Academia Archives - Page 7 of 7

Dr Steve Furber CBE

Steve Furber was working at Acorn Computers having helped develop the BBC Micro and was searching for the follow-on product. He found that the microprocessors then on the market had a deep design flaws: they were too complex. Acorn decided to design its own microprocessor using a novel approach. Furber led the small design team. They called it the Acorn Risc Machine (ARM), later changed to the Advanced Risc Machine and it is now found in over a billion mobile devices worldwide

17 August 2018

Dr Roger Johnson

Past President of both the BCS, 1992 to 1993, and the Council of European Professional Informatics Societies, 1997 to ’99, Roger was Honorary Secretary for the International Federation for Information Processing 1999 to 2010. In 2009 he became a Fellow of Birkbeck, after 23 years as Dean of the Faculty of Social Science.

6 April 2018

Sir Nigel Shadbolt

Sir Nigel Shadbolt is Professor of Computing Science at the University of Oxford and Principal of Jesus College. He is Chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founded with Sir Tim Berners-Lee in 2012.
He is also a Visiting Professor in Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton. During the course of his career he has made significant contributions to the fields of Psychology, Cognitive Science, Computational Neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Semantic Web and Web Science.

6 February 2018

Professor Michael Earl

Michael Earl is an expert in the management of IT by its users. He pioneered the use of prototyping in the development of IT systems in the early 1970s. In the mid-1970s he studies the emerging client-server IT approach and developed strategies for managing UIT based around that approach. He is also researching mergers and acquisitions and working on why 70% of mergers and acquisitions fail.

3 August 2017

Sir Bryan Carsberg

Sir Bryan Carsberg started work as an accountant in accountancy partnerships and then moved to become professor of accounting at the London School of Economics. While there and subsequently at Manchester he started advising the government. He was the first choice to head Oftel, the telecommunications regulation organisation set to in the mid 1984 when BT was privatised to supervise it.

1 August 2017

Eben Upton CBE

Dr Eben Upton is world renowned for inventing the bare-bones computer named Raspberry Pi which is based upon the ARM processor. One of his fondest memories at school was of programming the BBC Micro, and the Raspberry Pi model numbers follow those of the BBC Microcomputer series.

28 July 2017

Sue Black OBE

Professor Sue Black is an award-winning Computer Scientist, Technology Evangelist and Digital Skills Expert, who established #techmums, which runs programs and initiatives designed to support mothers becoming more familiar, confident, and excited about the use of technology in their personal, professional, and parenting lives.

#techmums vision is to reach a million mums and ignite potential in not only mums, but their families, and their communities. #techmums trains women in key areas including: Tech Skills, The Cloud, Digital Safety, and Coding to allow them to enter a new career path and gain confidence regarding returning to employment or setting up their own businesses.

Sue also led a successful campaign to save Bletchley Park in between 2008-11 and wrote a book about the experience.

27 July 2017

John Leighfield CBE

John Leighfield CBE was a pioneering IT user, applying the technology offered by vendors to the benefit of users, particularly in manufacturing. He started in IT with Ford in Dagenham in what would now be called systems analysis. He joined Plessey in 1965 and was on the board of Plessey as the head of IT. John moved to British Leyland in 1972, working in BL Systems, later renamed as ISTEL. It was privatised and John and others succeeded in a management buyout.

14 July 2017

David Potter CBE

David Potter CBE successfully straddled the worlds on academia and IT entrepreneurship. He started as an academic and then as an investor before founding Psion, Potter Scientific Instruments, in 1980. Psion became the largest microcomputer software vendor in the UK selling databases, utilities and computer games. By the early 1980s he had built a strong team and Psion was profitable. He decided to launch a mobile personal computer, the Psion organiser