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Latest - Decades: 1960s

Alastair Macdonald CB

Alastair Macdonald CB spent 32 years as a civil servant working on advice to ministers and executing policy for the IT industry. He was the civil servant in charge of the IT82 awareness campaign initiated by Lord Ken Baker. Macdonald was in charge of the privatisation of BT, a world first which started the liberalisation of the telecommunications industry. He was in charge of the Y2K efforts to avoid a catastrophe with the change of date at the start of this century. He took part in the decisions to widen the offering of mobile phone networks in the UK from two to four vendors.

Sir Frederick Crawford

Sir Frederick Crawford has a maxim which has stood him in good stead in his long career in industry and academia: never be seen moving.  He says he is like the sweeper in the game of curling: not touching the stone but influencing where it stops by sweeping in front of it.  His career has spanned four continents: Europe in the UK and France; the USA in Stamford University; and Japan and Australia where he was a visiting professor.  From 1980 to 1996 he was vice chancellor of Aston University, raising it from the bottom rung of UK universities into the top third.  He also opened the first science park in the UK.  He has never been a computer scientist nor a developer of IT but a user: IT is the servant, he says. 

Sir Desmond Pitcher

Sir Desmond Pitcher has worked on all sides of the IT industry. He has implemented computer systems for Sperry Univac and became a senior executive. In 1974/5 he delivered the Faraday lecture series for the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers in which he predicted many of the developments of the IT industry. He has run the computerised switching systems for the telecommunications company Plessey when it was developing and building System X. He has introduced computerisation in large organisations including Littlewoods, the football pools and retailing company based on Merseyside. He later chaired the Merseyside Development Corporation.

Sir Michael Brady

Sir Michael Brady is Emeritus Professor of Oncological Imaging at the University of Oxford, having retired in 2010 as Professor of Information Engineering.  He is co-Director of the Oxford Cancer Imaging Centre.  He is distinguished for his work in artificial intelligence, and for his outstanding contributions to developing computer-based post-processing for a variety of medical images.  He combines his work in oncology with a range of entrepreneurial activities.  He was Deputy Chairman of Oxford Instruments, and also a founder of successful start-ups such as Guidance, Mirada Medical, Optellum, Perspectum Diagnostics, ScreenPoint Medical, and Volpara Solutions among others.  Sir Michael was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineers, Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, Fellow of the Institute of Physics, Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and Fellow of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence, and also he is Membre Étranger de l’Académie des Sciences.  In addition to this numerous academic fellowships and prizes he received a knighthood in 2004 for services to engineering.

Maurice Perks

Maurice Perks worked on the implementation of large complex IT systems from his start at IBM in 1968. He helped build one of Europe’s first interactive applications for Dunlop in the early 1970s. He worked in the USA on the design of future computer systems within the heart of IBM. He became a Fellow of IBM working on the implementation of applications for customers. He is concerned that there is a continuing gap between what the IT industry can deliver and what organisations, both private and public, need.

Professor Yorick Wilks

Professor Yorick Wilks is a British computer scientist who has contributed to a wide range of academic fields, including philosophy, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, natural language processing, and machine translation. He is Emeritus Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of Sheffield, and Visiting Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Gresham College in London, a position created for him. He is a Research Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute, Senior Scientist at the Florida Institute of Human and Machine Cognition, and a member of the Epiphany Philosophers. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society, and of the Association for Computing Machinery. He is a Fellow of the European Association for Artificial Intelligence, and of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. In 1997 he led the team that won the Loebner Prize for machine dialogue; in 2008 he got the Zampolli Prize of the European Languages Research Association; and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Association for Computational Linguistics. In 2009 he got the Lovelace Medal of the British Computer Society for contributions to meaning-based understanding of natural language.

David Morriss

David Morriss spent over 31 years in IBM starting at the bottom and becoming a board member of IBM UK. He saw it change from the dominant computer company with a unique culture and set of policies to one focused on IT services. He planned the change to a services company for its European, Middle East and African sector and then executed the plan in the UK. This turned IBM UK round from a loss-making operation to a profit generator. He applied the mantra that computers were there to solve problems in the private and public sectors, not there for the sake of the technology.