Validate AI Conference 2019

The Rt Hon. Lord Willetts FRS is the President of the Resolution Foundation. He served as the Member of Parliament for Havant (1992-2015), as Minister for Universities and Science (2010-2014) and previously worked at HM Treasury and the No. 10 Policy Unit.

Lord Willetts is a visiting Professor at King’s College London, a Board member of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), a Board member of Surrey Satellites and of the Biotech Growth Trust. He is the Chair of the Sanger Institute and the Chair of Foundation for Science and Technology. He is an Honorary Fellow of Nuffield College, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society and the Chancellor of the University of Leicester.

Lord Willetts has written widely on economic and social policy. His book “A University Education” is published by Oxford University Press. A second edition of his book on the Boomers and the young generation “The Pinch” will be published in November.

 David Hand is a co-proposer of the Validate AI Conference. He is Senior Research Investigator and Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Imperial College, London, where he previously held the Chair of Statistics. He serves on the Board of the UK Statistics Authority and the European Statistical Advisory Committee. He is a former president of the Royal Statistical Society and has received many awards for his research, including the Guy Medal of the Royal Statistical Society, the Box Medal from the European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics, and the Research Award of the International Federation of Classification Societies. His 29 books include Principles of Data Mining, Measurement Theory and Practice, The Improbability Principle, Information Generation, and Intelligent Data Analysis. 

 Marta Kwiatkowska is a co-proposer of the Validate AI Conference. She is Professor of Computing Systems and Fellow of Trinity College, University of Oxford. Prior to this she was Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham, Lecturer at the University of Leicester and Assistant Professor at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland. Kwiatkowska has made fundamental contributions to the theory and practice of model checking for probabilistic systems, focusing on automated techniques for verification and synthesis from quantitative specifications. More recently, she has been working on safety and robustness verification for neural networks with provable guarantees. She led the development of the PRISM model checker, the leading software tool in the area and winner of the HVC Award 2016. Probabilistic model checking has been adopted in diverse fields, including distributed computing, wireless networks, security, robotics, healthcare, systems biology, DNA computing and nanotechnology, with genuine flaws found and corrected in real-world protocols. Kwiatkowska is the first female winner of the Royal Society Milner Award and was awarded an honorary doctorate from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. She won two ERC Advanced Grants, VERIWARE and FUN2MODEL, the latter focusing on developing probabilistic verification methods for deep learning, and is a coinvestigator of the EPSRC Programme Grant on Mobile Autonomy. Kwiatkowska is a Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of ACM, Member of Academia Europea and Fellow of the BCS.  

 Michael Wooldridge is a Professor of Computer Science and Head of Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, and programme director for AI at the Alan Turing Institute. He has been an AI researcher for more than 25 years, and has published more than 350 scientific articles on the subject. In particular, he is a of the international leaders in the field of multi-agent systems. He is a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the Association for the Advancement of AI (AAAI), and the European Association for AI (EurAI). From 2014-16, he was President of the European Association for AI, and from 2015-17 he was President of the International Joint Conference on AI (IJCAI).

Dr Faisal is Reader in Neurotechnology jointly at the Dept. of Bioengineering and the Dept. of Computing at Imperial College London, where he leads the Brain & Behaviour Lab. Aldo is also Director of the Behaviour Analytics Lab at the Data Science Institute. He is also Associate Investigator at the MRC London Institute of Medical Sciences and is affiliated faculty at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit (University College London). Aldo serves as an Associate editor for Nature Scientific Data and PLOS Computational Biology and has acted as conference chair, area chair, program chair in key conferences in the field (e.g. Neurotechnix, KDD, NIPS, IEEE BSN), in 2016 he was elected into the Global Futures Council of the World Economic Forum.  

Aldo received a number of awards and distinctions, including being scholar of the German National Merit Foundation (Studienstiftung des Deutsche Volkes; Undergraduate PhD), a Fellow of the Böhringer-Ingelheim Foundation for Basic Biomedical Research, elected as a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge (Wolfson College), and research prizes such as the Toyota Mobility Foundation award in 2018 ($50,000).

