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Dave Cliff, Professor at University of Bristol

Dave Cliff

Biography: Dave Cliff

Dave Cliff has worked at the University of Sussex, at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, at Hewlett-Packard Labs Bristol, at Deutsche Bank's London Foreign-Exchange Complex Risk Group, at the University of Southampton, and from July 2007 at the University of Bristol where he is Professor of Computer Science. He is also a founder of Syritta Algorithmics Ltd, a technology development and consultancy company. In October 2005 Cliff was appointed Director of a £14m five-year UK research consortium, addressing issues in the science and engineering of Large-Scale Complex IT Systems. He is author or co-author on over 70 academic publications, inventor or co-inventor on 15 patents; and he has undertaken advisory and consultancy work for a number of major companies and for the UK Government. He's given well over 100 invited keynote lectures and seminars; and he and his work have frequently been featured both in the press and on TV and radio.

Twitter: @davecliff

Presentation: The inevitability of failure

Track: Schadenfreude - War Stories / Time: Thursday 10:20 - 11:10 / Location: Churchill Auditorium

If you're involved in a large-scale complex project, one that pushes the state of the art, is failure inevitable? In this talk, that draws on experiences in the high-frquency trading technology of the financial markets, accidents in the space program, and looking after a pet rabbit, I'll argue that there is one particularly nasty thing to look out for: normalization of deviance.