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Cyril Hilsum CBE

Cyril Hilsum is a British physicist and material scientist, who carried out research on infra-red devices and semi-conductors, and played a key role in the development of flat-panel liquid crystal displays. He was awarded numerous prizes from several institutions: he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and an honorary member of the American National Academy of Engineering. He was awarded the Max Born Prize in 1987 and the Faraday Medal in 1988. He was awarded the CBE in 1990 for services to the Electrical and Electronics Industry. In 2007 he was awarded the Royal Society’s Royal Medal for his many outstanding contributions and for continuing to use his prodigious talents on behalf of industry, government and academia to this day

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.

Professor Brian Collins CB

Professor Brian Collins CB spent his career in the public service, in the private sector and as an academic.  He met his first computer programming the speed of nuclear bomb blasts and went on to work at the defence research establishment at Malvern.  He devised night goggles and tank night-time battle systems.  At the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) he helped re-orientate it to the new role after the cold war.  Working in the private sector he amalgamated the IT systems of the world’s largest legal firm.  He worked on integrating technology to government policy and then transferred to academia.

Professor William Webb

Professor William Webb chose as his PhD thesis finished in 1992 the use of variable level modulation in radio networks to raise the amount of data which can be carried. It is used widely in radio networks today. He worked for UK wireless consultancies until he moved to Motorola’s world HQ in Chicago becoming director of strategy. He joined the newly formed Ofcom communications regulator in the UK in 2003 and ran a 35 person R&D group. He often worked in mixed groups of engineers and economists where he developed his skills as a forecaster of technology developments. He now runs his own consultancy used internationally to advise CEOs, government and advisory bodies on issues of wireless communications.

Alastair Macdonald CB

Alastair Macdonald CB spent 32 years as a civil servant working on advice to ministers and executing policy for the IT industry. He was the civil servant in charge of the IT82 awareness campaign initiated by Lord Ken Baker. Macdonald was in charge of the privatisation of BT, a world first which started the liberalisation of the telecommunications industry. He was in charge of the Y2K efforts to avoid a catastrophe with the change of date at the start of this century. He took part in the decisions to widen the offering of mobile phone networks in the UK from two to four vendors.

Sir Frederick Crawford

Sir Frederick Crawford has a maxim which has stood him in good stead in his long career in industry and academia: never be seen moving.  He says he is like the sweeper in the game of curling: not touching the stone but influencing where it stops by sweeping in front of it.  His career has spanned four continents: Europe in the UK and France; the USA in Stamford University; and Japan and Australia where he was a visiting professor.  From 1980 to 1996 he was vice chancellor of Aston University, raising it from the bottom rung of UK universities into the top third.  He also opened the first science park in the UK.  He has never been a computer scientist nor a developer of IT but a user: IT is the servant, he says. 

Lisa Powis

Lisa Powis was enthralled by IT when at 11 she saw her father use an early computer in his insurance business. Since then she has been an advocate of the use of IT in business. She has tried to use IT in all of her roles in the insurance sector, sometimes asking IT to do more than it could given her enthusiasm. Powis is one of the users of IT who have pushed IT’s boundaries and challenged IT suppliers to give business what it needs. She is now launching a crowd-funded investment platform for companies developing IT of the insurance sector.

Robert (Bob) Kowalski

Robert Anthony Kowalski is a logician and computer scientist, a distinguished Research Fellow and Emeritus Professor of Computational Logic in the Department of Computing at Imperial College, London.  He was elected a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence in 1991, a Fellow of the European Co-ordinating Committee for Artificial Intelligence in 1999, and a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2000.  He received the IJCAI Award for Research Excellence in 2011.  He received the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science Award for Eminent Scientists for 2012-2014.