Webifying company

I don't often find myself mentioned alongside Ray Ozzie (chief software architect at Microsoft), Marc Andreessen (inventor of Mosaic, the first popular web browser, and cofounder of Netscape), and Stephen Chen (cofounder of YouTube).

Admittedly, we're all alumni of the computer science program at the University of Illinois.  (Outside the Midwest, the UI comp-sci program is a too-well-kept secret. But don't take my word for it: see the the US News & World Reports ranking of computer engineering programs. And there is a reason why the HAL 9000, of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame, came from the University of Illinois at Urbana.)

But this once, we have much more in common. To wit: We are all cited in the article "O Brave New Web" about what the World Wide Web might be like in ten years. The article points out that "Lerner, whose master's from Illinois is in computer science, uses high-tech savvy to underpin his writing ..." and goes on to propose, as a case in point, my 2008 novel Fools' Experiments. I got to opine about everything from human/machine interfaces to RFID chips to Web 3.0 as a step toward an AI-friendly Internet. 

The full text of "O Brave New Web" appears on the UI alumni website.