杏吧原创

鈥淭HERE is nothing traditional or geeky about me,鈥� says Wendy Hall. Her insight and wit may betray her intellect, but there are no outward signs that she is a computer scientist.

In fact, this gregarious woman with a warm, cheeky laugh and a strong London accent is among the best and brightest. As well as heading the University of Southampton鈥檚 world-class electronics and computer science department, Hall is senior vice-president of the Royal Academy of Engineering; sits on the Council for Science and Technology, which advises the prime minister; and works in close collaboration with Tim Berners-Lee, the 鈥渇ather of the web鈥�. So why does a woman who is indifferent to writing computer code or discussing processor speed choose a career in IT, a field with an undeniable reputation for being dominated by nerdy men?

Hall鈥檚 work with computers began long before the web existed and when personal computers were a novelty, back in the early 1980s. 鈥淎ll you could really do with the PCs in those days was learn programming or play games,鈥� she says. Like many other women at that time, Hall eschewed such pursuits: she was used to getting her intellectual buzz from pure mathematics, a subject for which she had a natural flair. Armed with a PhD in that field from the University of Southampton, she had begun her career lecturing in maths at a teacher-training college.

Her mathematician鈥檚 ability to appreciate abstract ideas is what then drew her to explore the nascent field of hypertext and multimedia. She taught herself to program, but it was the promise of how computing could change people鈥檚 lives that captivated her. 鈥淚 could see what could be possible once the technology developed,鈥� she says.

The primitive graphics on her early computer, a Commodore, set her dreaming about future possibilities for education. She built simple software to help her colleagues teach electrical power generation and biological diversity at the college, but her imagination was running wild: 鈥淚 was interested in getting text documents and videos onto computers in large quantities. I thought: 鈥榃ouldn鈥檛 it be amazing if all this was available electronically?'鈥� In 1984 she returned to the University of Southampton, this time as a lecturer in computer science, and two years later she had gained a master鈥檚 in her adopted field from City University, London.

At first working among computer scientists was intimidating. 鈥淚 was scared because it wasn鈥檛 how I was trained. I always felt inadequate because I didn鈥檛 talk technical,鈥� she says. 鈥淪tuff like 鈥楬ow fast does it go, how much storage does it have?鈥� 鈥� that doesn鈥檛 interest me.鈥� Soon, however, her ability to take leaps of the imagination without getting bogged down by detail proved to be her asset. 鈥淪omeone has to take that flight of fancy,鈥� she says.

One of Hall鈥檚 first ideas was a database of electronic photos, documents and audio recordings that could be linked together in different, unique ways depending on who was browsing through them. 鈥淚 wanted different people to be able to ask different questions about a document,鈥� she says. 鈥淎 schoolchild would ask very different questions to a professor, for example.鈥�

Many researchers brushed her off, claiming that the idea was irrelevant to mainstream computer science. She persisted and in 1989 launched Microcosm, a downloadable system that creates links in real-time between the contents of a document and related information on the hard drive, while the user reads that document. Because the links were stored in a database, rather than embedded in a document, true to Hall鈥檚 original vision they could be displayed dynamically to suit particular users鈥� browsing habits. This meant a schoolchild would be shown a different set of links to a professor looking at the same document. The same person might also see different links on different days depending on what they were using the document for.

By coincidence, 1989 was also the year that Berners-Lee, then working at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, first proposed the World Wide Web. As it turns out it was Berners-Lee鈥檚 vision, which used links that were not generated on the fly but embedded within a document, that took off. The World Wide Web worked on a global network, allowing anyone with an internet connection to access it, whereas Microcosm only worked in stand-alone hard drives, says Hall.

Nonetheless the Microcosm idea, which she spun out as a company called Multicosm (which later became Active Navigation) brought Hall recognition from her peers. This led to fellowships in a number of professional computer and engineering societies (see 鈥淐V 鈥� Wendy Hall鈥�), and enabled her to co-found the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia (IAM) research group at Southampton, where she works today.

One thing the interdisciplinary group focuses on is how software can be personalised and made aware of its context so people can access information more easily. 鈥淭he ideas that we developed in Microcosm are now coming into their own. That鈥檚 very fulfilling for me, as I can see that our ideas were quite far ahead,鈥� she says. She had first run into AI when she was hunting for new ways for Microcosm to generate links between documents. AI offered the prospect of creating more useful links. This has now led her to the field of software agents 鈥� programs that scour the web for information and retrieve it on behalf of humans or other programs. These agents could create a personalised web environment, similar to the one that Microcosm had created inside a hard drive. 鈥淚 want to be able to say to the computer: 鈥榃hat are the opening hours of the restaurant?鈥� and have the answer come back at me. Right now the information is all there, but you have to manually search for it.鈥�

In order to realise this vision, the agents must have some way of recognising what they are looking for, and this is what the much-discussed semantic web will bring 鈥� a universal way of describing types of online data. This year Hall became an adviser to a UK-based start-up company called Garlik, which uses semantic web programming to protect people against identity theft by combing public databases for information about them. 鈥淕arlik shows people what their profile is on the internet,鈥� she says. 鈥淚t鈥檚 like coming round to your house and showing you how the burglars will break in.鈥�

Her most exciting project could still lie ahead. New 杏吧原创 met her in Cambridge, Massachusetts, earlier this month as she and several other web visionaries including Berners-Lee launched the first ever web science research initiative, a collaboration between the University of Southampton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The goal of the initiative is to understand how the web evolves by studying the way that social networks, blogs, e-commerce and government regulation all contribute to its overall link structure. Hall is fascinated by this complex interplay between computer science and social science. 鈥淭he web is an amazing phenomenon. It鈥檚 the biggest man-made system ever, and yet it evolves. You can鈥檛 predict what it is going to do.鈥�

Emerging areas such as this make computer science very different to the field she joined in the 1980s. Hall hopes that one consequence of the fusion of social and computer science is that it will attract more women to follow in her footsteps 鈥� a cause close to her heart. Gender imbalance in Hall鈥檚 field has been a challenge since the start of her career. She was told she didn鈥檛 get the first job she applied for because she was a woman, and even as a young lecturer in computer science, she says, many of her male peers would rubbish her ideas. Things have certainly improved since then, but still her secret for day-to-day survival in the male-dominated IT field is to 鈥渕elt in鈥�. 鈥淪omehow I manage to be enough like them that I fit in,鈥� she says.

聯Somehow I manage to be enough like them to fit in聰

Being a woman may have made things harder at times, but she believes it has also helped her career: 鈥淲omen bring fantastic things to management. We are good at organising, listening to people, empathising with people.鈥�

Does she ever regret leaving the abstract field of pure mathematics and choosing the world of computers? 鈥淎ll the wonderful things I am doing are because I am a computer scientist,鈥� she says. 鈥淚T and computing are the basis of everything.鈥