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Happy Birthday World Wide Web

12 March 2019

Prof. Miguel Rio wishes the World Wide Web a happy 30th and looks forward to the next 30 Years of Web and Internet Research

Two Hand Reaching to touch and image of a networked globe with multiple application icons branching from the network

Author  Robert Thompson, ICCS Manager

Research theme logos - Intelligent High Capacity Networks, Infrastructures for Smart Services and Applications, Information and Data Processing
World Wide Web | Internet | Networks

In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee presented a proposal at CERN to unify computer systems by linking information across networks, the World Wide Web was conceived.

Since that point, and indeed before, UCL has been integrally involved in the evolution and development of the Internet and approaches to efficiently and securely share information. 

By 1991 Tim Berners-Lee's idea had become the World Wide Web; the global information system that operates over the Internet. In 1993 the system was put in the public domain and today it is estimated that roughly half the global population have access to the Internet using the World Wide Web.

The way in which we use the World Wide Web, and the Internet in general, has changed significantly in the past 30 years. As we look forward, this rate of change does not appear to be slowing down with the explosion of media content, new technologies such as holograms and volumetric data on the horizon, and the number of machines which now connect to the internet independent of human interaction. 

Wishing the World Wide Web Happy 30th, Professor Miguel Rio, Principal Investigator of the ICCS Internet Data Observatory said:

In the next 30 years, The Institute for Communications and Connected Systems at UCL aims to develop an internet that is more powerful for applications such as holograms and virtual rality, is more secure, more resilient, more private ... and more affordable for the half of the population who still can't afford it. 

Within the Institute of Communications and Connected Systems, we have many people continuing the Pioneering work of democratised access to the Internet, including:

  • Professor Miguel Rio, who leads the UCL Internet Data Observatory, undertaking global metrics of Internet Performance and informing future Internet strategy.
  • Professor Yiannis Andreopolous, researching multimedia stream processing and coding, developing and exploiting methods to improve the end to end delivery of media content.
  • Professor George Pavlou, addressing networking and network management with a key focus on managing resources to improve the user's quality of experience, particularly looking at how content can be brought closer, within the network, to those that wish to access it.

You can explore the research of ICCS further on our research pages.  

Happy Birthday, World Wide Web.

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