Henrik Frystyk Nielsen (born 1969) is a

Danish Danish may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to the country of Denmark People * A national or citizen of Denmark, also called a "Dane," see Demographics of Denmark * Culture of Denmark * Danish people or Danes, people with a Danish a ...

engineer and computer scientist. He is best known for his pioneering work on the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...

and subsequent work on

computer network A computer network is a set of computers sharing resources located on or provided by network nodes. The computers use common communication protocols over digital interconnections to communicate with each other. These interconnections are ...

protocols.

Biography

Henrik Frystyk Nielsen was born 1 August 1969 in

Copenhagen Copenhagen ( or .; da, København ) is the capital and most populous city of Denmark, with a proper population of around 815.000 in the last quarter of 2022; and some 1.370,000 in the urban area; and the wider Copenhagen metropolitan ar ...

Denmark ) , song = ( en, "King Christian stood by the lofty mast") , song_type = National and royal anthem , image_map = EU-Denmark.svg , map_caption = , subdivision_type = Sovereign state , subdivision_name = Danish Realm, Kingdom of Denmark ...

. Nielsen received a master's degree in Engineering of Telecommunications from

Aalborg University Aalborg University (AAU) is a Danish public university with campuses in Aalborg, Esbjerg, and Copenhagen founded in 1974. The university awards bachelor's degrees, master's degrees, and PhD degrees in a wide variety of subjects within humanities ...

in August 1994. Nielsen's Web work began at

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gene ...

, when he became

Tim Berners-Lee Sir Timothy John Berners-Lee (born 8 June 1955), also known as TimBL, is an English computer scientist best known as the inventor of the World Wide Web. He is a Professorial Fellow of Computer Science at the University of Oxford and a profess ...

's first graduate student, and shared an office with

Håkon Wium Lie Håkon Wium Lie (born July 26, 1965) is a Norwegian web pioneer, a standards activist, and the Chief Technology Officer of Opera Software from 1998 until the browser was sold to new owners in 2016. He is best known for developing Cascading Styl ...

, the co-inventor of

Cascading Style Sheets Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone techno ...

. They developed together the

Arena An arena is a large enclosed platform, often circular or oval-shaped, designed to showcase theatre, musical performances, or sporting events. It is composed of a large open space surrounded on most or all sides by tiered seating for spectators ...

web browser A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...

. It was at this time he began work with Berners-Lee, and later joined

Roy Fielding Roy Thomas Fielding (born 1965) is an American computer scientist, one of the principal authors of the HTTP specification and the originator of the Representational State Transfer (REST) architectural style. He is an authority on computer network ...

et al. Nielsen was invited by Berners-Lee to join the technical staff of the newly formed World Wide Web Consortium (

W3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...

) in 1994. He joined the staff of W3C in March 1995, and continued work on HTTP and other Web protocol topics such as the Line Mode Browser and

libwww Libwww was an early World Wide Web software library providing core functions for browsers, implementing HTML, HTTP, and other technologies. Tim Berners-Lee, at CERN, released libwww (then also called the "Common Library") in late 1992, comprising ...

. Nielsen was one of the principal authors of the

Hypertext Transfer Protocol The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide Web, ...

(HTTP) specifications, published in 1996. He then managed the development of a "next generation" called HTTP 1.1, published in 1999. He left W3C in July 1999. Nielsen joined the staff of

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

in August 1999, and began work on

SOAP Soap is a salt of a fatty acid used in a variety of cleansing and lubricating products. In a domestic setting, soaps are surfactants usually used for washing, bathing, and other types of housekeeping. In industrial settings, soaps are use ...

1.1. Previous versions of SOAP had been proposed as an XML-based object serialization protocol, such as

XML-RPC XML-RPC is a remote procedure call (RPC) protocol which uses XML to encode its calls and HTTP as a transport mechanism.Simon St. Laurent, Joe Johnston, Edd Dumbill. (June 2001) ''Programming Web Services with XML-RPC.'' O'Reilly. First Edition. ...

but through the input of Nielsen, Noah Mendelsohn, and others, SOAP 1.1 grew into a lightweight message-oriented protocol for exchanging semi-structured information in a highly decentralized environment. In 2000, Nielsen joined as an editor the standardizing effort of SOAP within the W3C XML Protocol Working Group which eventually became SOAP 1.2. In 2003, Nielsen started an incubation project together with George Chrysanthakopoulos focusing on providing a new Web-oriented application model and associated programming model suited for highly concurrent and distributed environments. An output of the incubation is DSSP, a SOAP-based protocol that augments the Web and HTTP model with structured data manipulation and event notifications. By the end of 2005, the incubation moved into productization as Nielsen and Chrysanthakopoulos joined the newly formed Microsoft Robotics Group. In June 2006 the first version of the

Microsoft Robotics Studio Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio (Microsoft RDS, MRDS) is a discontinued Windows-based environment for robot control and simulation that was aimed at academic, hobbyist, and commercial developers and handled a wide variety of robot hardware. I ...

shipped to the public. Nielsen is currently the Principal Architect at Applied AI team at Microsoft, working on bringing AI to the edge.

Biography

References

Further reading