Dr. Andy Stanford-Clark

A computer engineer at the forefront of research into "pervasive messaging" systems to keep humans informed about the performance of the objects around them, he is the Chief Technologist for IBM?s Consulting Business in Energy and Utilities for the United Kingdom and Ireland. He is based at IBM?s R&D headquarters in Hursley Park laboratories. Hursley House, an 18th Century stately home located in Hampshire, U.K. is where the Spitfire was developed during the Second World War. He and his team seek new ways to improve communication between people and things. He specializes in remote telemetry, energy monitoring and management, and smart metering and Smart Grid technologies, and has been able to apply his work to the home-front. He has wired up his family home to Internet sensation Twitter so the building itself can 'tweet'; utilizing his interest in home energy monitoring, home automation, demand-side management, and driving consumer behavior change. Concerned about how to maintain his idyllic Elizabethan cottage in a secluded part of the Isle of Wight in the U.K., he wondered how he would know when the heating was on for too long, an upstairs window was left ajar, or the garden hosepipe was dripping. He was educated at Stockport Grammar School and the University of East Anglia, receiving a B.Sc. degree in Computing and Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Computer Science. He is a visiting Professor at the University of Newcastle. He joined IBM in 1991. Five years later, while working on an early website for the Wimbledon tennis championships, he invented load balancing technology to deal with sudden traffic spikes that is still used by websites today. He is known for his lecture, ?Innovation Begins At Home? where he explains how his hobby of home automation and his passion for energy saving at home, have led to projects that have helped alleviate energy poverty in social housing, and are providing new ideas for consumer behavior change and the future smart energy grid, which will include a mixture of micro-generation, electric vehicles, demand management, storage technologies and novel fuels for transport. He was named IBM Distinguished Engineer and Master Inventor. He is a Fellow of the British Computer Society as well. He holds more than 40 patents.