Dr. T. de Sousa is Head of Sector, Internet of the Future, in the Directorate-General Information Society, European Commission. Previously he headed the sector Mobile and Wireless beyond 3G, the largest strategic objective of the IST Programme, funding leading research on future telecommunications systems. He coordinated the Broadband Access for all strategic objective in the Information Society Programme (IST), with the aim of creating a cheaper, faster and more reliable internet. He has been instrumental in the pursuing of a Broadband Europe, with emphasis on alternate technologies such as power line communications. He received his undergraduate degree from the University of Luanda, Angola and his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Missouri at Columbia (USA). He has an extensive background on telecommunications network planning and design with several multinational companies, including Rockwell International, Nortel and Verizon. He served as an ITU consultant in BanglaDesh and received two IEEE Outstanding Service Awards. He is co-author of the book "Network Systems" and a former Rotary Foundation Fellow.

John has over 20 years of experience in science policy management. He is currently Head of the Digital Economy, a cross-research council programme aimed a realising the transformational impact that Information Technology can have on society, business and government. Over the current spending review period the programme will invest over £100M in research that is driven by user need, bringing together researchers in technology with the arts and social sciences. Prior to his current position John was Head of the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council’s Information and Communications Technology Programme and has also worked in the Life Science Interface and Engineering Programme areas.

Professor John Polak is Professor of Transport Demand and Director of the Centre for Transport Studies at Imperial College London and is also Research Director of the UK Transport Research Centre. He is a mathematician by background with over 25 years experience in transport research and teaching, specialising in the areas of mathematical and statistical transport modelling and analysis. He is a past President of the International Association for Travel Behaviour Research and a past Council Member of the Association for European Transport. He is a member of the EPSRC Peer Review College and serves on the US Transportation Research Board’s Committee on Traveller Behaviour and Values and on the editorial advisory boards of a number of leading international journals. Much of his recent research has been concerned with the collection, analysis and interpretation of very large scale real-time datasets related to operational, behavioural, attitudinal and environmental aspects of transport.

John Williams is Professor of Health Services Research at the School of Medicine, Swansea University. He is also a Consultant Gastroenterologist at Neath Port Talbot Hospital. From 2002-07 he was Director of R & D for Wales.

His research interests include the development and evaluation of new models of service delivery, particularly in gastroenterology, and the greater involvement of patients in the process. He has a long-standing interest in improving the information systems that support the delivery of health care, and set-up and directs the Health Informatics Unit at the Royal College of Physicians of London, where he evaluated the use of routinely collected data to support appraisal and revalidation, and has been developing consensus-based standards for the structure and content of patient records to improve patient care and the contribution of operational data to research. He has researched the use of routinely collected data in support of large-scale, randomised controlled trials, the clinical- and cost-effectiveness of nurses undertaking gastrointestinal endoscopy, new models of service delivery in endoscopy, and the feasibility of capturing patient-focused outcomes routinely when patients are seen. He is currently exploring the Grand Challenges in information-driven health care, a scoping project funded by the ESPRC.

Prof Williams in his Keynote will focus on his vision of Healthcare Information Systems. The introduction of sophisticated information and communications technology into health care is not a simple task, as demonstrated by the difficulties encountered by the Department of Health’s multi-billion programme for the NHS. The challenges faced will be discussed, drawing on recent reviews including the House of Commons Select Committee on the Electronic Patient Record, the House of Commons NHS IT Policy Review, and Research Council-funded programmes relating to information and communications technologies. Opportunities for cross-disciplinary collaboration will be explored and the implications for radical change in the delivery of health care.

Iain Buchan is Professor of Public Health Informatics and Director of the Northwest Institute for Bio-Health Informatics, at the University of Manchester, and an honorary Consultant in Public Health in Salford in the English National Health Service (NHS). He has backgrounds in clinical medicine, public health and computational statistics, and runs a multi-disciplinary team bridging health sciences, computer science, social science, management science and mathematics. His work centres on the research and development of informatics methods for understanding and improving the public's health, partly focusing on applications in obesity and metabolic health. He works closely with the English NHS to develop population-based e-infrastructure to enable both: large-scale, realistically-complex epidemiology; and future e-health interventions.

Monika Büscher is senior lecturer in the Centre for Mobilities Research at the Sociology Department and ImaginationLancaster at Lancaster University. Her ethnographic studies include investigations of mobile work practices in art and design, healthcare, software development, event management and emergency response. Through close collaboration with professionals and designers her work contributes to innovation in these fields of work. This often requires experimental realization of (partial) futures, enabling 'ethnographies of change'.