Aldo read Computer Science and Physics in Germany, where he wrote his Diplomarbeit (M.Sc. thesis) in non-linear dynamical systems and neural networks (with Helge Ritter). He moved on to study Biology at Cambridge University (Emmanuel College) and wrote his M.Phil. thesis on the electrophysiological and behavioural study of a complex motor behaviour in freely moving insects with Tom Matheson in the group of Malcolm Burrow FRS. For his Ph.D. he joined Simon Laughlin FRS group at the Zoology Department in Cambridge investigating the biophysical sources of neuronal variability. He was elected a Junior Research Fellow at Cambridge University (Wolfson College) and joined the Computational & Biological Learning Group (Engineering Department) to work with Daniel Wolpert FRS on human sensorimotor control. Between and after his studies he gained insights into strategic mangement consulting with McKinsey & Co. and as a "quant" with the investment bank Credit Suisse. In winter 2009 Aldo setup the Brain & Behaviour Lab at Imperial College to pursue a research program that aims at understanding the brain with principles from engineering which often immediately translates into direct technological applications for patients and society.  

 Frankie is responsible for the capability of ONS, ensuring that everybody has the technology and skills to enable them to do their job effectively. She is leading the digital and workforce transformation to allow us to collect, securely store and analyse data from new sources. Frankie champions openness and data sharing for the public good in ONS and beyond.

Frankie joined the ONS in January 2010 as Head of IT Project Delivery. Since then, she has held several senior roles in ONS, including leading the development strategy for the UK National Accounts. Most recently, Frankie has led the transformation of ONS economic and population and public policy statistics, taking a leading role on preparations for Census 2021.

 Shakeel is a co-proposer and chair of the committee of the Validate AI Conference. He has been a great advocate of Artificial Intelligence supporting capability building in HMRC as well as sharing his expertise across government departments and tax administrations globally over the last decade. Prior to this he worked in Financial Services leading some major supervised and unsupervised machine learning initiatives for 10 years. In the last five years he has worked closely with academics with extensive tacit industry knowledge to develop a novel Data Science Masterclass program. He graduated with a Masters in Operational Research at Strathclyde Business School which has greatly aided his ability over his career to deliver in the AI field combining maths, programming and problem structuring methods. His extensive experience across private, public and academic sectors has also enabled him to benefit from the notion of the triple helix model.  

 Dr Jasmine Grimsley is a Senior Data Scientist at the Data Science Campus at the Office for National Statistics. She links Academia and Government on research surrounding Data Science for the Public Good both nationally and internationally. Her current interests include understanding the ethics of AI, and using data mining, machine learning, and natural language processing to solve real world problems. 

She previously headed a government funded neuroethology research laboratory within a medical school in the USA, where she still holds a position as an Adjunct Professor (NEOMED). She completed a PhD at the MRC Institute for Hearing Research in Biomedical Science where she developed a love for using large multidimensional data sets to understand systems. Her BSc was in Psychology and Neuropsychology from the University of Wales Bangor.

 Jonathan Crook is Director of the Credit Research Centre at the University of Edinburgh as well as Deputy Dean and Director of Research at the University of Edinburgh Business School. He has researched into credit scoring and the demand and supply of credit and credit constraints since the late 1980s. He has published over 55 refereed journal articles, mostly in the areas of credit scoring and credit availability in journals such as the European Journal of Operational Research, Journal of the Operational Research Society, Journal of Banking and Finance, Journal of Business Finance and Accounting and Economics Letters. He has co-authored or co-edited five books including Credit Scoring and its Applications, 2017 (with Lyn Thomas and David Edelman). He is particularly interested in the incorporation of macroeconomic factors into credit risk modelling, stress testing, survival models, dynamic models, the demand and supply of credit and the use of new forms of data. He has received research grants from the EPSRC, ESRC, Fulbright and other sources. He is a Fellow of the Financial Institutions Center at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and an External Research Fellow of the Centre for Finance, Credit and Macroeconomics at the University of Nottingham. He has acted as a credit scoring consultant to a number of banks. He is also the joint Editor of the Journal of the Operational Research Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. 

 As head of the Data Science at Capital One UK I lead an 20-strong cross-functional team that is changing the way we do business. We use the latest distributed computing technologies and operate across many billions of customer transactions. The models and data products that my team build unlock big opportunities for the business and help UK consumers save money and reduce friction in their financial lives.  

 Stan Boland is a co-founder and CEO of Five, a major start-up developing autonomous vehicle technology based in the UK founded in 2015. Five has so far built and demonstrated a self-driving capability for London streets and a number of high value offline tools in support of that effort. He was previously co-founder and CEO of two of the UK’s most successful venture-backed communications silicon and software companies, Element 14 Inc. and Icera Inc., bought by Broadcom and NVIDIA respectively, for an aggregate value of over $1 billion. Much earlier he was CEO of Acorn, a pioneer computer and technology firm and a Board member of its one-time associate, ARM. He is a graduate in physics from the University of Cambridge.  

