Individuals embraced

Our database of interviews includes leaders from a wide variety of backgrounds who all share one thing in common:

The positive impact they have made on the development of the UK IT industry

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Muffy Calder OBE

Muffy Calder is Vice Principal and Head of College of Science and Engineering at Glasgow University.  She is also a Professor of Formal Methods.  She is a member of the governing body of EPSRC, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research.  She is Chair of the DCMS Science Advisory Committee and a member of REF Main Panel B.She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the British Computer Society and, in 2011, she was awarded the OBE for services to computer science.

Dr Steve Furber CBE

Steve Furber was working at Acorn Computers having helped develop the BBC Micro and was searching for the follow-on product. He found that the microprocessors then on the market had a deep design flaws: they were too complex. Acorn decided to design its own microprocessor using a novel approach. Furber led the small design team. They called it the Acorn Risc Machine (ARM), later changed to the Advanced Risc Machine and it is now found in over a billion mobile devices worldwide

Dame Wendy Hall CBE

Dame Wendy Hall is a British computer scientist and Regius Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and an Executive Director of the Web Science Institute.  She was Dean of the Faculty of Physical Science and Engineering at the University of Southampton from 2010 to 2014.  Between 2002 and 2007 she was Head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science, where she was founding Head of the Intelligence, Agents, and Multimedia Research Group.  In 2000 she was awarded a CBE and became a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.  She is also a distinguished Fellow of the BCS, a Fellow of the IET, and of the City and Guilds of London Institute, and holds a number of honorary degrees.  She became a Dame Commander of the British Empire in the 2009 UK New Year’s Honours list, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in the same year. 

Andrew (Andy) Hopper

Andy Hopper studied computer science at Swansea under Professor David Aspinall then did his PhD in Cambridge where he worked on the Cambridge Ring.  His LAN company came to the attention of Acorn Computers and was taken into Acorn in 1979.   Hopper was appointed managing director of the Olivetti Cambridge Research lab in 1986.  As MD he helped more than 10 venture operations become independent companies under the benign eye of Olivetti.  On the closure of the lab Hopper focused on his professorship at Cambridge where he developed a strategy to get over 200 ventures from Cambridge University into the market.