David T. Cliff (born 1966) is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Bristol and was formerly the Director of the UK Large-scale Complex IT Systems (LSCITS) Initiative. 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 IBM. He is also the inventor on multiple international patents from the early 2000s concerning his invention hpDJ, the world's first fully automated disk-jockey (DJ) system for electronic dance music, the precursor to present-day DJ automation tools such as Traktor. Education Cliff was educated Segsbury School, a state school in Wantage. Cliff has a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Leeds, with Master of Science and PhD degrees in Cognitive Science from the University of Sussex. Career and research Cliff spent the first seven years of his career working as an academic, initially at the University of Sussex UK and then as an associate professor in the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Cambridge USA. 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 (e.g. between species of predator and prey). In 1996, while working as a consultant for Hewlett Packard Labs, Cliff invented the "ZIP" trading algorithm. In 1998 he resigned his post at MIT to take up a job as a senior research scientist at the HP Labs European Research Centre in Bristol, UK, where he founded and led HP's Complex Adaptive Systems research group. In 1999, Cliff (who described himself in a 2001 press interview as "a very bad amateur DJ") invented hpDJ, the world's first fully automated DJ system for electronic dance music (EDM), which automatically generated a serial play-order for a set of EDM tracks, and then did automated beat-detection, time-stretching/compression, and phase-alignment to create "seamless" continuous beat-matched mixes from one track into another. In this sense, hpDJ was the precursor to present-day DJ beat-matching mix automation tools such as those found in Traktor. The hpDJ project was the subject of multiple international patents invented or co-invented by Cliff over 2001–2005, and included patents for a wrist-mounted device which