Professor Wendy Hall, a world leading computer scientist, was officially named as a Tsinghua Guest Professor recently in a ceremony in Tsinghua’s FIT building.

Prior to the ceremony, Tsinghua President Gu Binglin exchanged views and ideas with Professor Hall. Also participating in the discussion were Professor Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, University of Southampton Professor Nigel Shadbolt, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and Mrs Rosemary Leith, Executive Director of the Web Science Research Initiative.

Tsinghua Vice Provost Zhang Yi presided at the ceremony and presented the honorary appointment book to Professor Hall.  After the ceremony, Professor Hall delivered a speech entitled "Towards a Science of the Web". Professor Sun Maosong, Head of the Department of Computer Science and Technology, and Professor Ma Hui, Associate Dean of the Tsinghua University Graduate School at Shenzhen, also attended the ceremony.

As a result of the collaboration with Professor Hall, Tsinghua and Southampton University have agreed to establish a Tsinghua-Southampton Web Science Laboratory at the Graduate School in Shenzhen.

Professor Wendy Hall, CBE, is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton in the UK. She has made significant contributions in computer science in the areas of digital libraries, the development of the Semantic Web, and the emerging discipline of web science. She is a founding director, along with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Professor Nigel Shadbolt and Daniel Weitzner, of the Web Science Research Initiative at Southampton.