Innovation Begins at Home - Andy Stanford-Clark

Andy Stanford-Clark is an IBM Distinguished Engineer, a Master Inventor with more than 45 patents, the leader of IBM's Quantum Ambassador programme in the UK, and an all-round IoT evangelist. He is the former CTO for IBM in the UK and Ireland.

IoT is at the heart of everything Andy does, and he has worked on Internet of Things technologies for more than 25 years, long before the term came into common use. One of Andy’s most significant achievements is as the co-inventor of MQTT, an open-source communications protocol that offers a scalable and cost-effective way to connect devices over the Internet, making it perfect for the Internet of Things. Originally designed for the oil and gas industry, this ISO-standard protocol is now widely used across all application areas of IoT. It’s also used by social media companies, so if you’ve ever used Facebook Messenger, you’ve used MQTT.

Outside of the workplace, Andy has numerous personal IoT projects on the go. These include managing his own 16th century smart home, bringing dinosaurs back to life, making sure antelopes stay warm at night, and making the Isle of Wight ferries tweet - the latter beginning as an IoT hack to kill time while waiting for a ferry that then took a quite unexpected turn.

More recently he has coined the term "Physical Digital Twin", and has made use of this in various applications from energy monitoring, to weather forecasting, to monitoring an autonomous ship sailing itself across the Atlantic ocean.

Andy holds a BSc in Computer Science and Mathematics and a PhD in parallel computing from the University of East Anglia. He’s a visiting professor at the University of Newcastle, an honorary professor at the University of East Anglia, and an adjunct professor at the University of Southampton. He’s a Fellow of the British Computer Society, and makes regular media appearances and gives conference talks about IoT.