Ben Segal's Home Page.

Date: March 26, 2009

To begin with, here's a photo:

*** BREAKING NEWS: CERN celebrated the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web on March 13th 2009 ***
... See some photos Family pictures around the NexT..... and a Video of the day's exciting event ....

I'm British, married to Christiane Segal (a sculptor) and have two sons, Adam Segal (b.1969, an ex-RAF Harrier pilot and flying instructor, now a British Airways civil pilot) and Nicolas Segal (b.1983, a 2006 graduate from Imperial College in aeronautical engineering, now with HSBC Private Banking).

I graduated in Physics and Mathematics in 1958 from Imperial College London, then worked for 7 years on fast breeder reactor development, first for the UK Atomic Energy Authority and later in the USA for the Detroit Edison Company. In 1971 I finished a Ph.D. at Stanford University in Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering. I then joined CERN in Geneva where I worked until my retirement at the end of May 2002. I am now an honorary member of the CERN staff, in the IT Department. The last major area to which I contributed was the European DataGrid Project, especially the part concerned with Data Management.

As an honorary CERN staff member, I help out with some IT Department projects, including the exciting LHC@home effort which uses the BOINC volunteer computing infrastructure to harness large amounts of computing power to help design CERN's new LHC accelerator. With some additional financing from outside CERN we extended this work to harness computing power for work on disease control in Africa - see Africa@home and the MalariaControl project. We also taught the BOINC technology to 35 African students from 18 African countries in a workshop held in Muizenberg, South Africa, in July 2007. See also an interview I gave there on some of the background to this work. I am continuing to work in this exciting area as I believe that "volunteer computing" has great potential for public involvement in science practice and education.

Except for a sabbatical in 1977, when I worked at Bell Northern Research in Palo Alto on a PABX development project (and encountered Unix for the first time), CERN kept me pretty busy on various projects, including the coordinated introduction of the Internet Protocols at CERN beginning in 1985 (see: "A Short History of Internet Protocols at CERN"). For more details on my work, see my CV and some associated Notes, together with a partial List of Publications.

For a little more historical reading, take a look at my book review of the recently published book "How the Web Was Born" by James Gillies and Robert Cailliau. Yes, the World Wide Web was invented at CERN and this book tells the story very truthfully. I gave a more personal account of some CERN and Web history to Robert Scoble when he visited CERN in 2007, available at: Scoble_Visit.

Another article of historical interest is on the project "SHIFT", which changed the way computing is done at CERN - from using mainframes to Unix clusters and now Linux PC's. This project was selected as the winner in the Science category in the 2001 Computerworld Honors awards. CERN was nominated for this award by Larry Ellison of Oracle Corporation.

Over the past 25 years I have taught courses on Unix, distributed computing and Internet protocols in many places outside CERN, both in "developing" countries (e.g. China, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba) and not-so-developing ones (Italy, Sweden, UK, etc.). My interest in teaching outside CERN began in 1986 in association with the Trieste International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), which has supported research by developing country scientists since 1964.

As a member of the Internet Society (ISOC), I participated in setting up the ISOC Geneva Chapter in 1995. I also set up its Development Special Interest Group ("Geneva DevSIG") to assist developing country access to the Internet.

In the 1997 election for members of the ISOC Board of Trustees, I was elected as a Trustee and took office that June for a 3-year term. Apart from this work, I helped my colleagues in ISOC Geneva to organize the 1998 annual ISOC Conference INET'98, which was held in Geneva in July 1998. My particular interest was local coordination of the INET'98 Network Technology Workshops; these occur the week before each INET conference and offer Internet training to about 200 people selected by ISOC as best fitted to spread Internet technology internationally.

Contact Information:

Ben M. Segal
Chemin des Tattes 13
1297 FOUNEX
Switzerland

Tel/Fax: +41 22 776 3628 (home)
Mobile : +41 76 420 3628

I still have an office and telephone at CERN where I can be reached part time (with an answering machine if I'm not there):

Tel/CERN: +41 22 767 4941

E-mail: b.segal@cern.ch
WWW: http://www.cern.ch/ben/