Draft:Phil Tetlow

Philip Tetlow, is a British technologist, IT Architect, author and Web Scientist. He is a visiting professor of practice the University of Newcastle and an adjunct professor at the University of Southampton. He completed his Bachelor of Arts (BA) degree in 1989, and his Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in 2009. The title of his doctoral thesis is ''Investigations into Web Science and the Concept of Web Life. ''

Career
Tetlow started his career in the industrial heartland of North East England, where he helped design and deliver IT systems for companies in heavy engineering, bulk chemicals and automotive manufacture. In 2000 he moved to PricewaterhouseCooopers Consulting (PwCC) to work as an IT Architect and quickly gained a reputation for pragmatic technical leadership. In 2001 he transitioned to IBM, as part of the PwCC aquisition, and took on the role of Chief IT Architect in IBM's UK consulting practice. He later went on to became technical lead for IBM (UK)'s Business Analytics and Optimisation consulting practice, then Chief Technical Officer (Data Ecosystems) in (IBM Software Group). He has worked as a trusted advisor to many top 100 companies and the UK Government on subjects including Open Data, metadata standards, data strategy, advanced AI and quantum computing. In 2002, Tetlow became interested in the use of formal semantics in Software Engineering and joined the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). There he contributed to the Semantic Web Best Practices and Deployment Working Group. While a member, he co-led the Software Engineering Task Force (SETF), which helped found the disiplin of Semantic Web Enabled Software Engineering. In 2005, while at the W3C's plenary meeting  in Boston Massachusetts, Tetlow raised an informal objection over role of the Hypertext Markup Languag e (HTML) in the Web's evolution. The resulting (out of session) debate(s) led to his first book The Web's Awake, the first major work on Web Science. It also highlighted the tension between information theory and other fields of science - something that has featured in Tetlow's published work ever since. In 2009, Tetlow gained the world's first PhD in Web Science. In 2012, Tetlow published his second book Understanding Information and Computation. In 2014, Tetlow was appointed as an Adjunct Professor of Web Science at the University of Southampton. Later that year he was elected as a member of IBM's Academy of Technology. In 2015 Tetlow, gave the Web Science Institute Distinguished Lecture at University of Southampton, in which he argued for the concept of web life, which considers the Web not as a connected network of computers, as in common interpretations of the Internet, but rather as a sociotechnical machine capable of fusing together individuals and organisations into larger coordinated groups. It argues that unlike the technologies that have come before it, the Web is different in that its phenomenal growth and complexity are starting to outstrip our capability to control it directly, making it impossible for us to grasp its completeness in one go. Tetlow made use of Fritjof Capra's concept of the 'web of life' as a metaphor. In 2017, Tetlow gave the TED talk on 8 steps to understanding information (and maybe the universe). In 2019, Tetlow was appointed a Visiting Professor of Practice at Newcastle University. From 2019 to 2022, Tetlow served as Vice President of IBM's Academy of Technology. In 2022, Tetlow coauthored a paper on Quantum Semantics, introducing the idea of Quantum Corollas. He also sat on the advisory panel on The Artificial Intelligence Public-Private Forum. Tetlow is currently working with the Open Group on the emerging idea of Ecosystems Architecture.

Awards and honours
In 2007, The Web's Awake won an Honourable Mention in the Association of American Publishers PSP Awards for Excellence. Tetlow has twice successfully nominated British Computer Society Lovelace Medal (2009,2012) winners.