Summary

I innovate practical solutions to real-world problems: one of the UK’s first Internet Service Providers; Europe’s first virtual prepaid card issuer; invented and manufactured a SAP- and ECO- approved smart radiator valve that requires no set-up and saves carbon by automatically turning down the set-point when a room is vacant.

Service roles have included company directorships for over 30 years including in payment services, vice-chair of a school governing board and an inventors’ club, liason between a local authority and green community groups.

Other than founding companies, I have worked in tech journalism, defence, oil, and banking.

In every role I create, persuade, fund, lead and deliver.

I am focussed on tackling climate change and its impacts.

Research

2023-- : continuing work on reducing climate inpact from UK home heating, at University of Surrey.

OpenTRV/Vestemi/Caredall

2013-- : founder, project leader and OpenTRV open source project and CTO with the initial goal of cheaply eliminating the ~50% wasted heat (and carbon emissions) of domestic space heating in the UK and across Europe, up to 8% of the region's entire footprint.

OpenTRV is an open source hardware and software project with Internet-of-Things low cost sensor and actuator technology, AI and machine learning, to help grow the ecosystem for everyone.

To fulfil our vision of painless affordable carbon saving for Jo Everyone, and our mission of having OpenTRV smart valves fitted to 80% of (400 million) European home-heating radiators by 2050, OpenTRV brought Radbot to market in 2018.

In 2020 Radbot entered the SAP PCDB. In 2021 Radbot was approved for ECO by Ofgem, and the product was acquired by Secure Meters.

Previous Projects Summary

1994--2014: investment banking consulting/contracting tech roles for Nomura (twice), Monis, Lehman Brothers (twice, ~10 years), Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), BarCap, Deutsche Bank, etc; mainly credit/derivatives, often from concept to production. (Some time spent on Y2K, dot-com and other retail/finance in this interval, see below.)

2002--2006: CTO/founder of Ixaris, leading the design, development and build-out of the J2EE-based EntroPay virtual credit-card system, with a (mainly-Malta-based) R&D staff of 20+ for this UK company. Ixaris had raised well over £3m of venture capital by March 2006.

2000--2001: various dot-COM projects including VP Technology for digitalRUM, a dot-com m-commerce B2B2C startup in London. Design authority and team manager from business requirements though to beta with rapidly expanding team up to about 15 staff.

2011: BP plc greenfield architecture/development on various projects including ship/cargo tracking. 1993: BP Exploration, managing complex and evolving multi-vendor distributed computing resource.

1991--1993: Technical Editor, then Editor, of Parallelogram, an international technical journal covering parallel and high-performance computing, with a world-wide circulation of approximately 6,000 as of 1992.

1990--1993: consultant to BAeSema (previously Dowty-Sema) on high-performance and open-systems technology on the largest-ever Ada projects in the world to then (over £100m) for the SSCS and SMCS frigate and nuclear-submarine weapons command-and-control systems. Handled material classified up to NATO Confidential.

1988-- : MD of ExNet Ltd. Raised £75k in seed capital whilst an undergraduate to do private research in networking and distributed operating systems. Created one of the UK's first Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

1985--1986: Personal Robots Ltd, Systems Engineer. Designed and implemented the real-time, multiprocessor, distributed robotics hardware and operating system in products featured on the BBC's "Tomorrow's World" and "Wogan". Later on contract to PRL while at university.

Education

2023-- : PhD candidate in Environment and Sustainability, University of Surrey.
1991--1994: MSc in Theoretical Computer Science (Parallel Systems), University of Edinburgh.
1986--1990: 2:1 BSc (Hons) Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, University of Edinburgh.

Sample Editorial

2007-- : Earth Notes "green" site
2007-- : various Register articles including How I built a zero energy cost, zero carbon home server and How I used Space Shuttle tech to insulate the living room.
2001: "First Person" article for New Scientist magazine.
1996-- : DHD Multimedia Gallery, pro-bono source of free multimedia with millions of visitors per year. Made extensive use of Google's AdWords and AdSense advertising programmes, as well as the networks of TribalFusion, CasaleMedia and AdBrite.
1991--1993: various articles and journalism for Parallelogram HPC/supercomputing magazine, eventually becoming Editor.
1989: "Cloning and characterization of an Escherichia coli gene, pcnB, affecting plasmid copy number": Molecular Microbiology (PubMed ID 2677604, scan).
1984: ETI (Electronics Today International): "Perpetual Pendulum" project.

Energy / Climate Change

2022-- : interim chair of Kingston Environment Forum, liasing between Royal Borough of Kingston and local green/eco community groups.
2020-- : member of Royal Borough of Kingston "Transition to a Green Economy" taskforce.
2020: patent application GB2006828.4 "Radiator Thermostatic Control" (WO2021224586A1, GB2594749A); granted UK 2594749 2022-08-31.
2013-- : OpenTRV/Radbot open-source software and hardware project to help improve heating efficiency of existing UK housing stock, eg see FOSDEM talk.
2013--2016: founding director of Kingston Community Energy Industrial and Provident Society.
2012--2014: DECC (UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change) pro bono work/advice.
2012: our house became UK SuperHome number 119, for energy/carbon savings of over 60%.
2011-- : Fieldlines renewable energy forum moderator/admin.
2009--2021: Ecotricity (and others) collaboration for the LIVE - Carbon content of the UK Grid page based on own more geeky version, and other renewable-energy visualisation work.
2007-- : earth.org.uk carbon-footprint-reduction site including live GB grid carbon intensity monitor and @EarthOrgUK Twitter feed.

Public Service

2011--2022: school community/parent governor at King Athelstan Primary School (2012--2022 Resources Committee Chair, 2017--2022 Vice-Chair of Governing Body).
2007--2008: accredited UK Election Observer.
1992-- : ExNet was one of the very first UK Internet Service Providers, to open up the market, as a public good, and continues to provide pro bono services.
2000-- : Java "Expert" in Sun's Java Community Process standards body in several areas (JSR-41, JSR-65, JSR-96) and assisted informally with their CLDC/KVM design for J2ME.

Personal

Born York, England, 1967. Numerate technophile, would-be traveller and linguist.

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Contact tel: +44 20 8296 5555; email: d@hd.org; www: http://d.hd.org/.