Gordon Hart Email & Phone Number

Bristol

My time with this business has led me to particularly focus upon innovation in the development of new product concepts that employ advanced technologies of low maturity. This demands that I not only posses the ability to recognise the role that very new technology could play in potential future products, but also employ the formal tools required to logically bring a concept to life with the minimum of programme risk.This process requires that I attack a problem on two distinct fronts. I must tackle the technical risk that a new concept presents by implementing a programme of technology assessment and experimentation. To this end I employ rational problem solving tools such as TRIZ. Simultaneously I must address the market risk that a new product concept imposes by searching for the appropriate customer and validating the value of a new product to that market segment. Despite working within a large corporation, I found that acting as a small technology start-up during this search phase is very much to my advantage. Therefore tool sets such as Lean Startup are very effective in managing the risk that a new idea may present to both our internal and external stakeholders.This role demands that I am adept at the design, facilitation and analysis of innovation workshops. These skills allow me to exercise the skills and experience of a wide range of potential delegates, from the training of large groups of new starters to exclusive gatherings of executive board members to engagement with senior members of the armed forces. I employ a wide range of formal tools to support the genesis and development of innovation, which I have gathered into sufficient material to publish a text on the topic.

Bristol

To succeed in this role I had to communicate well with all departments within the Company. I needed to understand the Systems Design process in detail. I needed to have a good understanding of the science and engineering employed by all of our technical departments. I needed to fully understand the requirements of the customer. I employed a wide range of concept development techniques and tools to solve complex engineering problems and to proposed appropriate technology to provide those solutions. I stalked the corridors of trade fairs and conferences to discover the latest in disruptive technology. I negotiated with suppliers to not only understand how their technology works, but also to understand how our businesses might collaborate and must understand the political climate in which we work. Finally, I had to employ my Big Data skills to collate all of this technology together into a comprehensive and easily accessible database of technology.

Bristol

This role combined the objectives of design engineering with the tools of games development. The objective was twofold.The Company develops complex airborne systems, with each sub-component developed by a team of specialists in each field. As components matured it was my task to integrate these sub-systems together to demonstrate their combined operation. Where components did not exist, it was my role to develop simulated analogues of the missing component to allow the rest of the system to be demonstrated and tested together. This not only allowed the collaborating teams to observe their component operating in the wider system, but this perspective also helped to drive the design process itself. Where systems were not mature at all, for example in the very early concept stage, it was my role to create simulations and presentations of these concepts in their entirety. As the Company develops complex engineering systems it has a need to illustrate the operation of these systems to a wide range of customers. It was my task to build working simulations of the product, employing what gaming technology, computer graphics, animations and props I needed to demonstrate to the customer how the final product will perform in the wider environment. This not only demanded that I possess the engineering and software skills to develop these 'Serious Games', but also required strong presentation skills to tie all of this live theatre together into a concise coherent story.

Bristol, England, United Kingdom

I originally started teaching with the Open University as a way of improving my presentation and teaching skills. I have now been teaching at the Open University for many years and persist as I find it a most rewarding experience. I teach a foundation course, and the students come from all walks of life, despite the common goal of starting their journey into Mathematics. It is this variety that is so rewarding, as I learn as much from them as they do from me.

Working with Doctor Foster was my opportunity to really understand and employ Big Data. The NHS is a very large and complex system. To manage this system policy makers need data. They need to be able to ask questions of this huge organisation and receive clear concise answers. It was my role to provide these answers. In this role I had access to the entire NHS patient database. One billion records described every patient, every procedure and every outcome throughout the entire NHS for a decade. If a policy maker needed me to slice this data to ask a very specific question, I could develop sophisticated queries, written in SQL, to provide those answers. Furthermore, once the answer had been conjured from the database it was not enough to simply provide the data in its raw form. I therefore also had to employ sophisticated mapping tools and illustration techniques to interpret these results for a non-expert audience.

This role encompassed an attempt to optimize airline operations using mathematical means. This role required me to develop novel algorithms to describe and implement the optimization of aircraft payload disposition using the Linear Programming which was then translated into software using C++.This research was developed under severe time pressures. However, it not only produced a sophisticated mathematical tool but also resulted in software that provides a robust and practical solution. To produce such a robust tool was a primary concern as even small errors, inefficiencies or failures can translate into a considerable loss of revenue.Skilled and expensive operators can carry out the payload disposition manually. Therefore, to support this research I had to communicate effectively with these operators to understand their role and understand both the formal and intuitive techniques that they use to create an efficient payload disposition. My attempts to translate this intuitive skill into mathematical algorithm was a fascinating role, as it combined sophisticated mathematical and computational research with an understanding of the human operator's intuition to create a revenue critical product.This project began with an entirely blank page and required me to spend two years developing a solution from scratch and translating this algorithm into C++ on a Unix environment. As a result I engaged in the full life cycle of this software, from conceptual design, to the incorporation of the algorithm into the wider environment, to testing and eventual delivery to the customer.

Research encompassed topics such as the targeting and tracking of ground and airborne contacts, mission management and decision support, terrain following flight control, weapon flight simulation, trajectory analysis, computer graphics and data visualisation, GPS mapping, stealthy navigation, and the occasional database application. Departures from basic C++ include embedded coding, VC++, WinCE, Delphi, FORTRAN and Matlab.

New Scotland Yard.

This brief contract involved me in social research to determine the cause and prevention of hate crimes. I was contracted by the Metropolitan Police Service to aid their hate crimes social research team by making the vast quantity of data which details those crimes motivated by prejudice more manageable and to provide software to expose important data structures. This project required that I write software in Visual Basic to read the Metropolitan Police propriety database and restructure this data.

With Connaught I was mainly involved in the construction of web resources using Java Servlets, JSP, Oracle, SQL and XML.

CSK Software develops market data systems for the financial industry. My duties concentrated upon the construction of Internet based services to deliver market data to client's web browsers. This role in the financial sector began with the construction of web resources in HTML, Javascript, ASP, Perl and Visual Basic. In addition I developed Flash movies that contacted market data servers via Perl to deliver market data to web browsers. However, my role primarily involved the development of Java applets designed to accept and display market data feeds.

After four years of high performance computing I was offered the opportunity to carry out research into the exploitation of Internet resources in the scientific research environment. The objective of this project was two-fold - to deliver high performance distributed computing resources via Internet links, and to investigate the communications tools available to ease the exchange of data and ideas between researchers. Java servers and applets were constructed to provide communication resources, Perl and Tcl/Tk were exploited to provide Internet based GUIs to large-scale prediction software and an investigation into streaming media was initiated. I also constructed on-line chat rooms, whiteboard and document repositories using Java, HTML, Perl and Tcl/Tk. This project therefore provided an excellent stepping-stone from an academic to a commercial environment.

This role provided many opportunities to engage in real engineering design and manufacturing projects, and allowed considerable contact with very experienced engineers. In addition, I was presented with sole responsibility for the design and implementation of their BS7750 Environmental Management System.

Doctor Of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Computational Fluid Dynamics, Phd

Activities and Societies: Gymnastics, Jiu Jitsu

Master'S Degree, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Distinction

Activities and Societies: Jiu Jitsu, Gymnastics.

Bachelor Of Engineering (Beng), Aerospace Engineering

Activities and Societies: Fencing.