules, it had to be a paper based version.[4]

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 "HALL, Dame Wendy, (Dame Wendy Chandler)". Who's Who 2013, A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 2013; online edn, Oxford University Press.(subscription required)
  2. ↑ Jane Morgan. "Professor Wendy Hall". users.ecs.soton.ac.uk. Retrieved 5 January 2009.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Wendy Hall's publications indexed by Google Scholar, a free service provided by Google
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 Wendy Hall interviewed by Kirsty Young, 2014-07-14, BBC Desert Island Discs
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Wendy Hall interviewed by Jim Al-Khalili 2013-10-08, on The Life Scientific, BBC Radio 4
  6. ↑ Wendy Hall at the Mathematics Genealogy Project
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 "EC/2009/15: Hall, Wendy". London: The Royal Society. Archived from the original on 2014-07-22.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 "List of Fellows".
  9. ↑ "Wendy Hall". The Life Scientific. 8 October 2013. BBC Radio 4. Retrieved 2013-12-11.
  10. ↑ Women of Distinction Interview, with Stephen Ibaraki
  11. ↑ Wendy Hall on Twitter
  12. ↑ "HALL, Dame Wendy, (Dame Wendy Chandler)". Who's Who 2014. A & C Black. December 2013. Retrieved 26 October 2014.
  13. ↑ Hall, Wendy (1977). Automorphisms and coverings of Klein surfaces (PhD thesis). University of Southampton.
  14. ↑ "Professor Wendy Hall - Official site". Retrieved 2015-04-21.
  15. ↑ Hall, W.; Hill, G.; Davis, H. (1993). "The microcosm link service". Proceedings of the fifth ACM conference on Hypertext - HYPERTEXT '93. pp. 256–259. doi:10.1145/168750.168842. ISBN 0897916247.
  16. ↑ Biever, Celeste (25 November 2006). "It's a woman's world wide web". New Scientist.
  17. ↑ Atzenbeck, C. (2008). "Interview with Wendy Hall". ACM SIGWEB Newsletter 2007: 1. doi:10.1145/1350502.1350503.
  18. ↑ Hall, W.; De Roure, D.; Shadbolt, N. (2009). "The evolution of the Web and implications for eResearch". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 367 (1890): 991–1001. Bibcode:2009RSPTA.367..991H. doi:10.1098/rsta.2008.0252. PMID 19087929.
  19. ↑ "BCS Past Presidents. A list of BCS Past Presidents from 1957 onwards". Retrieved 5 October 2013.
  20. ↑ Wendy Hall's publications indexed by the Scopus bibliographic database, a service provided by Elsevier.
  21. ↑ "ACM Past Presidents". acm.org. Retrieved 2014-10-12.
  22. ↑ https://www.ourinternet.org/#commission
  23. ↑ "Pioneer of cyberspace honoured". BBC News Online. 31 December 2008. Retrieved 2009-01-04.
  24. ↑ The London Gazette: (Supplement) no. 58929. p. 6. 31 December 2008.
  25. ↑ Anthea Lipsett (31 December 2008). "Visionary computer scientist becomes a dame". www.guardian.co.uk. Retrieved 5 January 2009.
  26. ↑ http://www.brookes.ac.uk/about/honorary/profiles/wendy_hall
  27. ↑ http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/wh/news3.php
  28. ↑ Professor Dame Wendy Hall elected Fellow of the Royal Society, Web Science Research Institute, 2009.
  29. ↑ Shadbolt, Nigel; Berners-Lee, Tim; Hall, Wendy (2006). "The Semantic Web Revisited" (PDF). IEEE Intelligent Systems 21 (3): 96–101. doi:10.1109/MIS.2006.62.
  30. ↑ Berners-Lee, T.; Hall, W.; Hendler, J.; Shadbolt, N.; Weitzner, D. (2006). "Computer Science: Enhanced: Creating a Science of the Web". Science 313 (5788): 769–771. doi:10.1126/science.1126902. PMID 16902115.
  31. ↑ ACM Names 41 Fellows from World's Leading Institutions: Many Innovations Made in Areas Critical to Global Competitiveness, ACM, 7 December 2010, retrieved 2011-11-20.
  32. ↑ "Advisory Council of the Campaign for Science and Engineering". Retrieved 2011-02-11.
  33. ↑ British Computer Society. British Computer Society http://www.bcs.org/content/ConWebDoc/52559. Retrieved 27 November 2014. Missing or empty |title= (help)
  34. ↑ Women in IT: Inspiring the next generation (PDF). British Computer Society. 1 Oct 2014. p. 57. ISBN 978-1-78017-287-3. Retrieved 14 Oct 2014.
  35. ↑ BBC Radio 4, Woman's Hour Power list