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Professor Dave Cliff Dave's picture

Department of Computer Science University of Bristol
The Merchant Venturers Building,
Room 3.30
Woodland Road
Bristol
BS8 1UB, UK

Phone: +44 (0) 79 77 55 22 50

Fax: +44 (0) 117 9545208

Email: dc@cs.bris.ac.uk



Vacancies:

Please note, I have no funds available to provide short-term summer internships to prospective interns from outside the UK.


Background

Prior to joining the University of Bristol in 2007, I'd held faculty posts at the University of Sussex School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences, at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and at the University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science. I'd also spent roughly half my career working as a researcher in industry: initially for Hewlett-Packard Labs, where I ended up as a Department Scientist; and latterly for Deutsche Bank London, where I was a Director/Trader in their Foreign Exchange Complex Risk Group.

From October 2005 to March 2013 I was Director of the UK Research and Training Initiative in the Science and Engineering of Large-Scale Complex IT Systems (LSCITS). This was funded by more than GBP10M of UK public funds (from EPSRC), with significant support from partners in industry and the UK public sector. Further details of the LSCITS Initiative are available at www.lscits.org.

Most of my personal research work in the ten years before I got involved in LSCITS was centered on adaptive automated trading systems for various types of markets, and on automated design of market mechanisms. I started doing this in 1995, for market-based control of ultra-large-scale data-centres. In 2001 a team at IBM showed my "ZIP" trading software beating human traders, which got the attention of various companies in the global financial markets. I've worked as a consultant with several investment banks and hedge funds.

From 2010-2012 I was one of the eight-person Lead Expert Group for the UK Government Office for Science (GO-Science) "Foresight" project investigating the future of computer trading in the financial markets. The outputs from that project are available from the GO-Science archive here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/future-of-computer-trading

From 2012-2014 I served as a lead expert witness in a major intellectual property case heard in the Chancery Division of the High Court of London. In consequence, I am significantly more acquainted with case law like Faccenda Chicken Ltd -v.- Fowler 1986 than your average computer scientist.

Research Interests

Publications, and citation indices

You can find me on Google Scholar here: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=DmIm-UMAAAAJ&hl=en

Current/Recent PhD and EngD Students

Public Engagement annd Media Appearances

In 2013 I had the pleasure of being asked to help write and present a one-hour TV documentary for the BBC called The Joy of Logic, it was first broadcast in December 2013. It was produced by Cat Gale for Wingspan Productions Ltd. Wingspan's online shop sell DVDs of the programme at very reasonmable rates. It was subsequently nominated for the 2014 Best Science and Technology Documentary Award at the Banff World Media Awards 2014 and was shortlisted for the Best Science Documentary Award and Best Newcomer Award, at the 2014 Grierson Awards.

For many years I have been a regular speaker at GCSE Science Live: events where audiences of around 1,000 schoolchildren listen to brief lectures from scientists in various fields.

Teaching