Steven Pemberton is a distinguished researcher in the field of computer science and information technology, with a long and rich history of contributions to the development of the internet and the web. He is affiliated with the Dutch national research centre Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, where he conducts research on interaction, declarative programming, and web technologies.
At university he was tutored by Dick Grimsdale who built the world's first transistorised computer, and who was himself a tutee of Alan Turing. After university, Pemberton -- coincidentally -- worked in Turing's old department in Manchester, writing software for the 5th computer in the line of computers Turing had worked on.
Pemberton was the first user of the open internet in Europe when the CWI created the first connection in 1988, and has been involved with the web from its inception, co-designing several web standards, including HTML, CSS, XHTML, XForms, and RDFa. He chairs two groups at W3C.
In addition to his work on the web, Pemberton has also made significant contributions to other areas of computer science, such as the design of programming languages, having co-designed the language that Python is based on, and the study of human-computer interaction. His involvement with ACM includes being editor in chief of The SIGCHI Bulletin, and then ACM interactions for a decade; he has chaired the CHI Conference and he co-founded the Netherlands local SIGCHI group, and chaired several local CHI conferences there.
He has received numerous awards and recognitions for his work, including the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Service Award and the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Practice Award.
As a speaker, Pemberton is known for his engaging and informative presentations, which draw on his deep knowledge of computer science and his passion for technology, and cover both social and technological aspects of computing. His talks are always thought-provoking and entertaining, and he has been invited to speak at numerous conferences and events around the world. In 2023 he became an ACM Distinguished Speaker. He is bi-lingual in English and Dutch.
A fuller bio, videos, and a full list of talks is available on his website https://www.cwi.nl/~steven
Photo: https://www.cwi.nl/~steven/Steven-Pemberton-CWI.jpg
All talks are 45 minutes, including Q&A, in English with the option of Dutch. The numbers indicate approximate number of slides. The links are to the abstracts.
There is no I in AI (yet) 75 [Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Computer Vision, Natural language processing]
The Book vs the Web 30 [Society and the Computing Profession; Web, Mobile and Multimedia Technologies]
The 100 Year Web 30 [Society and the Computing Profession; Web, Mobile and Multimedia Technologies]
Moore's Switch and why the future of programming is declarative 50 [Society and the Computing Profession; Software Engineering and Programming]
The Design of Notations 100 [Human Computer Interaction]
"The future is already here, just not very evenly distributed" 45 [Society and the Computing Profession]
The Internet of Things and the Coming Robot Rebellion 50 [Society and the Computing Profession]
On the design of the URL 60 [Web, Mobile and Multimedia Technologies]
4 a.m. is the new midnight (and other internet philosophies) 40 [Society and the Computing Profession]
Web n+1: Start Planning Now! 50 [Web, Mobile and Multimedia Technologies]
The Computer as Extended Phenotype/The Evolution of Memory 40 [Society and the Computing Profession]
There is no yellow in this presentation (on Colour and Reality) 75 [Human Computer Interaction]
Open Source is Not Enough! 45 [Software Engineering and Programming]
The Open Web: Why you should have a website 30 [Web, Mobile and Multimedia Technologies; Society and the Computing Profession]