Join us on Tuesday 30th June at 6:30pm as Club Chairman Mike Beesley interviews Dr. John Manley, High Sheriff of The County of The City of Bristol over a glass of wine, or two!
This event does require a pre-registration, therefore please click here to register your attendance. Please note, registration closes 24 hours before the event. Upon registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing the link to join in the webinar.
In order to be able to attend this event, you will also need to have a Zoom account.
Introducing Dr. John Manley, High Sheriff of The County of The City of Bristol
Dr. John Manley, originally from Colchester, came to Bristol in the mid 70s to read Chemistry, followed by a PhD in Quantum Chemistry. After post-docs in Milan and Toronto, he jumped to Artificial Intelligence with a post-doc in Speech Recognition at Sussex.
Hewlett-Packard opened their European long-range Research Labs, the first outside Silicon Valley, in 1985. John returned to Bristol to join HP Labs and stayed for 28 years, retiring as the Laboratory Director of Cloud Computing. Over those 28 years his groups carried out next-generation massive-scale systems research from Knowledge Base Management Systems to management of the global telecommunications network, from the convergence of the telecoms network with the Internet to the emergence of the Web and the Cloud. HP Labs Bristol built some of the very earliest prototypes of Utility/Grid/Cloud Computing, including the first CGI film rendered in the Cloud, and the first experiments in market-based Cloud use. Interest in High-performance Computing led to collaborations with Dreamworks on CGI rendering (Shrek2, Madagascar,…), with Williams F1 on CFD (computational fluid mechanics), with Schlumberger on oil field reservoir simulations and investment banks on CDO optimization. The next step was to augment the Net + the Web + the Cloud with the ability to sense (smell, taste, touch, hear and see) the world and the ability to change the state of the world with actuators. John sat on/chaired several advisory boards in Cloud/Grid computing, high-performance networking, quantum computing, large-scale complex IT systems and technology incubators. The CERN Grid Advisory Board was a particularly fascinating time.
John was a Trustee of Bristol University for nine years, where he chaired the University IT Committee and sat on the Audit Committee. He was a Trustee of St George’s Bristol and President of the Anchor Society. He is a Visiting Professor at UWE in the Faculty of Business and Law, and a Freeman of the City of London. In March John became High Sheriff of the County of the City of Bristol.
John has been a member of the Clifton Club since 2000, introduced by Tom Barrington. He has been a Clifton Apostle since the inaugural meeting and is a less than reliable attendee of the CC Choir. He organizes some cycle trips for the Club, sometimes opening up less well-known parts of the Bristol region. Cooking and Italian food, and (classical/jazz) piano music and European cities are particular interests. An interest in the chemistry of wine has not yet had the attention it deserves.