Latest - IT Sector: Systems integration

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.

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 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.

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.