"Father of the World Wide Web" to collect Finnish technology prize worth EUR 1 million

Tim Berners-Lee's work described as "an outstanding technological innovation that directly promotes people's quality of life"

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Finland's first Millennium Technology Prize was awarded on Thursday by the Finnish Technology Award Foundation. It went to someone without whom you would probably not be reading this, at least not in the form we know it today: step forward Sir Tim Berners-Lee, 48, the British-born scientist who is credited with having invented the World Wide Web.
      Berners will collect prize-money of EUR 1 million, making this the largest such award in the world. A total of 78 innovators from 22 countries were nominated for the award.
      Berners-Lee, a former graduate of Queen’s College, Oxford, currently holds a professorship at the Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL) of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also directs the World Wide Web Consortium, which is an open forum of companies and organisations geared to exploring the full potential of his initial invention.
     
In the late 1980s, while working at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Berners-Lee put forward the idea of a global hypertext project, to be known as the World Wide Web, and based on earlier conceptual research he had carried out while on a CERN fellowship. The "World Wide Web" (only one of many possible names Berners-Lee had in mind) was activated within CERN in late 1990, and it hit the Internet itself in the following year.
      The rest, as they say, is history. Without his input, there would not be many of the things we now take for granted: no HTTP protocols, no HTML language, no URLs like the one on which this page is found.
      In the years since 1991, the WWW has mushroomed and Berners-Lee has in turn been showered with honours, most recently the award of a knighthood (KBE) in the Queen’s New Year Honours in January 2004.
     
The eight-member international awards selection committee headed by Prof. Pekka Tarjanne said that Berners-Lee had met the criteria for “an outstanding technological innovation that directly promotes people's quality of life, is based on humane values, and encourages sustainable economic development.”
      He will receive the award on June 15th at a ceremony in Finlandia Hall, Helsinki, in the course of a “Future Society - Future Technology” conference discussing the role of technological development on the quality of life, to be held at the Dipoli Congress Centre in Espoo.
     
The Millennium Technology Prize, which seeks to emulate the Nobel Prizes, is granted by the Finnish Technology Award Foundation, an independent fund with the support of the Finnish government and several companies and organisations.
      Following this inaugural award, It will be given out once every two years to an outstanding achievement in one of the four fields of Health Care and Life Sciences, Communications and Information, New Materials and Processes, or Energy and the Environment.


Links:
  Sir Tim Berners-Lee
  Finnish Technology Award Foundation: Millennium Technology Prize

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