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Latest - IT Sector: IT Education and research

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. 

Robert (Bob) Kowalski

Robert Anthony Kowalski is a logician and computer scientist, a distinguished Research Fellow and Emeritus Professor of Computational Logic in the Department of Computing at Imperial College, London.  He was elected a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 1991, a Fellow of the European Co-ordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence in 1999, and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2000.  He received the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence in 2011.  He received the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Award for Eminent Scientists for 2012-2014.

Eva Pascoe

Eva Pascoe was co-founder of Cyberia, the first Internet café in London, in1994. During her career, Eva pioneered women’s participation in online business, online secure payments, e-commerce fashion solutions, and electronic customer relationship management. She is currently the chair of Cybersalon.org, a non-profit digital think tank she co-founded in 1997. She works with a retail practice, developing strategies for large and small international retail companies supporting young fashion brands with women founders, like Bluebella.com and Thefoldlondon.com. In 1995, jointly with Gene Teare, she was awarded the Sunday Times Technology Award.

Lisa Goodchild

Lisa Goodchild’s experience in – and passion for – all things digital is unrivalled. For more than 20 years she has lived, loved and been a major player in the industry making waves in far-reaching arenas, from fashion, finance & tech to online advertising and non-profit.

Throughout her career, Lisa has brought excitement to her projects, making ‘it’ happen, with her agency social media consultancy Digiwoo, for the likes of Hewlett Packard, British Airways, Goldman Sachs, Panasonic & Ted Baker, & also in her capacity as an advisor to notable names such as PR guru Lynne Franks, June Sarpong MBE, Shaa Wasmund MBE & MOBO Awards founder Kanya King MBE. Lisa also mentors for Google & Virgin as well as being a Marketing Academy Alumni and a Marketing Academy Apprenticeship Charity Trustee.

Pete Lomas

Pete Lomas and a colleague designed the Raspberry Pi educational computer to help turn young people from consumers into creators. The original plan in 2008 called for 3,000 units: there are now close to 30 million of these small and inexpensive used to educate young people into how to design digital systems of all types. Pete went further and turned Raspberry Pi into a charity with other industrialists and academics. Raspberry Pi came out of a long career in electronic engineering which included teaching and research at Manchester University and commercial work developing digital systems for clients.

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.

Sir John Chisholm

Sir John Chisholm started his IT career in management roles at early software and systems companies like Scicon, CAP Scientific, and Sema. In 1991 he became Chief Executive of the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, later rebranded as QinetiQ. He is perhaps best known for this role in leading QinetiQ to become an internationally successful technology services company, which floated on the London Stock Exchange in 2006. He became Chairman of QinetiQ in the same year.

Doron Swade MBE

Doron Swade. He is an engineer, historian, museum professional and scholar who publishes and lectures widely on the history of computing, curatorship and museology. He is the author of more than eighty articles and four books. At the Science Museum in London he was curator of computing and responsible for the national computing collection. He is a leading authority on the works and life of Charles Babbage. During his tenure at the London Science Museum he directed, managed, fund-raised and publicised the construction of the first mechanical calculating engine from original nineteenth century designs by [Charles] Babbage. In 1989 he founded the Computer Conservation Society and in 2009 was awarded an MBE for his services to the history of computing in the New Year’s Honours List.

Peter Kirstein CBE

Peter Kirstein is a British computer scientist. He is often recognised as the father of the European Internet. Professor of Computer Communications Systems at UCL in London. He was appointed Commander of the British Empire in 2003. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a distinguished Fellow of the British Computer Society, a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, a Fellow of the Institute of Physics. In 2003 he was awarded the Postel Award by the Internet Society, and in 2006 he was given the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Royal Academy of Engineering