Pro-Chancellor, it is my great pleasure to present Adam Leon Smith for the award of Doctor of Engineering.

Adam was born and grew up in Sheffield, where both his parents worked in education. Adam is almost an accidental computer scientist: his pre-teen years were spent coding on an Acorn BBC Master computer, as well as taking apart it and the family modem – amongst other pieces of hardware - and reassembling them to working order. Despite this and passing GCSE computing at the age of 13 Adam turned away from technology – and university – towards cooking with a view to becoming a chef. Yet, by the first day of the year 2000 – remember the concerns about Y2K and software failure? – he was testing business systems at the Norwich Union (now Aviva) insurance company, where he was rapidly pulled into the IT team.

This stint seems to have rekindled the fascination with computing, because Adam then joined a games company which took the unusual route of using the menu on a DVD to build an interactive game. The point of mentioning this is less the game and more that it marks Adam’s first engagement with standardisation as he fought with differing de facto industry standards for DVD protocols.

By the mid-noughties Adam’s focus had shifted to the finance sector, including working for Barclays and Deutsche Bank, doing quantitative analytics, risk simulation and profit and loss systems, and using machine learning on idle company desktop machines; a clunky forerunner of cloud computing. The theme of breaking and making things continued with a move to a testing consultancy – named Dragonfly – as Chief Technology Officer in 2012, where work included helping launch several of the UK “challenger” banks and modernising the UK card payments infrastructure, which both contributed to a developing reputation for being able to address complex verification problems, specifically those associated with the testing of systems involving AI technology.

The late 2010s saw a wider awareness of the emergence of AI technology coupled with a lack of awareness of the difficulty in testing it. In part to address this, Adam took the initiative to revive the then moribund British Computer Society Special Interest Group in Software Testing, while at Dragonfly he started building a team focused on data science and AI technology testing in Barcelona. It might have been a small thing at the time, but one outcome of one testing task for a ML system they had built was the identification of what is now called unwanted bias. This learning process led to engaging with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in the USA and the UK’s AI standards committee to contribute to developing technical standards to guide practitioners in how to deal with this new form of software “bug”, eventually becoming editor of the International Standards Organization (ISO) technical report on Bias in AI systems and AI aided decision making, its successor technical specification and the international standard on a Quality model for AI systems. Adam now works full time on standardization, contributing to many of the dozens of AI-related standards under development at ISO, as well as having a key role with CEN/CENELEC (the European Committees for Standardisation) in writing standards for the EU’s AI Act.

Pro-Chancellor, in recognition of his impact on testing and quality in the software industry, his contribution to the computing profession through the British Computer Society and above all his work internationally in standards making, which in sum enable entrepreneurship across multiple economies, I present to you Adam Leon Smith, who is eminently worthy to receive the Degree of Doctor of Engineering, honoris causa.