AI CONFERENCE LONDON - Key Persons
Aaron Jones is an award-winning entrepreneur working in Artificial Intelligence. Aaron co-founded Yepic AI, Their flagship product vidvoice.ai. is a state-of-the-art video translation technology that dubs your lips in real-time. Vid Voice is being used in business meetings, telehealth, live events, and film dubbing. It's the first and only service of its kind.
Aaron was recognized in the Queen's Birthday Honours list, making him the youngest person to receive a British Empire Medal for services to Industry. He was also awarded Alumni of the Year 2018 by Essex University and shortlisted for Forbes 30 under 30.
Job Titles:
- Is Director of Neurosymbolic Artificial Intelligence at the Centre for Cognitive and Advanced Technologies, Fujitsu
Al is a former Research Fellow at Oxford University, researching perception, information integration, and optimisation for competitive advantage in biological and computational systems. He was previously the lead for UK Ministry of Defence on the study of global strategic trends in robotics and artificial intelligence, and its impacts on conflict. The veteran of numerous experimental exercises, testing remote and autonomous systems and A.I. tools for conflict, Al authored Defence's short book on Human Machine Teaming.
He writes and has lectured on related subjects at the Alan Turing Institute, Oxford University, UCL, Cranfield University, and other military and academic institutions. He has also been one of a group of government experts on lethal systems and autonomy, providing advice to and speaking at the United Nations.
Al is also a former Army officer. In addition to other operational tours in Afghanistan and the Balkans, he commanded an explosive ordinance disposal and high-risk search regiment and led the counter-IED squadron in Afghanistan.
Conan McKenzie, CFA, Vice President, is a portfolio manager and a member of the Diversified Strategies team within BlackRock's Multi-Asset Strategies (MAS) group, which is responsible for developing, assembling and managing investment strategies involving multiple asset classes. Within Diversified Strategies, Mr. McKenzie is involved in managing both benchmarked and unconstrained funds. He also leads the team's research on alternative investment opportunities.
Job Titles:
- CEO of Data Science Talent
Damien Deighan is CEO of Data Science Talent. Damien has worked in recruitment since 1999. He's still very much involved in day-to-day work, which could explain why his ginger beard is slowly turning grey. Having built up experience across several sectors (including IT & tech, energy and healthcare),
Damien has served the world's largest blue chip organisations and placed staff in over 20 countries. The CEO appreciates a classic cup of Yorkshire Gold, which he believes is (arguably) the best tea on the planet. Damien also enjoys spending time with his family, playing tennis and a good game of cricket.
Job Titles:
- Advisory and Executive
- CEO of Satalia
Daniel Hulme is the CEO of Satalia, a London-based company that provides Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions to solve industry's hardest problems. He is also the Director of UCL's Business Analytics MSc, applying AI to solve business, governmental and social problems.
Hulme specialises in philosophy, technology, innovation and organisational design. He is passionate about how technology can be used to govern organisations and bring positive social impact. Hulme's work outlines a framework for understanding data-driven decision making. He understands the capabilities of AI but also the future challenges and opportunities for AI, and how and why we need to embrace these emerging technologies.
Daniel Hulme's expertise also spans both the philosophical and ethical issues surrounding these emerging technologies. He has a Masters and Doctorate in AI from UCL, lectures on topics in Computer Science and Business, and is passionate about how technology can be used to govern organisations and bring positive social impact.
Dr Daniel Hulme has advisory and executive positions across companies and governments. He holds an international Kauffman Global Entrepreneur Scholarship and actively promotes purposeful. He is a popular public speaker specialising in the topics of Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, Decentralisation, Philosophy, Technology, Innovation and Organisational Design. He is a serial speaker for Google and TEDx, and is a faculty member of Singularity University.
Job Titles:
- Research Associate at the Centre for Gender Studies
Dr Eleanor Drage is a Christina Gaw Post-doctoral Research Associate at the Centre for Gender Studies and a member of the Gender & Technology Research Project team.
Eleanor started her career in financial technology before co-founding an e-commerce company. She graduated with an International Dual PhD from the University of Bologna and the University of Granada in 2019, where she was an Early Stage Researcher for the EU Horizon 2020 ETN-ITN-Marie Curie project "GRACE" (which investigated the production of ‘cultures of gender equality' in Europe). As part of this project Eleanor helped develop a software application, which communicated intersectional feminist ideas and methodologies to the public. Her publications focus on how humanity defines and constitutes itself both through unstable socio-cultural processes such as race and gender and through fallible technological systems.
Eleanor is particularly interested in how technology can prompt and develop certain kinds of behavioural skills, and how anti-racist and anti-sexist critical theory can be implemented at industry-level to develop ethical and socially transformative technological products. Her work investigates how queer and intersectional methodologies can be applied to improving technological processes and systems. Eleanor is also a Research Associate at Darwin College, Cambridge.
