Wendy Hall
British computer scientist (born 1952)
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Through Mathematics, Computing and Multimedia
Early life and education
Wendy Hall was born in west London and educated at Ealing Grammar School for Girls. 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. Her doctoral thesis was titled Automorphisms and coverings of Klein surfaces. She later completed a Master of Science degree in Computing at City University London.
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Career
Hall returned to the University of Southampton in 1984 to join the newly formed computer science group there, working in multimedia and hypermedia. Her team invented the Microcosm hypermedia system (before the World Wide Web existed), which was commercialised as a start-up company, Multicosm Ltd.
Wendy Hall and Hugh Davis led the Multimedia Research Group at the University of Southampton, which created commercial systems near the beginning of the hypertext and database system era, including:
- Microcosm 1994 (which used link services)
- Distributed Link Services 1995
- Multicosm 1998
- Portal Maximizer 2001
These systems used a separate server to hold a linkbase and recorded links from anchor points within a Word or pdf document, similar to Vannevar Bush’s original vision of hypertext documents. This linkbase could then be updated and maintained as a separate database to create a separate, flexible overlay for any document.
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 to 2007.
In 2006, along with Tim Berners-Lee, Nigel Shadbolt and Daniel Weitzner, Hall became a founding director of the Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI). Now known as the Web Science Trust, the WSRI was originally a collaboration between the University of Southampton (ECS) and MIT (CSAIL) which aimed to coordinate and support the study of the World Wide Web. The WSRI's activities helped to formally establish the concept of Web Science, and Hall is now executive director of the Web Science Trust.
Hall was President of the British Computer Society from 2003 to 2004 and of the Association for Computing Machinery from 2008 to 2010. Since 2014, she has served as a Commissioner for the Global Commission on Internet Governance.
In 2017, Hall was appointed Regius Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton.
In 2020, she was appointed as Chair of the Ada Lovelace Institute by the Nuffield Foundation – the organisation's independent funder, succeeding Alan Wilson.
Since 2022, Hall has been the Editor-in-Chief of Royal Society Open Science and served as the Chair of the Royal Society Publishing Board from 2017 to 2022.
Personal life
Hall is married to Peter Chandler, a plasma physicist.