Speaker Bio
Professor Joe Butler is an experienced technology focused public policy and strategy leader with roles spanning government, regulatory and technology innovation contexts, as well as having worked in technology innovation in industry. This includes as the Chief Scientific Adviser and Director for Telecommunication policy in the UK government department responsible for Digital & AI, as Digital Infrastructure lead at the UK National Infrastructure Commission, as a policy director in the UK’s economic competition regulator Ofcom, and as the CTO for the UK radio spectrum and CTO in one of the government national technology transfer organisations.
In his current role as CTO and exec board member of Digital Catapult he works across technology transfer and innovation with a focus on significant challenges and opportunities facing the UK’s economy and society. He leads an interdisciplinary team of 90 covering areas including AI and data, Quantum, future networks and IoT, extended reality and the metaverse. Recent interventions include BridgeAI, a £100M intervention to support AI adoption in key high value sectors where adoption remains low, establishing the UK Telecoms Innovation Network (with a membership of around 5000 academic, industry and public institutions), partnering with Ofcom and DSIT to establish the UK’s SONIC Labs centre focused on supporting open networking based approaches into the UK telecommunications market, and establishing two Advanced Media Production facilities, enabling skills and broadening access within the creative industries.
Joe is an industrial professor in the University of Bristol’s SMART Internet laboratory, focused on working across technologies to benefit future hi tech sectors in the UK. Previously Joe worked in industry in a number of AI startups and scaleups.