Martin Hamilton

I'm a widely published writer, public speaker, strategist and change agent. My work focusses on helping people and organisations to understand the impact of near future trends and technologies.

I've worked extensively with senior teams in a wide variety of organisations to help them develop their innovation strategy, and supported a large number of startups to scale up their business. I've worked in and around the intersection of research and industry for some thirty years, doing everything from researching next generation Internet protocols to running a supercomputer centre.

Career

Hamilton published original research on how IP multicast could be applied to Internet resource discovery. such as allowing massively parallel searching of online databases. He has been active in a number of Internet Engineering Task Force working groups, ultimately co-authoring RFC 2219 which established the "www." convention for naming websites.

Hamilton has worked on web caching, including setting up an online community for UK universities experimenting with the technique to make the best use of scarce bandwidth as the Web began to take off in the mid 1990s. Hamilton was technical lead on the JANET Web Cache Service, which provided a national network level cache facility for UK universities and colleges. His contributions included modifications to the Linux kernel and Squid web proxy software.

Hamilton co-wrote the ROADS software for eLib, the UK electronic libraries programme[8]. This was used by a number of subject gateway services which provided a Yahoo Directory style view of Internet resources curated by staff with expert domain knowledge.

Hamilton would go on to develop an interest in cloud computing, co-founding a series of Google for Education user group conferences which were held in Loughborough , Portsmouth and York. He also worked as Centre Manager for HPC Midlands, an award winning supercomputing centre for research and industry.

Hamilton led Jisc's innovation lab, working as a Futurist and steering the direction of the company's overall R&D activities. These included surveys on research infrastructures and a series of horizon scanning reports.

In January 2020 Hamilton left Jisc to start his own digital innovation consulting practice.

Public engagement

Hamilton has been a judge for the Times Higher Education Awards and the Edtech 50 Awards and has presented extensively about the potential of emerging technologies in research and education. In January 2019 he gave evidence to the British Parliament's Education Select Committee on the role of technology in the classroom, stating that: "If we’re going to throw technology into education anywhere, it should be at literacy and numeracy", and noting the importance of investment in digital infrastructure such as Wi-Fi that underpins more sophisticated education technology applications.