Tim Berners-Lee has been affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for years, as director of the World Wide Web Consortium and a researcher at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Now he has been named 3Com Founders Professor of Engineering in MIT's School of Engineering, with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

The appointment, which was made a few weeks ago, will allow Berners-Lee to work on two subjects which have long interested the computer scientist -- collaborative applications and the Semantic Web -- as well as develop a curriculum for "Web Science", which involve "close interactions between computer science, the social sciences and technology application deployment," says MIT. For more information about what Web Science entails, visit this 2006 post by my old Network World colleague, Paul McNamara.

Congratulations, Sir Tim!

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