Professor Zabih Ghassemlooy CEng, Fellow of IET, SM-IEEE: Received BSc (Hons) degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from the Manchester Metropolitan University in 1981, and MSc and PhD in Optical Communications from UMIST in 1984 and 1987, respectively. 1987-88 he was a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at City University, London. 1988 joined Sheffield Hallam University as a Lecturer, becoming a Reader in 1995 and a Professor in Optical Communications in 1997. 2004 joined the University of Northumbria at Newcastle as an Associate Dean for Research in the School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences. He was a visiting professor at the Ankara University, Turkey and Hong-Kong Polytechnic University, and is currently a visiting Professor at the Technological University of Malaysia. He is the Editor-in-Chief of The Mediterranean Journals of Computers and Networks, and Electronics and Communications. Has supervised a large number of PhD students and has published over 320 papers. Since 2009 he is the Chairman of the IEEE UK/IR Communications Chapter.

Gary Graham has been researching, in a broad sense the area of supply chain management and the creative industries for 15 years. He has co-authored two books on the internet and its influence on the creative sector. His initial research focus involved qualitative case study research investigating the transmission mechanisms, by which sub-cultural creativity and styles (music, fashion, writings etc) are taken through the supply chain to become in essence a ‘commodity’ creative product for mass distribution. This work has been extended to investigate the incorporation of the internet into the operations of regional newspapers. The unit of analyses being focused upon includes the convergence of online and printed newspaper activity together with the issue of consumer interactivity in the supply chain. His current work involves developing a hierarchical regression model exploring the predictor influences of interactivity within regional newspapers.

Azeem Majeed is Professor of Primary Care and Head of the Department of Primary Care & Social Medicine at Imperial College London. He is also Associate Director (Primary Care) for the UK National Diabetes Research Network; and Co-Director of the NW London Comprehensive Local Research Network. Professor Majeed qualified at the University of Wales College of Medicine in Cardiff, Wales and is accredited in both General Practice and Public Health Medicine. Professor Majeed’s research interests are in chronic disease management, particularly diabetes & cardiovascular disorders; health policy and the organisation and delivery of health car; the use of information technology and health informatics to improve health care. He has over 200 publications in medical and scientific journals, and has a acted as an adviser to the UK Office for National Statistics and the Department of Health .

Dr. Maziar Nekovee is a senior research scientist at BT’s Mobility Research Centre, where he leads research on cognitive radio and dynamic/cooperative spectrum access for next generation wireless systems. Other research areas include wireless vehicular communications networks for future intelligent transport, and theory and applications of complex social networks. Prior to joining BT he held research posts at Imperial College and Queen Mary College in London. He received his MSc. in Electrical Engineering (cum laude) from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and his PhD in theoretical and computational Physics from the University of Nijmegen, also in the Netherlands. Dr. Nekovee is the author of over 60 papers in international journals and refereed conferences, and the holder of several patens in communication systems and networks. Dr Nekovee is a guest co-editor of a special issue of ACM/Springer Journal on Mobile Networks and Applications (MONET) on Cognitive Radios, and was TPC Co-Chair of the Second International Conference on Cognitive Radio Oriented Wireless Networks and Communications (CROWNCOM 2007). He is currently co-editing a book on “Cognitive Radio Communications and Networks: Principle and Practice”, which is planned for publication in 2010.
Dr Nekovee is a recipient of a prestigious Industry Fellowship from the Royal Society for his work on high-fidelity simulation of very large scale wireless networks, and an Honorary Senior Fellow at the University College London.

Mike has worked at the University of York since 1964 and is now Emeritus Professor of Mathematics. For many years Mike was Director of the York Network Control Group and then a director of the Networks and Nonlinear Dynamics Group within the Department of Mathematics. Mike has worked since 1974 on creating mathematical models of transport which include control and also allow or positively help the design of effective congestion-reduction strategies for urban networks. In 2007 Mike was presented with the Robert Herman Lifetime Achievement Award by the Informs (The Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Transportation Science & Logistics Society; for fundamental and sustained contributions in Transportation Science and Logistics.

Dr. Shi Zhou is a Lecturer of the Department of Computer Science of University College London. He is a holder of The Royal Academy of Engineering/EPSRC Research Fellowship. His research interests are in characterising and modelling complex networks in a wide range of domains, with an emphasis on communication and information networks, such as the Internet and WWW. He reported the rich-club phenomenon in the Internet and introduced the positive-feedback preference (PFP) model which is regarded as one of the most advanced Internet topology generators.