A group of industry leaders, researchers and analysts gathered at a U.S. university on Thursday to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the birth of Internet.

The daylong celebration and forum at UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) was lead by Leonard Kleinrock, a computer science professor of the university who on Oct. 29, 1969 headed a team to send the first message over the ARPANET, which later became the Internet.

That event was recognized as "the moment the Internet was born, ushered in a technological revolution that has transformed communications, education, culture, business and entertainment across the globe, leading to dramatic changes in our social, political and economic lives," the UCLA said in a press release.

In addition to the UCLA event, a series of activities are also scheduled to be held at Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, to celebrate the historic moment.

"The 1969 connection was not just a symbolic milestone in the project that led to the Internet, but in the whole idea of connecting computers -- and eventually billions of people -- to each other," Marc Weber, founding curator of the museum's Internet History Program, said in a statement.

"In the 1960s, as many as a few hundred users could have accounts on a single large computer using terminals, and exchange messages and files between them. But each of those little communities was an island, isolated from others," Weber noted. "Byreliably connecting different kinds of computers to each other, the ARPANET took a crucial step toward the online world that links nearly a third of the world's population today."

Four decades after its birth, the Internet is seen by some to have encountered some kind of middle-age crisis. But others argue that it is still in the early stage of innovations.

At a symposium hosted this month by market research firm Gartner, Eric Schmidt, chief executive officer of Internet search giant Google, said he envisions a radically changed Internet five years from now.

In the next five years, the Internet is expected to be dominated by social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time, he predicted.

"It's because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that is the great challenge of the age," Schmidt said.