We welcome Richard Hopkins, IBM Distinguished Engineer as our after dinner speaker to discuss the opportunities this technology will enable and how and why you should be getting ready to seize them.
After 65 years of highly predictable exponential progress in compute power, things have recently taken an unusual, though well foreseen, turn.
Moore’s Law is creaking due to the laws of physics and mainstream computing is no longer the sole preserve of the zero or one. Artificial neurons and qubits are enabling new ways of building computers and are promising new waves of exponential growth in computing performance. These new computers promise to solve currently intractable problems, resulting in world-changing solutions.
In his talk, Richard will set the scene for this post-von Neumann diversity; explain how and why quantum computing is set to power past conventional supercomputing; where the first real world opportunities are likely to be and what organisations should be doing about it right now.
About our Speaker
Richard has designed IT systems that have improved the lives of millions of people for more than 30 years. Starting with biometric national identity card systems, post office automation, through welfare reforms and into the realms of national security and regulated industry Clouds, he has adopted and adapted new information technology to meet the needs of citizens around the globe.
He co-authored the book Eating the IT Elephant – which explained how to modernise complex brownfield IT landscapes using semantic technologies and resulted in multiple patents and a new business. IBM appointed him an IBM Distinguished Engineer in 2011. As CTO for IBM’s European Public Sector business, he engineered an unprecedented growth in IBM’s engagement with Government.
In 2019 he was appointed by current IBM CEO Arvind Krishna to be the nineteenth President of IBM’s Academy of Technology (the organisation that brings together all of IBM’s technical leaders, including all its Fellows). Richard is only the second President appointed from outside of the United States since the Academy was created. In 2020 he was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Today he advises how regulated industries can safely move to Cloud and exploit the new technologies they find there (including quantum computing).
In his spare time, he creates robots to encourage kids into STEM. He lives in a beautiful market town in Yorkshire with his wife, three adult kids, four dogs and seven cats. One of the dogs is a robot.