What sparked your interest in computer science? I first learnt programming (Fortran) at university but hated it. I got interested in the early 1980s when I was lecturing at a teacher-training college and the Commodore PET computer was released. I became interested in the use of computers in education, did an MSc in computer science and then got a lectureship in computer science at Southampton.
What does hypermedia mean and why is it important for the general user? The terms hypertext and hypermedia were coined by Ted Nelson in the 1960s to describe the idea of using computers to link, or cross-reference, documents (hypertext). If you allow the documents to include multimedia material (images, video, etc), then we talk about hypermedia. This concept formed the basis of Tim Berners-Lee's ideas that evolved into the web in the 1990s. We are all used to clicking on items in web documents to follow links to other documents. This is hypermedia.
What is the Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia (IAM) research group? I founded the Multimedia Research Group (MMRG) in 1992. At that time, we were working on several different types of hypermedia and multimedia systems. The research vision of the group included the development of personalised information systems implemented using agent-based computing techniques. In 1999, two new professors joined the group: an AI specialist and a pioneer of agent-based computing. The group was renamed the IAM. It is now well over 100-strong and is one of the biggest and most successful groups of its kind in the world.
Did you anticipate that the internet bubble would burst so spectacularly? The bubble that burst was the dotcom bubble. I draw the analogy with the invention of the printing press in the 15th century. Here was a technology that we now know changed the world, but at the time, the people trying to make a business out of printing books were selling into a population that largely couldn't read.
Do you find your specialism male-dominated? Yes, it can be very intimidating to be a woman in such a male-dominated world. You have to be very strong and self-confident to survive, and actually be better than your peers to make it to the top. Having said that, once you have broken through the glass ceiling, it can be quicker to progress because everybody wants a woman on their committee or board. This is a double-edged sword, of course, because there are so few of us in the industry and the demands on our time to be "the female representative" are enormous. It's not just the IT industry that is male-dominated, the whole higher education sector is very biased towards men.
We seek to encourage more women to consider degrees and careers in IT but it is an uphill struggle. I am president of the British Computer Society next year (only the second female president in the society's 50-year history) and I plan to highlight these problems during my presidential year.
Useful links
IAM
ECS
Active Navigation
Hypermedia Research Centre
· Wendy Hall and David Rowe's book Hypermedia and the Web: An Engineering Approach is published by John Wiley, £32.
