Ben Segal's Home Page
Date: December 19,
2023
To begin with, here's a photo:
I'm British (and recently also Swiss), married to Christiane Segal (a sculptor) and
with two sons, Adam Segal (b.1969, aeronautical
engineering graduate of Bristol University, ex-RAF Harrier pilot
and flying instructor, now a British Airways Airbus captain) and Nicolas
Segal (b.1983, with a Masters from Imperial College in
aeronautical engineering, currently Senior Adviser at Syz Capital
SA in Geneva).
I graduated in Physics and Mathematics in 1958 from
Imperial College London, then worked for over 7 years on fast
breeder nuclear reactor development, first for the UK Atomic
Energy Authority (1958-62) and later in the USA for the Detroit
Edison Company (1962-65). In 1971 I finished a PhD 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.
Until July 2023 I was an Honorary Member of the CERN
personnel in the CERN IT Department (see "More Recent
Projects" below) and still give occasional invited talks.
Recent CERN
talks
=>> I gave an invited talk
at CERN on May 11th, 2022 as Part 1 of a 3-part series
entitled:
"Distributed Computing - A Historical Perspective"
=>> Watch the video at:
Talk 1/3: TCP/IP
at CERN
=>> I gave two invited
talks at CERN on October 3rd and 11th, 2019 entitled:
"Apprenticeship: 60 years
of computing experience"
=>> Watch the videos at:
Part1: 1958-1988
Part2:
1989-2019
=>> I was interviewed for
the CERN Alumni Association in May 2019 which led to a
series of 12 podcasts:
"Chatting with Ben Segal (CERN)", published on
their website during summer 2020.
=>>
Listen
to the whole series here.
Major CERN
projects during my career
Except for a sabbatical from CERN 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:
- TCP/IP at CERN: I
coordinated the introduction of the Internet protocols within
CERN, beginning in 1985. It's surprising to many people today to
learn that the Internet was strongly resisted in Europe at that
time and so its introduction at CERN was a very controversial
issue (see: "Internet
prehistory at CERN" and in more detail: "A Short History of Internet Protocols at CERN").
*** On April 8th 2014 I
was inducted by the Internet
Society into their Hall of Fame
for this early work at CERN ***
Here are details
and a 5 minute video of my acceptance speech ...
as well as
CERN's announcement of this award ...
... plus a 12
minute interview made by Elon University students
for their project
Imagining the Internet
- The SHIFT Project: Another project of
historical importance was the project
SHIFT. Started in 1989-1990,
this changed the way computing is done at CERN and then world-wide
- moving from expensive mainframes to Unix clusters and
then to multicore Linux servers. I was responsible for the ultra-high
speed network that SHIFT required. This project was selected
as a 21st Century Achievement in the 2001
Computerworld Honors awards, for which CERN was
nominated by Larry Ellison of Oracle Corporation. SHIFT led to
what we now call Grid and Cloud computing. The last major
area to which I contributed before retirement was the European
Data Grid project, which in turn led to the Worldwide LHC Grid
project (WLCG) which today supplies the massive computing
requirements for the four LHC experiments.
- World
Wide Web: The years 1989-1991 also saw the
beginning of the Web at CERN, with which I was associated as an
early supporter (and "mentor" according to its inventor Tim
Berners-Lee : see his remarks in this
video between 1:00 and 1:40).
***
In February 2022, the
BBC interviewed me and a colleague Jean-François Groff for
their series Witness History ***
- You can listen to the resulting 9 minute podcast: "The
World Wide Web" (limited period of availabiity)
- You can see CERN's Web@30 pages here , including a 2 hour video of the main event,
and two interviews with me in English : My Web30 (CERN) and a PBS TV program "NOVA"
plus one in French with the Geneva TV station Léman Bleu : Le Web a 30 Ans !
*** On March 13th 2009, CERN celebrated the 20th
anniversary of the World Wide Web's first proposal ***
- You can see a
video of
the day's exciting event and some photos:
family
pictures around the NexT
For a little more historical reading, take a look at
my book review
of the 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 the blogger
Robert Scoble when he visited CERN in 2007, available at:
Scoble_Visit. I gave a more recent
talk on this story at CERN in 2014 and you can find the transcript
(Speech 1.2) on pages 21-28 of this
document.
Teaching etc.
Since the 1980's I taught courses on Unix, distributed computing and Internet protocols in many places, beginning in 1986 at the Trieste International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), which has supported research by developing country scientists since 1964. This led to invitations to teach both in "developing" countries (e.g. China, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba) and not-so-developing ones (Italy, Sweden, the UK, etc).
As a member of the Internet Society (ISOC), I
participated in setting up the ISOC Geneva Chapter in 1995 and set
up its Development Special Interest Group ("Geneva DevSIG") to
assist developing country access to the Internet. In 1997 I was
elected as a member of the ISOC Board of Trustees and took office
that June for a 3-year term. With many volunteer members of ISOC
Geneva, we organized 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 which offered Internet
training to over 160 people selected by ISOC as best fitted to
spread Internet technology internationally.
More Recent Projects
As a CERN Honorary Member I was free to
work in areas I chose, but relied mainly on students in
collaboration with existing CERN projects. Since 2004 most of my
effort has been in Volunteer Computing using the BOINC
infrastructure to harness large amounts of computing power from
the public. First came the LHC@home
"Sixtrack" project to help design and tune the magnets for CERN's
new LHC accelerator. We then extended LHC@home to support physics
computing for CERN's Theory Department and for three of the main
LHC experiments ATLAS, CMS, and LHCb.
With some financing from outside CERN in 2005 we
applied volunteer computing to disease control in Africa in
collaboration with the Swiss Tropical Institute in Basel, creating
the MalariaControl.net and Africa@home projects. We taught BOINC
technology to 35 African students from 18 African countries in a
workshop held in Muizenberg, South Africa, in July 2007.
In 2009 I participated in the creation of the Citizen Cyberscience Centre (now Citizen Cyberlab) with partners CERN, the UN Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) and the University of Geneva. Its activities included launching the projects Asia@home and Brasil@home to promote citizen cyberscience in these regions. 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.
In 2012 I co-founded CERN's first hackathon event,
originally called the CERN Summer Webfest, which has run
every year since then with increasing numbers of participants.
Initially organised for the CERN Summer Student population, it is
now run online with participants from around the world. See the "Webfest
Challenge 2022" for more details of a recent edition.
Contact Information:
E-mail: ben.segal@gmail.com
WWW: https://bensegal.ch/