Steven Pemberton

Steven is a researcher, author, public speaker, and occasional broadcaster, based at the CWI, The Dutch National Research Centre for Mathematics and Informatics, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His research is broadly in interaction, and how the underlying software architecture can better support users.

At university he was tutored by Richard Grimsdale, who built the first transistorised computer, and was tutored himself by Alan Turing. He was a research programmer at the University of Sussex before going to implement Algol 68 for the research computer MU5 at the University of Manchester (where Turing had worked himself); and later was a lecturer in computing at the University of Brighton, and wrote a book on Pascal Implementation.

Moving to the CWI, he co-designed the programming language ABC, the forerunner of Python, and co-wrote a book on ABC. He wrote part of gcc.

He was a member of the ACM SIGCHI (Special Interest Group Computer Human Interaction) Executive Committee for a decade, and editor in chief of the SIGCHI Bulletin, and later ACM/interactions. He chaired the CHI conference in 1997.

He was one of the first handful of people to use the open internet in Europe. Involved with the Web from the beginning he organised two workshops at the first Web Conference at CERN in 1994. From there he became involved in W3C, and co-designed HTML, CSS, XHTML, XForms, RDFa, and several other Web technologies. He chaired the HTML and XForms working groups for a decade, and still chairs the XForms group. He has also been a member of the ODF technical committee.

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