Universal Access to All Knowledge

A passionate advocate for public Internet access and a successful entrepreneur, Brewster Kahle has spent his career intent on a singular focus: Universal Access to All Knowledge.

Kahle will address how advances in computing and communications mean that we can cost-effectively store every book, sound recording, movie, software package, and public web page ever created, and provide access to these collections via the Internet to students and adults all over the world.  By using existing institutions and funding sources, we can build this as well as compensate authors within the current worldwide library budget.  Technological advances, for the first time since the loss of the Library of Alexandria, may allow us to collect all published knowledge in a similar way.

Soon after graduation from MIT with a B.S. in computer science and engineering, he helped found Thinking Machines, a supercomputer manufacturing company.  In 1989, Mr. Kahle created the Internet's first publishing system called Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) and established WAIS, Inc.   He also founded the Internet Archive, one of the largest digital libraries in the world.  With a staff of nearly 150, and 100 partnering libraries, the organization is working to create an online catalog of every book ever created.  In 1996 Mr. Kahle co-founded Alexa Internet, a service that collects data on web browsing behavior for future analysis. It was sold to Amazon.com in 1999.

Kahle also founded Open Content Alliance, a group of organizations contributing to a permanent, publicly accessible archive of digitized texts.  He is a member of the Internet Hall of Fame, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the National Academy of Engineering and serves on the boards of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, the European Archive, and the Television Archive.

Please note that tickets are required to attend the event.  Reserve your ticket at https://www.msri.org/general_events/20845

This free public talk is part of the "Not on the Test: The Pleasures and Uses of Mathematics" series of public lectures in 2014–15, and it is jointly presented by the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) and Berkeley City College (BCC).