Rick Robinson

I’m an Executive Architect at IBM responsible for the development and delivery of Smarter City solutions for IBM’s customers in the UK and Europe. I’m a member of the UK Government’s Smart Cities Forum; a Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce; a member of the Academy of Urbanism; and a contributor to UBM’s Future Cities community, who included me in their list of the “Top 20 leaders in urbanization“, and the Sustainable Cities Collective.

I’m heavily involved in IBM’s project in Sunderland to deliver a City Cloud; and in Birmingham I’m a member of the Smart City Commission, a Director of Innovation Birmingham and the chair of the Digital Working Group for Birmingham Science City.

I’m a member of Advisory Board’s for the Department for International Development; the World Cities Network; the British Standards Institute’s Smart Cities programme; the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Aston University; the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham; and the Doctoral Training Centre for Complexity Science at the University of Warwick.

In previous roles for IBM I’ve been responsible for strategy and first-of-a-kind project delivery in areas such as social media, service-oriented architecture and distributed computing. I hold a PhD in the physics of superconducting devices from the University of Birmingham, and am a visiting Research Fellow at WMG at the University of Warwick where my interests include dynamic supply chains, regional economic development and healthcare technology.

I live in Birmingham, UK, with my wife and young son, and wish I had more time for photography, cookery, music, science fiction and crosswords.

You can connect with me on Twitter where I’m @dr_rick, or contact me through Linked-In where I’ll respond to connection requests from people I know, or that are accompanied by a message that starts a meaningful discussion.