People

Ben Azvine, Head of Centre

Ben Azvine is 43, married with two children. He holds a BSc in Mechanical Engineering, an MSc in Control Engineering, a Ph.D. in Intelligent Control Systems all from Manchester University and an MBA from Imperial College, London. Having held research fellowship and lectureship posts in several universities, he joined BT in 1995 to set up a research programme to develop and exploit intelligent systems technologies within BT Research. Since then he has held senior, principal and chief research scientist posts at Adastral Park, the head quarter of BT R&D. Ben was appointed the head of IT Futures centre on 1st Oct 2007. He has edited several books and published more than 100 scientific articles. He is an inventor on 30 patents, has won two BCS gold medals, and the IET award for innovation in IT, holds visiting professorships at Universities of Bristol and Bournemouth, and is a visiting fellow at Cranfield University.

John Davies, Head of Next Generation Web Research

Dr John Davies leads the Semantic Technology research group at BT. Current interests centre around the application of semantic web technology to business intelligence, information integration, knowledge management and service-oriented environments. He is Project Director of the ¤12m ACTIVE EU integrated project and co-organiser of the European Semantic Web Conference series. He is also chairman of the European Semantic Technology Conference and a Vice-President of the Semantic Technology Institute (www.sti2.org) He has written and edited many papers and books in the areas of the semantic technology, web-based information management and knowledge management; and has served on the program committee of many conferences in related areas. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society and a Chartered Engineer. Earlier research at BT led to the development of a set of knowledge management tools which are the subject of a number of patents. These tools were spun out of BT and are now marketed by Infonic Ltd, of which Dr Davies is Group Technical Advisor. Dr Davies received the BT Award for Technology Entrepreneurship for his contribution to the creation of Infonic.

Theo Dimitrakos, Head of Security Architectures Research

Theo Dimitrakos is leading the SOA Security Research Group. He has fifteen years of research and innovation experience in a wide range of topics relating to Information Security, Identity and Access Management, Software and Systems Engineering, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services and Grid Computing. He also has strong academic background in the areas of security risk analysis, formal modelling and applications of semantics and logic in computer science.

He has been the vice-chair of an IFIP working group on Trust Management (www.ifip.org) and a member of Industrial Advisory Boards of European collaborative research initiatives. He has also been a member of the editorial board of several international journals on distributed systems and information security and of the steering or programme committees of international conferences in Information Security, Trust Management, SOA and Web Services. He has been the scientific coordinator of the European Integrated Projects BEinGRID^? (www.beingrid.eu), which includes 96 partners and oversees 25 business pilots in different market sectors, and TrustCoM^? (www.eu-trustcom.com) that brought together innovation teams from Atos Origin, BT, Microsoft, IBM and SAP, among others. He has fostered research communities on Trust Management (www.itrust.uoc.gr) and applications of Grid computing (www.lege-wg.org) that expanded to include several hundreds of researchers from most continents.

His academic qualifications include a Ph.D. in Foundations of Software Engineering from Imperial College London, and a BSc from the University of Crete in Greece. He has also been lecturing on SOA and Web Services at the University of London.

Mike Fisher, Head of ICT Infrastructure Virtualisation

Mike Fisher leads the ICT Infrastructure Virtualisation group which has a focus on management of large-scale distributed IT infrastructure, including Grids, and is contributing to IT-related aspects of BT’s 21st Century Network architecture. Mike’s research interests in 18 years with BT have included optical materials and devices, network design, distributed middleware, active networks and policy-based management. His group is currently leading the Business and Operational Issues work package in the European collaborative project NextGRID^?. He is Chairman of the ETSI Technical Committee on GRID and represents BT on the Steering Committee of the NESSI (Networked European Software and Services Initiative) European Technology Platform in which he is also co-chair of the Service Oriented Infrastructure Working Group.

Andy Jones, Head of Information Security Research

Dr. Andy Jones is Head of Information Security Research at the Information Technology Futures Research Centre at British Telecommunications (BT). He leads research into computer forensics, Anomaly detection and the development of a risk management methodology. In addition he holds a post as a visiting adjunct at Edith Cowan University in Australia. His background is of 25 years in Military Intelligence during which he gained experience in both operational and strategic intelligence and then in defence research, where he developed a research group and carried out research into all aspects of Information Warfare and developed a methodology for the modelling of threats to information systems. From the Army he moved to the Defence Research Agency where he took over the Secure Information Systems research group which research information security problems for the defence research programme. He then moved to the University of Glamorgan in Wales where he was a principal lecturer. While at the University he created a computer forensics research laboratory and lectured on Information Security and computer crime.

He was awarded an MBE during his military service, has a PhD^? in Information Security and is a member of MENSA, the British Computer Society, the Institute of Information Security Professionals and the Information Systems Security Association. He has published numerous articles in the areas of information security and computer forensics and four books, one on Information Warfare, one on information risk management, one on High Technology Crime investigations and one on Corporate Security and Terrorism. He currently sits on the CSIA GIPSI Committee, the Tiger Scheme Management board and periodically acts as an assessor for research grant applications for the DTI (now BERR) and sits on the committees of five security related conferences.

Paul Kearney, Head of Enterprise Risk Research

Paul Kearney has responsibility for building a research programme in Enterprise Risk Management around a number of internal, university, and FP7 collaborative projects. He has recently been working on secondment to the Business Continuity practice in BT Global Services helping develop a visionary framework and roadmap names the Resilient Enterprise, continues in that role part time. Previously in the Security Research Centre, he led the ICT Security Research theme and had a personal role in a number of the projects within it.

He is also active in the research community beyond BT, playing a leading role in current and past collaborative research projects and various working groups and programme committees. Particular interests include architectures for managing trust and security in open distributed systems, and model-driven approaches to design of secure solutions. Paul has a BSc and PhD^? in theoretical physics and worked for British Aerospace and Sharp Laboratories of Europe in R&D roles before joining BT in 1997. He is a Member if the Institute of Information Security Professionals and a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP).

John Wittgreffe, Head of OSS Research Group

John Wittgreffe has 19 years’ experience in the industry, starting with optical networks research in the late 1980s, before moving into OSS migration planning for BT’s major systems. John then ran a range of innovative eBusiness developments for corporate customer contracts. John later combined internal OSS and contract experience to lead capability strategy development for BT Global Solutions. John Wittgreffe is currently BT’s ICT Research Chief, working in BT’s Group CTO, and heads programmes of research in to ICT Management Systems for Corporate Customers and Rapid Assembly of Products and Services. John has a first class honours degree in Physics from the University of York and is CPhys, MInstP^?.