John Redford

Birthplace: Cambridge, United Kingdom 
CTO, Five AI 

“Innovating to deliver seemingly impossible solutions or performance generates persistent economic value and patents are vital to making the work secure and worthwhile. Nowhere is this more true than in the pursuit of Five’s goal to deliver safe automated driving.” 

John Redford has centred his career on creating commercially valuable leading-edge software and technology. Starting at Acorn Computers, he first worked on software for their emerging ARM processor and later became CTO. John then co-founded Element 14 and Five AI, two successful venture-funded companies. 

At Element 14, John oversaw the specification of the processor architecture, compiler and signal processing for a novel software-defined DSL chipset. He was key in commercialising Broadcom’s technology and establishing the company’s dominance in the DSL infrastructure market.  

John led the machine learning activities used in Five’s public autonomous driving trial, the largest in Europe at the time, after which Five refocused on simulation tools and the safe use of AI for self-driving vehicles. As Five’s CTO, he directs research published at numerous machine learning and robotics conferences.