Latest - Decades: 2010s

Dr Louise Bennett

Dr Louise Bennett is an IT Security Expert with more than 30 years’ experience in the industry. Her first experience of computing was modelling weather using London University’s Atlas computer.

She worked at the Ministry of Defence as an operations analyst and one of her first roles involved programming in BASIC and Fortran to develop a flying training programme for the RAF.

In the late 1980s she became R&D Director as well as IT Director and moved to Thorn Security where she led early work in biometrics with fingerprint, hand, iris and voice recognition and also worked at AEA Technology (the privatised Atomic Energy Establishment).

As the chair of the security forum at the British Computer Society, she has an excellent bird’s eye view of what’s going right, and wrong, with the nation’s security

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

Paul Barry-Walsh

Paul Barry-Walsh is an IT entrepreneur and investor. After leaving IBM in 1986 Paul founded Safetynet; then in 1996 Netstore; and in 2001 he founded the Fredericks Foundation, which has become one of the UK’s leading micro finance organisations.

In 2005 alongside Paul & Peter Sedgwick, he founded Frank Investments. This business was established to provide long-term investment management services to a partnership of investors. Paul has made over private 30 investments since 2000 and typically invests between £250-£ 500k each year.