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Latest - Business Sector: Education

Ellie Coyte

Ellie Coyte is Founder and Head of Marketing at Haelu, a start-up which builds software to support health and social care.  She  joined the Alacrity Foundation after graduating in 2020 and that provided her with mentors and enabled her to develop the concept behind Haelu’s product. It also introduced her to the fellow students with whom she set up the business.

Haelu’s tool empowers social care workers without clinical training to record signs and symptoms, and alerts them when a health professional is needed. “The aim is to help meet people’s needs earlier so that they can live happier and healthier lives,” she says. ”Because while people are tending to live longer they are not necessarily healthier.”  She also hopes it will help social care workers be more valued by giving them a means of sharing much of the knowledge they already have about people they work with.

It is early days and the tool is still under development. However, Ellie believes it has the potential to be adopted in health authorities across Wales and the rest of the UK and Haelu is going through an intensive growth period which she finds stimulating and rewarding. “The best thing about this situation is having room to grow,” she says. “It’s so exciting to be always learning something new that you didn’t know yesterday.

Dr Angus Cheong

In the early 2000s, Angus Cheong saw the potential to use real-time structured and unstructured data analysis to improve the quality of insight from data mining. Angus was a lecturer focused on developing techniques to take public opinion research beyond conventional surveys and polling and after 13 years in academe, he left university life to set up a consultancy focused on data analysis for industry and government using advanced techniques such as AI and machine learning. 

In 2017, this became uMax Data Technology. Angus is still the company’s chief executive, and the business now has offices in Hong Kong and Singapore and clients across Asia. He calls their approach “DiVo” (data in value out) in contrast to many previous “GiGo” systems (garbage in, garbage out).  

A man with grey hair smiling. He is wearing a blue polo shirt.

Jeremy Brassington

The early experience of rejection gave Jeremy Brassington a drive which led through impressive exam results to studying chemistry at Oxford. Despite a well-received thesis on blood proteins, he found academic research unappealing, and instead qualified as an accountant.   Describing auditing as “the dullest subject on earth” he turned to banking, eventually focusing on tech venture funding and turning around failing businesses such as Oxford Molecular. “It taught me how not to run a business,” he says.

In 2003, Jeremy moved into Assistive Technology, redesigning an assistive listening device for the hard of hearing. Having had learning difficulties himself, he realised could help students with dyslexia, language problems and other disabilities.  “It was the first time I had run a business that was doing good,” he says. He managed it for the next 15 years, launching in 30 markets worldwide.

In 2019, Jeremy founded Habitat Learn, an Edtech group which combines automated note-taking and transcription with a smartphone app that helps disabled students take notes in lectures and is now pioneering digital education for all students. He hopes it will become a unicorn.

Professor John Tucker

Professor John Tucker is one of the select few academic computer scientists who are also passionate about the history of computing; being a noted authority on both.  After studying maths at the newly opened University of Warwick in the ‘70’s John was captivated by interests in mathematical logic and computability and pursued studies in the UK and internationally before returning to Wales.

At Swansea, his course on the history of computing teaches undergraduate students the skills essential to the workplace, of how to learn about and communicate on unfamiliar subjects. Furthermore, it extends our understanding of “invention and innovation in Computing” and nurtures his fascination for the subject.  He has expanded his work to include the collection of hardware and documents in the Swansea Computing Collection and the study of the role of science and technology in the industry and society of South Wales.

Dame Wendy Hall CBE

Dame Wendy Hall is a British computer scientist and Regius Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and an Executive Director of the Web Science Institute.  She was Dean of the Faculty of Physical Science and Engineering at the University of Southampton from 2010 to 2014.  Between 2002 and 2007 she was Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, where she was founding Head of the Intelligence, Agents, and Multimedia Research Group.  In 2000 she was awarded a CBE and became a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.  She is also a distinguished Fellow of the BCS, a Fellow of the IET, and of the City and Guilds of London Institute, and holds a number of honorary degrees.  She became a Dame Commander of the British Empire in the 2009 UK New Year’s Honours list, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in the same year. 

Professor Liz Bacon

Professor of Software Engineering, champion of women in STEM, Vice-Principal and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at Abertay University in Dundee, BSC President: Liz has many accolades to her name including completing an industrial placement at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Geneva, during her sandwich degree in the 1984/85 academic year.

With others she helped change the school curriculum in computing and set-up more than 200 computers at school hubs across the country to train the teachers to deliver it. In 2016 Liz became a Trustee and Director of Bletchley Park Trust, the home of British code breaking.