Professor Tim Berners-Lee, known as the father of the web, discusses technology, data, and peace.
Tim Berners-Lee, winner of the 16th Seoul Peace Prize, gave the only lecture of his visit to Korea and participated in open conversation with students at the Media Hall’s KU Cinema Trap.

The School of Media & Communication invited Professor Tim Berners-Lee, winner of the 16th Seoul Peace Prize, to hold a special lecture and discussion at the Media Hall’s KU Cinema Trap on Tuesday, November 15th from 2pm.

The event was organized by the School of Media & Communication, the Korea University Smart Media Service Research Center (SSRC), and the Korea University Center for Information and Communication Technologies and Society (CIS), and co-hosted by the BK21 FOUR R&E Center for Media and Communication and the Seoul Peace Prize Foundation. Professor Berners-Lee gave the only lecture of his visit to Korea to attend the Seoul Peace Prize ceremony. The lecture was titled, “The Third Layer: How Solid Technology and Data Sovereignty Policy Combine to Restore Peace through Individual and Organisational Empowerment” to convey an awareness of the problems of future society.

The event, which opened with a congratulatory speech from Min Young, Head of the School of Media & Communication, was moderated by Professor Shin Hae-rin. Professor Berners-Lee announced that he had come to Korea for the first time and began by expressing gratitude for his enthusiastic welcome. From his childhood to his college days, he recalled important life events that influenced him on the path to being called the father of the web. This lecture, which was open to media studies, engineering, and social engineering majors, as well as the general public, was a time to share insights into ICT technology with the about 150 attendees.

Professor Tim Berners-Lee, a software engineer, played a groundbreaking role in advancing today's Internet world by developing and distributing the World Wide Web for free in 1989. Currently, he is a professor at Oxford University and MIT, and he is the representative of the World Wide Web Consortium. Professor Berners-Lee is also a practical intellectual and social activist who, with his efforts within the A4AI (Alliance for Affordable Internet) and the SOLID (Social Linked Data) project, has led the global civil society movement to utilize technology and policies to solve various social problems caused by the post-World Wide Web Internet, including Internet addiction, privacy, monopoly in the platform industry and fake news.

Professor Berners-Lee has recently contributed to the spread of open-source applications through the SOLID project. He emphasized that since the development of the WWW, social problems, such as leakage of personal information, hate speech, and fake news, have occurred in the online space. In response to this, he introduced the SOLID project as one of the various technologies and policies for solving social problems caused by the Internet.

On November 14, The Seoul Peace Prize Cultural Foundation awarded Professor Berners-Lee the Seoul Peace Prize. The reasons for his selection were cited as being his merits in developing applications that can directly control personal privacy and data sovereignty and in carrying out a peace movement to secure human rights associated with data. In the lecture that day, he also mentioned that his goal was to create a world where people do not worry about personal information being misused and do not worry about which SNS to use.

In the conversation that followed, Professor Young Min, head of the School of Media & Communication, asked Professor Berners-Lee where his mission as a social activist originated from. He confessed that he had been imagining a world where individuals go beyond creating and using data to also sharing it, and that his mission was to break down the closedness and barriers that were present before the Internet era.

After lively discussions with the attendees from the School of Media & Communication, the Department of Computer Science, and graduate students, Professor Berners-Lee said, “SOLID aims to create an environment for peace and to build the foundation for a better democratic society,” and he concluded his lecture by requesting that we please join him in promoting global citizenship based on communication, creativity, and collaboration.