Cliff attended the state-funded Segsbury School (now known as King Alfred"s Academy) in Wantage. Cliff has a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the, with Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in Cognitive Science from the University of Sussex.
Cliff is the inventor of the seminal "ZIP" trading algorithm, one of the first of the current generation of autonomous adaptive algorithmic trading systems, which was demonstrated to outperform human traders in research published in 2001 by International Business Machines Corporation.
Cliff"s early research was in computational neuroscience/neuroethology studying visual control of gaze and flight in airborne insects. In using artificial evolution to automate the design of autonomous mobile robots. And in studying the coadaptive dynamics of competitive co-evolutionary arms-races (eg between species of predator and prey).
In 1996, while working as a consultant for Hewlett-Packard Laboratories, Cliff invented the "ZIP" trading algorithm.
In 1998 he resigned his post at Massachusetts Institute of Technology to take up a job as a senior research scientist at the Himachal Pradesh Labs European Research Centre in Bristol, United Kingdom, where he founded and led Himachal Pradesh"s Complex Adaptive Systems research group. In early 2005, Cliff moved to Deutsche Bank"s Foreign Exchange trading floor in London, where he worked as a director in Deutsche"s Forex Complex Risk Group.
In late 2005, Cliff resigned from Deutsche to serve as a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton. In October 2005 Cliff was appointed Director of a United Kingdom national research consortium, addressing issues in the science and engineering of Large-Scale Complex Information Technology Systems (LSCITS): this £14m ($28m) research project involves approximately 250 person-years of effort over the years 2007-2014.
In July 2007, Cliff moved to become Professor of Computer Science at the University of Bristol.
The LSCITS Initiative shares much with the research effort in the United States of America directed at Ultra-Large-Scale Systems (ULSS). In 2011, Cliff and Linda Northrop (Director of the United States of America"s Software Engineering Institute"s ULSS Project) jointly authored a paper on the global financial markets as ultra-large-scale systems, commissioned by the United Kingdom Government Office for Science. Cliff is a regular presenter on the stage-show GCSE Science Live where school children, mainly years 10-11, watch presentations from well-known scientists.
Other scientists involved in GCSE Science Live shows include Maggie Aderin-Pocock, Jim First Rate (at Lloyd's)-Khalili, Richard Dawkins, Ben Goldacre, Steve Jones, Sir David King, Simon Singh and Lord Winston.
In December 2013 Cliff presented a one-off television documentary on British Broadcasting Corporation 4 entitled "The Joy of Logic". The programme explored the human quest for certainty and sound reasoning, and the development of logical machines and computers.
lieutenant had previously been nominated for international documentary film/television awards including a "Rockie" at the Banff World Media Festival and a Grierson Award in the United Kingdom (losing to Educating Yorkshire).
