Innovation Director
Dr James Luke
James joined Roke in January 2021 as Innovation Director. With over 25 years’ experience delivering artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to National Security and Defence clients, he has held several key leadership roles, including CTO for UK Public Sector in IBM Global Business Services, Chief Architect for IBM Watson Tools and the lead architect for the IBM Text Analytics Group.
As Innovation Director he is responsible for driving investment, development and exploitation of innovation activities, balancing focus on customer campaigns with exploratory work to build opportunities, skills and intellectual property for Roke’s future. One of his key focuses is to support current and future product development in domains including cyber, electronic warfare, counter-measures, agile software and situational awareness technologies.
James read for his first degree in Electronic Engineering Systems at the Royal Naval Engineering College (RNEC), working on radar, communications and electronic warfare. After leaving the Royal Navy, James worked on data analysis in Formula 1 and witnessed the importance of being the first to exploit cutting edge technologies.
In 2003, James completed his PhD with the Image, Speech and Intelligent Systems Group of the University of Southampton, and researched the application of intelligent agents to detect previously unseen computer viruses.
He is passionate about artificial intelligence (AI) and, specifically, about using AI to solve real world problems. As an experienced programmer, in recent years he has focussed on natural language understanding and extracting meaningful data from documents. James is also an accomplished inventor with over 20 patents in AI (and several more pending!).
