Latest - Organisation: BCS

Dennis Blackwell

Dennis Blackwell was a key figure in the British computer industry for over 50 years, in a career that spanned and contributed to some of the most important commercial initiatives of the period. He worked for the UK flagship manufacturer, ICL, and its forbears for 25 of those, starting with English Electric in 1959 and contributed to industry institutions including the British Computer Society (now known as BCS) and the Worshipful Company of information Technologists.

Mark Holford

Mark Holford trained as a solicitor and worked in two practices before joining Thomas Miller as a claims executive and underwriter in 1978. He worked closely with the company’s IT Director to develop applications using pc and minicomputer technology. He helped to build Thomas Miller’s reputation as a leader in the use of IT in insurance.  He was the first person in his firm outside the IT department with a pc on his desk. He used Borland software to build spreadsheets for the company where he worked for 36 years. He can, says his wife, spot when the results of a calculation are wrong rather than just trust the technology. He is constantly searching for new applications for IT.

Professor Alan Dix

Professor Alan John Dix is Director of the Computational Foundry at Swansea University and Professorial Fellow at Cardiff Metropolitan University. He is an author, researcher, and university professor, specialising in human–computer interaction (HCI). He is one of the four co-authors of the university level textbook Human–Computer Interaction. His research interests are eclectic and include HCI, creativity, AI and Data. He is a member of the SIGCHI academy and a fellow of the British Computer Society and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.

Dianne Murray

Dianne Murray has been a Usability and Interface design consultant for more than thirty five years. She was one of the earliest researchers in HCI in the UK, through her time at the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington since the early 1980s. Her roles in consultancy included evaluation of research proposals financed by the UK Government and the European Commission as well as validation of interface design solutions. As an academic she lectured in several UK universities, such as King’s College, London, City University, London and University of London. She was a founding editor of Interacting with Computers journal and subsequently its Editor-in-Chief until 2015.

Alan Newell

Alan Newell is Emeritus Professor at Dundee University. He has spent over forty years conducting research in Human Computer Interaction, primarily into supporting elderly and disabled people. He founded and headed the Dundee University’s School of Computing, and later set up the Queen Mother Research Centre, an important academic group, researching digital systems for older and disabled people. In 2000 He was awarded an MBE, for services to IT and communication for people with disabilities. 

Linda Macaulay

Linda Ann Macaulay is Professor Emerita of Information System Design, University of Manchester. Professor Macaulay’s research interests are concerned with how technical system design can be informed by the needs of users and groups of users and fall into the four main areas: Human Computer Interaction; Requirements Engineering; e-Commerce and e-Business; and Facilitated Collaboration.

In 1999 she was the first female Professor to be appointed to the Department of Computation at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. She is twice holder of the prestigious IBM Faculty Award. She is a Fellow of the British Computer Society. Her memoir ‘Hello Computer’ is a personal history of computers from 1967 to 2017.