Manama: Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, will next week emphasise at a lecture in Qatar that the decisions to shape its development in a positive direction lie firmly within society’s hands.

The lecture, just a quarter of a century since the birth of the World Wide Web, will focus on the global impact made by the Web as well as on future challenges and opportunities facing the technology.

“The World Wide Web and the Next 25 Years” will also highlight why principles of integrity, openness, and individuals’ freedom to use technology unimpaired should underpin its governance.

Berners-Lee on Sunday afternoon is expected to tell his audience how he believes the World Wide Web can maximise its benefit to humanity by using its power to promote scientific collaboration to solve major problems, apply democratic and rational principles of governance, and build understanding and empathy across national and cultural borders.

Dr Ahmad K. Elmagarmid, Executive Director of Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) who has invited Berners-Lee, said that “Tim has single-handedly touched the lives of most people on earth through his invention of the World Wide Web.”

“He is uniquely qualified to help us see the future of the Web, and how we maximise its benefits for humankind,” he said. “QCRI is proud to be working with Sir Tim and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT-CSAIL) team as part of our joint on-going research that is delivering benefits for people in Qatar and beyond.”

The talk coincides with the annual meeting between QCRI and MIT-CSAIL, as part of the seven-year strategic research agreement they signed in 2012 to collaborate on joint research projects of benefit to Qatar.

The meeting on March 23-24 in Doha brings experts together to discuss their joint research in five key areas — Cyber security, speech and language processing, data management for social computing, advanced analytics and visualisation in sports, and data integration.

Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989, and his later specifications for URIs, HTTP and HTML have served as the basis for the global spread of Web technology. Today, he is the 3Com Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering at MIT with a joint appointment at CSAIL.

He was named by Time Magazine as one of the 100 greatest minds of the 20th century, and knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for services to the global development of the Internet in 2004.