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Latest - Decades: 1980s

Stephanie Liston

Stephanie Liston was born in the mid-west of the USA to a mother who was a first grade teacher and a father who was a finance director in the retail sector.  Stephanie studied history and political science at The Colorado College.  She studied law in San Diego, London and Cambridge.  Her first legal job was with Fulbright and Jaworski, which had offices in Houston, Washington and London.

Stephanie joined MCI Communications Corp in January 1990.  She was involved in forging joint venture agreements across the globe for MCI.  She returned to the UK, where she completed her LL.M. at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, to join Freshfields in 1992.  There she continued to advise MCI with its Concert joint venture with BT.

She was recruited by a number of firms throughout her legal career.  From Freshfields Stephanie joined Baker and McKenzie, working on international communications and technology matters and being asked to join the international partnership.  She built a very successful telecoms practice from scratch – but without the international focus.

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.

Bob Hopgood

Bob Hopgood joined the IT industry out of Cambridge having studied mathematics in 1959 at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment at Harwell.  He has worked in software, management and networking until his formal retirement in 2000.  This has included work on compiling techniques, computer animation, translator writing systems, computer graphics and the World Wide Web.  After retirement he worked for the Word Wide Web Consortium setting up national offices in, among other places, Israel, Morocco and Australia.

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.

Rodney Hornstein

Rodney Hornstein started work as a programmer at IBM during his vacations in 1958 and worked there, off and on, until 1962. He joined LEO computers programming the LEO ranges and later selling them and becoming director of marketing. He lived through the turmoil of first the merger of English Electric and LEO (EEL), shielded by his boss from the turbulence. He was also shielded when EEL merged with Marconi Computers. The big bang was the formation of ICL in 1968. He lived through the often brutal years of the Jeff Cross era from 1972 to 1977 but lost faith and his natural optimism when ICL began to implode into confusion in 1979.

Rodney then spent seven years outside the IT industry but did encounter Sir Arnold Weinstock head of GEC. He was headhunted to run an ICL spin off, DAP, which he had re-engineered from a £30,000 production cost to about $5,000 and sold it into the US and UK markets. He ran Alphameric, as CEO for 5 years, chairman for 4 years, building a profitable company from a near wreck. By 1999 he became an angel investor often acting as chairman of the board. His normal optimism about technology is being tested about the current developments in AI, but he heads an AI start up with a different approach.