Articles
Back to Publications & Opinion > Articles ? Back to Homepage
Who is developing technologies that could revolutionise the industry and bring about a quantum change?
Infoconomy, 4 January 2001
By Samad Masood
Peter Cochrane, Concept Labs
After heading up the research department of the world famous BT Laboratories for seven years, Peter Cochrane's desicision to quit the company and set up the UK arm of a new technology incubator, ConceptLabs, at the end of 2000 shocked many. At BT, he was responsible for 660 staff dedicated to the study of future technologies, systems, networks and services, but was reported to be frustrated by the constraints of working for such a large organisation. At ConceptLabs the plan is to help develop and prototype new technologies, particularly in the areas of information retrieval, contextual computing, learning, community-building, and collaboration.
Arto Karila, Jippii
The future growth of the wireless industry requires consistent improvement in the manageability of wireless networks. Arto Karila is leading that effort in his role as professor in computer networks at the Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) and at the Finnish Telecommunications Software and Multimedia Laborotory. He is also a director of the Jippii Group, a Finnish mobile LAN provider.
Roger Needham, Microsoft Research Laboratory
Roger Needham is probably the best known technologist in Europe and certainly the best connected. He has been in computing at Cambridge University since 1956, and is reportedly the reason that Bill Gates decided to bring the Microsoft Research Lab to Cambridge. His current main research interest is security, although he has worked on everything from time sharing systems to local area networks.
Lorenzo Pavesi, University of Trento
Italy's University of Trento Physics Department, based in Povo in the Alps, is on the verge of cracking the next big challenge in optical networks. Pavesi is leading research that has managed to produce an optical amplifier on silicon. Pavesi says this work will create a 'thinking laser', and bring down the cost of optical component manufacturing by 100 to 1000 times.
Bill McColl, Sychron
A Professor of Computer Science at Oxford University, Bill McColl co-founded Sychron in 1998 to provide companies with a revolutionary new data center infrastructure for ecommerce, content distribution, hosting and other major internet services markets. One of the pioneers in the field of scalable internet infrastructure, McColl believes that the foundation of the next generation Internet infrastructure will be radically new software systems, such as the Sychron architecture, which can provide fully automated policy-driven control of the massive data centers and global networks of data centers which power the internet.
David Payne, Southampton Photonics
Probably the world's first PhD student in the field of optical fibre communication, Southampton Photonics co-founder David Payne is also a director at the world-renowned Southampton Optoelectronic Research Centre, a facility with 40 research labs and more than 100 full-time researchers. Payne led the team that invented the erbium-doped fibre amplifier, the technology that enabled the explosive growth of the Internet through dense wavelength division multiplexing in optical fibre.
Hans Strack-Zimmerman, formerly of iXos
A co-founder of German document management software provider iXos and of the X/Open group, Strack-Zimmermann was previously the development director for the SINIX computer line at Siemens AG. He also managed the implementation in West Berlin in the 1970s of a computer network between universities and research centres, and the Laboratory Computer Network at the world-renowned European Nuclear Research Centre (CERN) in Geneva. Strack-Zimmermann is now working on a business alternative to the web.
Jennifer Bray, Cambridge Silicon Radio
Jennifer Bray is a consultant for leading Bluetooth chip designer, Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR). Bray holds a doctorate in wireless communications, and has a decade of experience in communications product development, including working on Nortel & 3Com's first ATM and wireless ATM systems, the first secure ethernet repeater, ADSL to ATM gateways, FDDI and CDMA.
Gerhard Fettweis, Systemonic
Former IBMer Gerhard Fettweis founded Systemonic in July 1999, to exploit the digital signal processor (DSP) technology that he developed as a professor at the Dresden University of Technology. DSPs are currently in high demand because they handle data that has been converted from analogue to digital. Fettweis had devised a method of reducing the development and production time of DSPs down from one year to a few months.
Ian Page, Celoxica
A researcher at Oxford, Ian Page developed the innovative programming language Handel-C, and set up Embedded Solutions Ltd (now Celoxica) in January 1998 with the help of Isis Innovation, the Oxford University arm responsible for commercialising the Universities intellectual assets. Handel-C uses field programmable gate array chips (FPGAs) as indefinitely re-programmable hardware. The use of such a technology could revolutionise the technology industry, overcoming the need to design, build and implement application specific hardware.