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The stories of the pioneering people behind IT

This expanding database contains more than 200 oral histories recorded by the Archives of IT team. They tell the extraordinary story of how the Tech industry has transformed our lives, in the words of the people who made and are making it happen.

You can filter interviews by subject area below or use the Search button at the top of the page. If you know who you are looking for, use our A-Z list here.

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Sue Daley

Sue Daley is the big data and AI expert at techUK, the trade body for IT vendors.  She is a leading figure in the development of ethics for the digital world.  Her aim is to build a culture of trust and confidence between all the parties providing and handling data.  She began her career in government relations, representing clients to government and parliament.  She was a senior policy advisor at the Confederation of British Industry where she helped run the CBI’s EBusiness Council.  She worked for five years for Symantec, the IT security expert company.   In 2019 she was voted one of the UK’s top 100 experts on big data.  In 2016 she swam the English Channel in just under 24 hours.

Professor Sir Ian Diamond

Professor Sir Ian Diamond first encountered a computer as a student at the London School of Economics the mid-1970s. He learnt Fortran and submitted programs on punched cards. “But we never actually used computers to analyse data,” he says.

Computers are now crucial to Sir Ian’s role as the UK’s national statistician, and principal adviser to the UK Statistics Authority and the Government. The task involves using the latest AI, machine learning and textual analysis to tackle some of the thorniest current social and economic challenges.

From the beginning, Sir Ian was interested in the application of statistics to social science, demographics and survey data. Statistics have had a bad press, he says, but when they are rigorous and well put together they are increasingly reliable and powerful. For example, they have recently helped discover how the coronavirus is impacting people disproportionately in different ethnic groups.

After an MSc at the LSE, Sir Ian took a PhD at St Andrews, where he received “outstanding supervision” looking at the problem of relatively high drop-out rates among Scottish students compared with their English counterparts.

His career has included being chief executive of the Economic and Social Research Council and vice chancellor of the University of Aberdeen. In 2019, he did not take much persuasion to apply for the post of national statistician.

“It has been a total thrill every day since,” he says. “We need to produce data that the public can trust, and to reflect the economy and society at a time when it is changing very quickly.”

Massive technology change has made it possible to think increasingly radically about all kinds of data, and to produce ever more timely and accurate statistics. But it is really important to have a social theory about what you are doing, says Sir Ian. And to communicate properly, explaining assumptions and ensuring that people can understand the level of uncertainty and margin for error.

For those interested in studying statistics, there can be no better career, he says, and the UK has some of the world’s strongest institutions.

Mischa Dohler

Mischa Dohler is now Chief Architect in Ericsson Inc. in Silicon Valley, USA, having previously been Professor in Wireless Communications at King’s College London.

He was born in Germany, into a family of scientific academics, who were also talented in music and business.  He has continued the family tradition, as academic, entrepreneur and musician.  Mischa brings all those skills and interests to bear on his approach to technology, speaking eloquently of its relevance to diverse aspects of our lives; industrial, personal and cultural.

He demonstrated the power of 5G communications to enable collaboration over the Internet in a real time duet with his daughter 1000 km away and looks forward to medicine, industry and culture developing with 6G and the Internet of Things, Skills and beyond.

Paul Fullagar

Paul Fullagar says he has been a user of IT rather than a developer of IT but he has written applications and run companies developing and selling packages mostly in the financial sector. He qualified in business studies and as a chartered management accountant. He has written applications in Algol and Fortran IV. He has helped several ailing software package companies to recover through looking at their overall position with helicopter vision. He is a business angel in many software and healthcare companies.

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. 

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. 

Professor Nick Jennings

Professor Nick Jennings is an internationally recognised authority in the areas of artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, cybersecurity and agent-based computing.

He is the Vice-Provost for Research and Enterprise and Professor of Artificial Intelligence at Imperial College London. He was the UK’s first Regius Professor of Computer Science (a post bestowed by the monarch to recognise exceptionally high quality research) at the University of Southampton and the UK Government’s first Chief Scientific Advisor for National Security. 

Dr Gopi Katragadda

Born in Bangalore in 1968, Dr Gopichand Katragadda comes from a long line of engineers on his father’s side, while his mother’s family background is in the arts. This combination has helped him bring a high level of creativity and breadth of vision to engineering achievements, he believes.
Gopi attended Iowa State University and did his doctoral research at NASA. In 2000, he returned to India as Chairman and Managing Director of GE India Technology Centre — the group’s largest R&D facility, which he helped become a world leader in intellectual property generation.

In 2014, he joined Tata Sons as Group Chief Technology Officer and Innovation Head, where he promoted collaboration with corporations such as Airbus and forward-thinking in the group’s subsidiaries and university partners. In 2019, Gopi set up Myelin Foundry, an AI company aimed at transforming human experiences and industry outcomes.