University of Southampton
Academics working at the university include Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, Wendy Hall, inventor of Microcosm (hypermedia system) a predecessor of the World Wide Web, founding director of the Web Science Trust between the University of Southampton and MIT, José Antonio Bowen, President of Goucher College and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Erich Zepler, who made leading contributions to radio receiver development, David Payne, who invented EDFA for use in fibre optics cables, Sir Barry Cunliffe, a pioneer of modern British archaeology, Ray Monk, the biographer of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Albie Sachs, former Judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa, and Tim Holt, former President of the Royal Statistical Society and Office for National Statistics.
Global brain
Although some of the underlying ideas were already expressed by Nikola Tesla in the late 19th century and were written about by many others before him, the term “global brain” was coined in 1982 by Peter Russell in his book "The Global Brain". How the Internet might be developed to achieve this was set out in 1986. The first peer-reviewed article on the subject was published by Gottfried Mayer-Kress in 1995, while the first algorithms that could turn the world-wide web into a collectively intelligent network were proposed by Francis Heylighen and Johan Bollen in 1996.