Ibrahim Gedeon, CTO, TELUS, is one of the global telecommunications industry's eminent thought leaders. He has carved out an international career by combining tremendous insight and skill as an applied scientist with a lighthearted and non-conventional approach to leadership. As Chief Technology Officer for TELUS, a leading national telecommunications company in Canada, he is responsible for all technology development and strategy, security, service and network architecture, service delivery and operational support systems, as well as service and network convergence, and network infrastructure strategies and evolution. Under his leadership the TELUS wireless broadband network has become one of the best in the world.
Within industry Ibrahim has held leadership roles and chaired many events in the IEEE and received the IEEE Canada's Outstanding Canadian Engineer Award in 2001. He serves on the board of the Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance, the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions and the Institute for Communication Technology Management. He has a Bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering from the American University of Beirut and a Master's in Electronics Engineering from Carleton University. In 2010, Ibrahim received a Honourary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of British Columbia. In 2014, he was elected as a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering (CAE) in recognition of his significant contributions to the field of engineering. He has been named five times to the Global Telecoms Business magazine's GTB Power 100, a list of the 100 most powerful and influential people in the telecoms industry.
Job Titles:
- Founding Partner of Transforma Insights
Jim Morrish is a Founding Partner of Transforma Insights. He is a respected Digital Transformation, Internet of Things, and Artificial Intelligence industry expert, with over 25 years' experience of strategy consulting, operations management and telecoms research. Jim is responsible for the addition of the term Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) networking to the lexicon of the IoT, and is a co-author of the Ignite|IoT project management framework for IoT and the accompanying book entitled "Enterprise IoT".
Job Titles:
- Technologist and Journalist
Laura Ellis is a technologist and journalist with a focus on emerging technology, machine learning, disinformation, and data. She has worked on news teams in radio, TV, and online and led two regional news and current affairs teams thorough significant technology change, establishing the BBC's first end-to-end digital newsroom. In her current role she focuses on ensuring the BBC is best placed to take advantage of emerging technology and takes a particular interest in ethics, personalised and automated journalism, machine learning and media provenance.
Professor Burke PhD MBA DMS is Professor of Management with Winchester Business School, in the Faculty of Business, Law and Sport. She holds a PhD in Information Systems; a Master of Business Administration (MBA) and a postgraduate Diploma in Management Studies (DMS). Her previous appointment was as Reader within Salford Business School at the University of Salford.
Maria has a well established research profile, evidenced by an extensive record in the fields of Systems / Business / Management which include peer-reviewed publications; a successful track record in obtaining competitively funded research grants and an excellent track record in establishing collaboration in community, business and government contexts. She has a significant record of international publications and an excellent record of attracting external income from UK Research Councils and European Union Funds, winning international prizes for the research such as the B2B Best Internet Award and the EPSRC National Impact Prize.
Professor Burke has experience of leading research projects both as Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator on various projects, having been successfully awarded several EPSRC grants. One of these grants, valued at £1.4 million, aimed to explore the application of Digital Technologies to the High Street. This research attracted significant partners, national and international press and featured in New Scientist; the New York Times; Japan Times and the technology journal WIRED.
Maria has also contributed to the workings of the UK Research Councils. Experience in this area, includes invited membership of the Special Commissioning Panel for the Research Seminars Competitive Fund; member of the Expert Commissioning Panel for the awards of Research-First Grants in Business and Management and membership of several Funding Panels including Research in the Wild grants.
She has authored several textbooks. In addition she has published book chapters, many peer-refereed international journal papers and national reports. She has also delivered papers at many conferences both nationally and internationally and organised and led international panels and workshops. She is an active Editorial Board member of the Journal of Documentation and a new journal published by Elsevier, focussed on technological innovation, the International Journal of the Digital Human.
Maria also has experience within multicultural environments having worked with a range of international Universities in Europe, China and Russia such as the Nicholas Copernicus University; Warsaw Technical University; Jagiellonian University; Budapest Technical Universities; Etvos Lorand University, National University of Columbia and various Russian and Belorussian State Universities.
AREAS OF EXPERTISE
Management
Information systems
Job Titles:
- Group Data Director for Kingfisher Plc
Tom Betts is Group Data Director for Kingfisher Plc. He spent the last 20 years working in the field of data analytics. Throughout that time he worked in a range of sectors and seen the transformational power that data can have on businesses. Customer data and building an understanding of how customer behaviour is changing has been a particularly powerful thread through all of that.
Tom has a deep understanding of customers helps bring certainty during times of change. He spent the last decade leading the development of data science and analytics capabilities at the Financial Times. These became a key catalyst in the acceleration of their digital growth - taking the business from 5% to >80% digital participation in a decade.