Ben Segal's Home Page

Date: October 17, 2024

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 "Projects since retirement" 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").

- 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 saw the invention 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 handwritten dedication to me written on the title page of his book:  "Weaving the Web"

which reads:

“To Ben. Few people know how much CERN and the world owes to your dogged insistence that the Internet was the way to go. Thanks also for being a mentor to me about that, & RPC & all kinds of things. Tim”

    ==> hear his spoken remarks in this video (between the times 1min:00 and 1min:40 seconds).

.      Some more Web history:

     *** On March 12th 2019, CERN celebrated the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web's proposal  ***

            - 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.

Projects since retirement

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/   or:  https://bensegal.ch/data/files/home.html