Latest - Decades: 2010s

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. 

John O’Connell

John O’Connell is a high-profile London-based technology entrepreneur, investor and philanthropist. He founded Staffware, one of the then leading software companies in the UK, which he sold in 2004. Since then he has personally invested in fourteen technology businesses, having chaired the vast majority of them. He also chaired and co-owned the professional rugby club then known as London Wasps. At present he is Chairman of Active Navigation, and he is the founder and Chairman of ScaleUp Group,

Shirine Khoury-Haq

Shirine’s career has been a transition from finance to consulting, and then to operations. She started in the US public sector before moving on to telecommunications, consumer products, retail and then insurance. She has led global teams delivering large scale technology and business change in FTSE 100 and Fortune 500 organisations, including several mergers and acquisitions. She has worked in the US, UK, across Europe and in Asia Pacific. She spent her childhood traveling around the world due to her father’s job and had lived on every continent except for Antarctica before the age of 12.

Professor Brian Randell

Brian has had a long and illustrious career in computing, starting work at English Electrics Atomic Power Division in 1957. Brian worked on various programming tasks, including the ALGOL 60 compiler for the KDF9 machine, which was the subject of his book, Algol 60 Implementation, along with Lawford Russell, one of the first books on compilers.  Brian then joined IBM Research at Yorktown Heights in 1964, where he worked on computer and systems design.  After five years at IBM, Brian became Professor of Computing Science at the Department of Computing Science at Newcastle University, where he has remained since. 

Interview with Sir Andrew Hopper

Andy Hopper studied computer science at Swansea under Professor David Aspinall then did his PhD in Cambridge where he worked on the Cambridge Ring.  His LAN company came to the attention of Acorn Computers and was taken into Acorn in 1979.   Hopper was appointed managing director of the Olivetti Cambridge Research lab in 1986.  As MD he helped more than 10 venture operations become independent companies under the benign eye of Olivetti.  On the closure of the lab Hopper focused on his professorship at Cambridge where he developed a strategy to get over 200 ventures from Cambridge University into the market.