Latest - Decades: 2010s

Professor David Duce

Dr David Duce worked for the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory most of his working life, starting there in 1975 programming an ICL mainframe in Fortran. He implemented a structured Fortran with a colleague and has keep a keen interest in formal methods. He became deeply involved in the realm of graphics and with graphics standardisation. He is not a fan of AI preferring model-based computing where you can see why the system can to its conclusions. Latterly he worked at Oxford Brookes University.

Professor Phil Blythe

Phil Blythe is Professor of Intelligent Transport Systems at Newcastle University. He focuses on policy and technology in areas such as connected and autonomous vehicles, electro-mobility, decarbonising transport, age-friendly and accessible transport and smart cities. Phil leads Newcastle University’s Future Mobility Group and directs its Centre for Research Excellence for Mobility and Transport. Here he talks about the future of transport in the UK and the transformational role of IT.

Professor Ross Anderson

Ross Anderson was Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge and at Edinburgh University. A pioneer in his field, he devoted his career to developing security engineering as a discipline: building systems to remain dependable in the face of malice, error or mischance.

Throughout his career as an academic and an industry consultant he received important distinctions and awards. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the Institute of Physics, a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, as well as the recipient of the 2015 Lovelace Medal, awarded by British Computer Society.

Mark Enzer OBE FREng

Mark Enzer OBE is a consultant engineer with experience in the water industry, universities, central government digital policy and the environment.  He is an advocate of systems thinking at a national level to tackle the multiple issues facing the built environment.  He is a visiting professor in the digitisation of the built environment at the University of Cambridge.  All his working life he has worked for the UK-based consultancy Mott Macdonald including five years as its chief technology officer. 

Professor Nigel Gilbert CBE

Dr Professor Nigel Gilbert CBE holds a distinguished chair in Computational Social Science having been a Professor of Sociology at the University of Surrey. Nigel brings a fascinating insight into how IT an help us understand society. His prolific output includes Agent-based Models (Sage Publications 2008); a technique used to model behaviours such as clustering of populations, the dynamics of opinions in society and the operation of the housing market.   

Nigel is a polymath.  He wanted to do computer science at university but nobody was offering such a degree yet so he studied engineering at Cambridge with management studies thrown in, Nigel’s first program was for his father, a biophysical chemist, helping him understand through simulation how haemoglobin picks up and releases oxygen in the blood.  This around the time that Crick and Watson were building computer models (and note the parallels with Dennis Noble).  He was a lecturer in sociology at York University and joined the newly formed University of Surrey as part of a small sociology department in 1976.  He made a name for himself using a microcomputer to cut through the complexity of rules for social security benefits that were beyond human comprehension.  As a result the topic was  in the Alvey project. 

Professor Sir Iain Gray

Professor Sir Iain Gray was appointed Director of Aerospace at Cranfield University in 2015. In this role he draws on his 30 years in the aerospace manufacturing and engineering sector, ultimately leading Airbus in the UK.

Sir Iain also spent seven years as Chief Executive of UK Innovate, previously known as the Technology Strategy Board. The post included responsibility for an annual budget of £500m and interacting with some 5,000 large and small businesses across all sectors.

Dr Gopi Katragadda

Born in Bangalore in 1968, Dr Gopichand Katragadda comes from a long line of engineers on his father’s side, while his mother’s family background is in the arts. This combination has helped him bring a high level of creativity and breadth of vision to engineering achievements, he believes.
Gopi attended Iowa State University and did his doctoral research at NASA. In 2000, he returned to India as Chairman and Managing Director of GE India Technology Centre — the group’s largest R&D facility, which he helped become a world leader in intellectual property generation.

In 2014, he joined Tata Sons as Group Chief Technology Officer and Innovation Head, where he promoted collaboration with corporations such as Airbus and forward-thinking in the group’s subsidiaries and university partners. In 2019, Gopi set up Myelin Foundry, an AI company aimed at transforming human experiences and industry outcomes.

Sian Cleary

Sian Cleary has used the Archives of IT and other sources to write her MA dissertation on Government policy towards IT from 1992 to 1997, the years of John Major’s prime ministership.  In the archive she discovered the pivotal work of Professor Stephen Temple CBE in getting a European policy, driven by the UK, for single mobile network.  She also admired the work of Charles Hughes who, after a long career at ICL and others, played a vital role in the Information Society Initiative by Government in association with Ian Taylor, MP and MBE, another contributor to the archive.