The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has awarded the Turing Prize to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web who was knighted thirteen years ago. The Turing Prize is often compared to a Nobel Prize for computing; it is extremely prestigious and comes with a million dollars.
Currently, Berners-Lee is working on efforts to keep the Web decentralized and to combat the proliferation of fake news. He is co-lead of the Decentralized Information Group at MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (CSAIL) and is also working an open source project called Solid that hopes to create open data sharing standards. Solid standards could eventually allow people to migrate their information off servers owned by a few technology giants. “You can make the walled garden very, very sweet,” Berners-Lee said at last year’s Decentralized Web Summit. “But the jungle outside is always more appealing in the long term.”