Dai Clegg
Senior Associate and director of open-source software projects
Dai is a specialist in big data, database and data modelling. He has spent all the 30-plus years of his working life in the computer industry, in public and private sector companies including many years’ experience consulting, teaching and developing software products at Oracle and IBM, and as part of management teams shaping the direction of highly successful and innovative UK and US data start-ups.
Over the years, Dai has garnered wide experience in a range of technical and management roles in software product development, marketing and service delivery. In product development, he has performed all the major roles (from developer to director) for a number of globally distributed products. In service delivery, he has worked with clients in a variety of industries (e.g. CSFB, Astra Zeneca, CERN, Kellogg’s, and British Gas). In marketing, he has built global brands from start-up to multi-million dollar revenue streams.
Dai has been working with databases since the early 1980s. He has been an innovator in CASE tooling for database application design and code generation, a member of the team that designed the Universal Modeling Language (UML) and went on to pioneer SOA and business process automation based on executable UML models, and an evangelist for the value of managing and analysing all kinds of big data.
Dai is a published author of texts on software project management, an international speaker at technology conferences and a guest lecturer at British universities. He has a BSc in Mathematics from the University of Birmingham and an MSc in Computer Science from Birkbeck, University of London.
Pursuing his long-held concern for under-developed economies, Dai directs Evidence for Development’s open-source software projects. He won the inaugural IBM Netezza IDEA award for his vision of a long-term, pan-southern Africa analytic database capable of measuring and predicting the effects of climate change on vulnerable populations, and hopes that Evidence for Development will one day deliver this vision.
Selected EfD blog posts
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16th June 2023
Can Machine Learning be used to help rural communities adapt to Climate Change?
William Shields, Celia Petty & Dai Clegg Evidence-for-Development (EfD) aims to reduce poverty by improving the quality and effectiveness of livelihood information available to decision makers at every level, from local to global, and to researchers working across multiple disciplines . Focusing currently on sub-Saharan Africa, EfD combines high tech innovation with on-the-ground experience. We...
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23rd November 2017
How new technologies can make a difference to rural smallholder farmers.
Some of you may have seen this piece on the BBC about “How missing weather data is a 'life and death' issue”. It’s about tech start-up Kukua, and the weather stations they have installed in Tanzania to help provide local commercial farmers with better forecasts. Kukua is a business with a rather unusual business model:...
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9th January 2014
Big data, climate change and developing economies: predictive modeling for improved lives
I did my first, and possibly last, Ignite talk at Strata London recently. If you don’t know the format it goes like this: 5 minutes, 20 slides; the slides automatically advance every 15 seconds and you have to tell your story and finish on time. The story I was telling wasn’t about Acunu, nor even...