Orange County Register

Dame Wendy Hall with Queen Elizabeth. Image courtesy of University of Southampton

A member of Great Britain’s “science royalty” will give a public talk at UC Irvine on Monday on the future of that thing many of you can’t get enough of: the Internet.

Professor Wendy Hall, one of the world’s top computer scientists, will speak in the CalIT2 building on Ring Road from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m (news release, directions and map).

Hall was knighted “Dame Commander of the British Empire” by Queen Elizabeth earlier this year for her research, which studies how people socialize and share information, something widely done on such services as YouTube and Facebook, and the impact these Internet services have on our behavior. Dame Wendy (her official title now) also works on how to design software that helps people more effectively search the Internet.

She also is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the top honor for British scientists and one shared by historic figures such as Newton, Darwin, and Stephen Hawking.

I asked Dame Wendy a few questions on the future of the Internet:

Q: The recent elections in Iran and even President Obama’s campaign saw the influence of Twitter and social networks on people and government. Do you think we’ll ever vote for presidents and ministers by logging online?

A: Yes!

Q: You’ve spoken before on how the Internet industry has excluded women. How might Internet tools of the future embrace what women need and how women think?

A: Women are using the Internet, particularly the social networks you mention above. But they are not getting involved with the development of the technology or careers in the IT industry generally. This is what we need to work to change.

(Dame Wendy talks about her own struggles in the male-dominated IT science world in this interesting interview by The Guardian.)

Q: Smart searches like Wolfram Alpha are giving us new ways to find information. What kind of searching power can be at our finger tips in the future?

A: In the future we will be asking questions and getting answers back — rather than lists of documents. I didn’t collaborate on Wolfram Alpha, but I am involved in the development of the Semantic Web, or the “Web of Linked Data” as we like to talk about it today. We are just at the tip of the iceberg with respect to information on the Internet. The Web of Linked Data will make search engines such as Wolfram Alpha much easier to build. I’ll cover this in my talk.

What other impacts will the Internet have on humanity in the future? We should learn much more from Dame Wendy on Monday.

• For an example of what the future of “smart searches” might look like, try out the newly released Wolfram Alpha search engine. This might be where Internet searching is headed in the coming decade. For fun, try typing your birth date, or “pancake”, or “the meaning of life”.

– by Ben Young Landis

Follow Sciencedude on Twitter at grobbins and on facebook at facebook.com/garyrobbins

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