Internet Super Five Win Queen Elizabeth First Recognition Award
Baku, March 27 (AZERTAC). Sir Tim Berners-Lee, best known as one of the pioneering inventor of the World Wide Web has won the first global engineering prize- Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, in recognition of his work of excellence in internet technology.
He won the recognition with four other colleagues who are also partners in the new generation communication which in today’s world is referred to as the internet.
Others in the Queen Elizabeth Engineering excellence recognition big win are Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf, Louis Pouzin and Marc Andreessen will share the £1m award.
According to the Award citation panel, the five men had all contributed to the revolution in communications that has taken place in recent decades.
The UK government initiated the QE Prize as a companion to the Nobels to raise the profile of engineering.
It is endowed by industry and administered by an independent trust chaired by Lord Browne, a former chief executive of BP.
The award was announced at the Royal Academy of Engineering in central London.
Sir Tim may be the best known of the winners, certainly in the UK. Working with others in the late 1980s, he helped develop the World Wide Web, which radically simplified the way information could be shared on the net.
Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf provided the engineering insights that actually made the internet work. Their TCP/IP protocols define the way data travels around the internet.
Louis Pouzin helped work out how data should be labelled so that it reached the right destination.
Marc Andreessen is the man who developed Mosaic, the first popular browser for the web.
“The prize recognizes what has been a roller-coaster ride of wonderful international collaboration,” said Sir Tim.
“Bob and Vint’s work on building the internet was re-enforced by Louis’ work on datagrams and that enabled me to invent the web.
Sir Tim played a central role in the opening ceremony for last year’s Olympics.
“Marc’s determined and perceptive work built on these platforms a product which became widely deployed across nations and computing platforms. I am honored to receive this accolade and humbled to share it with them,” he told BBC News.
The citation said the winners’ contributions had not only changed the way we communicate but had spawned many new industries.
The men were commended for having the foresight to make their work freely available and without restriction. The internet and the WWW could not have taken off in the same way without this open approach.
The star winner of the award, Sir Timothy John “Tim” Berners-Lee, OM, KBE, FRS, FREng, FRSA (born 8 June 1955), also known as “TimBL,” is a British computer scientist, best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He made a proposal for an information management system in March 1989, and he implemented the first successful communication between a Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) client and server via the Internet sometime around mid November.
In 2004, Berners-Lee was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his pioneering work. In April 2009, he was elected a foreign associate of the United States National Academy of Sciences. He was honored as the “Inventor of the World Wide Web” during the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony, in which he appeared in person, working at a NeXT Computer at the London Olympic Stadium. He tweeted “This is for everyone”, which was instantly spelled out in LCD lights attached to the chairs of the 80,000 people in the audience.
The Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering is a new global engineering prize that will reward and celebrate an individual (or up to three individuals) responsible for a ground-breaking innovation in engineering that has been of global benefit to humanity.
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