Professor Ben Azvine PhD, MBA, FIET, FITP, (DFI)

Ben is a BT Distinguished Engineer and leads BT’s global cyber security research programme. He is responsible for setting direction and strategy for Security research, identifying innovation opportunities and leading a strong international team of researcher to develop new capabilities in collaboration with industrial and academic partners.

Ben has 30 years’ experience in both academia and industry. His previous roles included leading the IT research centre and head of business intelligence & customer analytics research at BT Group Chief Technology Office. He holds a BSc in Mechanical Engineering, an MSc in Control Engineering, a PhD in Intelligent Control Systems from Manchester University and an MBA from Imperial College, London. Having held research fellowship and lectureship posts in several universities, he joined BT in 1995 to lead a research programme to develop and exploit novel Artificial Intelligence technology to support next generation IT systems. Since then he has held senior, principal, chief research scientist posts at BT’s global R&D headquarters in Adastral Park, Ipswich where he is currently based.

He has edited two books and published more than 100 scientific articles on novel application of intelligent systems. He is an inventor of 70 patent applications, has won 4 BCS awards and an IET gold medals for IT innovation, is a current holder of  a Royal Academy of Engineering visiting professorship at City and holds visiting professorship positions at the Universities of Bristol, Cranfield, Suffolk and Bournemouth. Ben is also a current fellow of Institute of Engineering and Technology (FIET) and Institute of Telecom Professionals (FITP). His current research interests include the application Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to Cyber security, protection of critical national infrastructure, data analysis and information & knowledge management. His current projects include Advanced Threat Detection and Automated response, Visual Analytics for Cyber defence, cloud & Internet security, machine learning and anomaly detection in network data and future identity and access management.