Speakers
Sylvia Lu
Ken Cowley
Philip Steele
Speaker Session
Does complexity encourage or deter innovation? Broadcast, energy, rail.
Sylvia Lu is an award-winning Chartered Engineer and Non-Executive Director. Sylvia has over 16 years of experience in the Telecom industry for four mobile generations with semiconductor vendors. Sylvia provides guidance on the impact of emerging technologies on products and corporate strategy, influences global standards, accelerates the adoption of new technologies, and provides independent advice to industry and policy stakeholders.
Sylvia serves on several national and global industry Boards: she is an elected board director of CW (Cambridge Wireless), and serves on the Advisory Board of UKTIN, which provides independent advice on the telecoms sector, champions the opportunities in telecoms research, development, and innovation for the UK, and helps UKTIN provide impartial input to government. She also served on the Board of 5G-ACIA (5G Alliance for Connected Industries and Automation), joined forces with global industry stakeholders to influence 5G development and deployment in line with industrial imperatives to accelerate Industry 4.0.
She holds a first-class Electronic Engineering degree, a Master of Science degree in Communications and Signal Processing from the University of Bristol. She graduated with a Distinction from the University of Oxford in PGDip Strategy & Innovation, and an Executive MBA degree from the University of Cambridge. Sylvia is also an artist.
Ken has spent fifteen years in railway communications including design and installation of two of the first trackside dedicated broadband networks in the UK, on West Coast Mainline and Heathrow Express, and a combined signalling and voice communications network for Denver Transit, Colorado. He is currently lead architect and technical manager for the mmWave trackside network being built to deliver multipurpose broadband connectivity to Caltrain services in the Bay Area and for the Internet On Board system, including trackside radio network, being delivered as part of the new Réseau Express Métropolitain in Montreal. He is also technical lead on the integration of current generation LEO and HAP connectivity into Nomad’s aggregating router technology.
Phil is the Future Technologies Evangelist at Octopus Energy, leading the research & development team, and applying cutting edge technology to develop new innovation across the whole of the energy chain.
Some of the tech-led innovation Phil is working on includes the Octopus Agile tariff, making the grid more flexible to cope with the realities of intermittent renewable generation, and Powerloop, a project that could turn millions of electric cars into mini battery packs to supply the grid when renewables energy is in short supply.
Phil joined Octopus Energy following the acquisition of his entech startup nCube, a pioneer in IOT platform development, with award-winning tech that acts as a bridge to connect IOT devices, using Z-Wave, WiFi, Zigbee, Bluetooth and LAN.
Prior to nCube, Phil helped launch a mobile advertising startup in Canada, and delivered numerous innovations at O2 such as messaging, pre-pay & mobile internet. He regularly subjects his wife and three children to trialling out his latest gadgets in energy tech.
