Dr.  Stephen Allpress is an  internationally recognised expert in CDMA cellular communications and named inventor on 45 US patents. He was one of the earliest pioneers of the application of CDMA technology to cellular communication, through his Ph.D studies at the University of Bristol.   

He joined Bell Laboratories in the USA in 1993 and there he went on to contribute to the standardisation of IS-95B and cdma2000, filing several essential patents. Through his research activities he patented a number of key inventions, many of which were critical to AT&T's cellular infrastructure products. From his deep knowledge of CDMA technology, he singlehandedly developed the architecture, signal processing and communication theory used in the early ASIC devices in Lucent's CDMA base-stations. That these complex devices were also "first-pass" successes is entirely attributable to the rigorous engineering application of Dr. Allpress. More than 5 million of these devices were shipped and provided a 25% capacity increase over competitive technology (due to the algorithmic innovations made by Dr. Allpress). At Broadcom, he developed advanced algorithms and silicon architectures for EDGE/GSM devices, as well as writing VHDL code to implement the equalisers used in Broadcom's WiFi products and contributing his innovations to the 802.11g specification.   

In 2001, he returned to the UK as Chief Research Fellow at Toshiba and here he worked closely with the University of Bristol on collaborative projects for future wireless LANs involving MIMO techniques. In 2002, he co-founded Icera Inc., together with Stan Boland and Simon Knowles. As an executive board member of Icera he was instrumental in raising over $250M in funding over a 9 year period, for the ambitious venture to create the world's first entirely software-based cellular modem. As Chief Technology Officer he led and developed the software architecture and high-complexity algorithms required to implement the world's highest performing HSDPA and LTE technology on Icera's soft-modem platforms (as validated by independent research), as well as setting the technical roadmap for the entire company of 300 people. He has filed many critical patents during his time at Icera which were used to provide performance leadership in all of Icera's products.   

His engineering depth allowed him to set high-level strategic direction for the company, to implement complex signal processing algorithms and unravel intricate system engineering issues. Icera Inc. was acquired in June 2011 for $435M by Nvidia Corp., providing a valuable return on investment for both investors and staff on this 10-year old venture. He served as a Senior Vice President at NVIDIA Corp for 4 years before leaving to co-found his second startup, Five AI Inc, which develops software for autonomous vehicles, and was its CTO. Since leaving Five AI in 2017, he has worked for several venture capital firms as an entrepreneur-in-residence and co-founded Folio Intelligence, a robo-trading hedge fund. Dr. Allpress has been a fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering since 2012 and of the IET since 2003.