The Web was invented around 1990 by Tim Berners-Lee with Robert Cailliau as a close ally. Both of them were then working at CERN, which is the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. Tim is a graduate of Oxford University and a long-time computer and software expert, and is now the director of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an organization that coordinates the development of the Web. He also is a principal research scientist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Laboratory for Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (MIT CSAIL). Robert is a 30-year veteran at CERN, where he still works. Robert organized the first Web conference in Geneva in 1993. Both Tim and Robert were awarded the ACM Software System Award in 1995 because of their work on the Web.