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Latest - Decades: 2020s

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. 

Alan Burkitt-Gray

Alan Burkitt-Gray thinks both Whitehall, the government, and Westminster, Parliament, are useless in their understanding of technology. A proper quantum computer is five years away and poses problems because it will be able to decode all messages encoded: organisations such as banks and government are already hoarding encrypted messages in order to decrypt them in the future. Quantum computing will also allow users to encrypt messages so that nobody would be able to read them.

Richard Hopkins

Richard Hopkins is a distinguished engineer at IBM and an authority on Hybrid Cloud, AI and Quantum computing.  He started as a systems engineer in 1990 based in the north east of England.   He has worked for IBM all his working life.  He has great admiration for Louis Gerstner who turned around an ailing IBM in the early 1990s. 

From his 33 years experience of building complex systems at IBM, Hopkins sees quantum computing far closer than many think and AI still prone to hallucinations and is inaccurate.   But both are coming and the key will be not the technologies themselves but their useful adoption. 

Julia Sutcliffe

Professor Julia Sutcliffe, was appointed Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department for Business and Trade in February 2023. Previously, she spent 26 years at BAE Systems where she focused on innovation, aerospace, defence and security. Here she talks about what has inspired and driven her career. This includes the great feats of engineering she saw as a child, the huge potential of the explosion in computer power, and the ability to collaborate with leading experts across many technologies.

Mark Holford

Mark Holford trained as a solicitor and worked in two practices before joining Thomas Miller as a claims executive and underwriter in 1978. He worked closely with the company’s IT Director to develop applications using pc and minicomputer technology. He helped to build Thomas Miller’s reputation as a leader in the use of IT in insurance.  He was the first person in his firm outside the IT department with a pc on his desk. He used Borland software to build spreadsheets for the company where he worked for 36 years. He can, says his wife, spot when the results of a calculation are wrong rather than just trust the technology. He is constantly searching for new applications for IT.

Gilbert Cockton

Gilbert Cockton is Emeritus Professor of Computer Science, University of Sunderland and Emeritus Professor, School of Design, Northumbria University.
With degrees in History, Education and Computer Science, he was one of the leading figures in HCI and Interaction Design in the UK. He has mostly worked in university computing and design with periods in industry. His Balanced, Integrated and Generous (BIG) paradigm for design seeks to combine the strengths of creative, engineering and human-centred design in ways that neutralise their individual weaknesses. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, he was a Fellow of the British Computer Society, he is Distinguished Speaker, Association for Computing Machinery and recently got an ACM SIGCHI Distinguished Service Award.

Dr Andrew Rogoyski

Dr Andrew Rogoyski is Innovation and Partnership Director of the AI Institute at the University of Surrey. He has experienced several winters where interest in AI has nearly evaporated but is excited to now be in a summer of interest as big tech pours fortunes into development, some fruitful and some futile. 

In March 2023 he tried to co-sign the letter from 1,000 people calling for the suspension of development in the AI tool ChatGPT but couldn’t as the server crashed. Among those who did manage the sign the letter were Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak.

Professor Harold Thimbleby

Professor Harold Thimbleby is See Change Digital Health Fellow at Swansea University, Wales. His research interests span from Human Computer Interaction to Formal Methods, and their medical applications. His passion is designing dependable systems to accommodate human error, especially in healthcare. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians,  a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh, a fellow of the Learned Society of Wales, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He has been a Royal Society Wolfson Research Merit award holder. Finally, he is also Emeritus Gresham Professor of Geometry.