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Latest - Organisation: University of Cambridge

Professor Ross Anderson

Ross Anderson was Professor of Security Engineering at Cambridge and at Edinburgh University. A pioneer in his field, he devoted his career to developing security engineering as a discipline: building systems to remain dependable in the face of malice, error or mischance.

Throughout his career as an academic and an industry consultant he received important distinctions and awards. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering, a fellow of the Institute of Physics, a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications, as well as the recipient of the 2015 Lovelace Medal, awarded by British Computer Society.

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 Nigel Gilbert CBE

Dr Professor Nigel Gilbert CBE holds a distinguished chair in Computational Social Science having been a Professor of Sociology at the University of Surrey. Nigel brings a fascinating insight into how IT an help us understand society. His prolific output includes Agent-based Models (Sage Publications 2008); a technique used to model behaviours such as clustering of populations, the dynamics of opinions in society and the operation of the housing market.   

Nigel is a polymath.  He wanted to do computer science at university but nobody was offering such a degree yet so he studied engineering at Cambridge with management studies thrown in, Nigel’s first program was for his father, a biophysical chemist, helping him understand through simulation how haemoglobin picks up and releases oxygen in the blood.  This around the time that Crick and Watson were building computer models (and note the parallels with Dennis Noble).  He was a lecturer in sociology at York University and joined the newly formed University of Surrey as part of a small sociology department in 1976.  He made a name for himself using a microcomputer to cut through the complexity of rules for social security benefits that were beyond human comprehension.  As a result the topic was  in the Alvey project. 

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.

Interview with Sir Andrew 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.