World Wide Web

James Gillies is the Head of Communication at the CERN, the world’s largest particle physics laboratory and currently home of the world’s most ambitious scientific experiment: the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), which started in 2008. CERN is also where British scientist Sir Tim Berns-Lee invented the world wide web, a story told by James in his successful book ‘How the Web was Born'. Thus, during the LIFT conference this year, he will be telling us his own perspective on the history of the web on Thursday, the 26th

James Gillies holds a BSc (with first-class honours) in Physics from the University of London and a D.Phil in experimental particle physics form the University of Oxford. After being the Head of Science at the British Council in Paris for 2 years, he joined CERN in Geneva in 1995, where since 2003, he is, the Head of Communication. More recently he was in charge of the development and implementation of the global communication plan of the LHC. James Gillies LIFT profile can be found here.

LIFT Expectations (in James’ own words)

This is my first Lift conference, so I'm intrigued to see what it will bring. I'm looking forward to some interesting exchanges - the format of LIFT is different from any conference I've ever been to, but whenever you cross disciplines, there's the potential for interesting things to happen. I'm also a bit overwhelmed to be on the same agenda as Vint Cerf - unlike him, all I did was write about the Internet, not invent it!