 Michael Bronstein joined the Department of Computing as Professor in 2018. He has served as a professor at USI Lugano, Switzerland since 2010 and held visiting positions at Stanford, Harvard, MIT, TUM, and Tel Aviv University. Michael received his PhD with distinction from the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) in 2007. His main expertise is in theoretical and computational geometric methods for data analysis, and his research encompasses a broad spectrum of applications ranging from machine learning, computer vision, and pattern recognition to geometry processing, computer graphics, and imaging. 

Michael has authored over 150 papers, the book Numerical geometry of non-rigid shapes (Springer 2008), and holds over 30 granted patents. He was awarded four ERC grants, two Google Faculty Research awards, Amazon ML Research award, Facebook Computational Social Science award, Dalle Molle prize, and the Royal Society Wolfson Merit award. During 2017-2018 he was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University and since 2017, he is a Rudolf Diesel fellow at TU Munich. He was invited as a Young Scientist to the World Economic Forum, an honor bestowed on forty world’s leading scientists under the age of forty. Michael is a Fellow of IEEE and IAPR, alumnus of the Technion Excellence Program and the Academy of Achievement, ACM Distinguished Speaker, and a member of the Young Academy of Europe. In addition to academic work, Michael's industrial experience includes technological leadership in multiple startup companies, including Novafora, Videocites, and Invision (acquired by Intel in 2012), and Fabula AI (acquired by Twitter in 2019). Following the acquisition of Fabula, he joined Twitter as Head of Graph Learning Research. He previously served as Principal Engineer at Intel Perceptual Computing (2012-2019) and was one of the key developers of the Intel RealSense 3D camera technology.  

 Pushmeet Kohli is the Head of research for the "AI for science" and "Robust & Reliable AI"  groups at DeepMind. His research revolves around Intelligent Systems and Computational Sciences. His current research interests include Safe and Verified AI, Probabilistic Programming, Interpretable and Verifiable Knowledge Representations of Deep Models. In terms of application domains, he is interested in goal-directed conversation agents, machine learning systems for healthcare, and 3D reconstruction and tracking for augmented and virtual reality. Pushmeet’s papers has appeared in conferences in the field of machine learning, computer vision, game theory and human computer interaction and have won awards in CVPR, WWW, CHI, ECCV, ISMAR, TVX and ICVGIP. His research has also been the subject of a number of articles in popular media outlets such as Forbes, Wired, BBC, New Scientist and MIT Technology Review. Pushmeet is on the editorial board or PAMI, JMLR, IJCV and CVIU. 

 Giles Herdale is co-chair of the Independent Digital Ethics Panel for Policing working with leading experts from academia, law, ethics, civil society and digital investigation to advise on effective and ethical digital investigation. He has been involved in digital investigation for many years, working in policing at the NPIA, College of Policing and NPCC, where he set up and ran the DII programme. He has also had experience in the private sector providing digital forensics and data analytics services to law enforcement and the criminal justice system. He is now a consultant and policy advisor working on the challenge of the changing face of crime, investigation and intelligence in the digital age.  

 Stephanie Hare is an independent researcher and broadcaster focused on technology, politics and history. Previously she worked as a Principal Director at Accenture Research, a strategist at Palantir, a Senior Analyst at Oxford Analytica, the Alistair Horne Visiting Fellow at St Antony's College, Oxford, and a consultant at Accenture. She holds a PhD and MSc from the London School of Economics and a BA in Liberal Arts and Sciences (French) from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  

 Zeynep is a Senior Research Associate at UCL Computer Science also leading UCL's Digital Ethics Forum - an EPSRC IAA funded platform developing cross-disciplinary responses to major societal issues caused by the ongoing 'digital revolution'. She is the Founder and Chair of the international Data for Policy conferences (dataforpolicy.org), the Editor-in-Chief for Data and Policy (cambridge.org/dap) - an open-access peer-reviewed publication venue developed in collaboration with Cambridge University Press, and the Principal Investigator of the GovTech Lab (govtechlab.org). 

 Carly Kind is the Director of the Ada Lovelace Institute, an independent research body and think tank with a mission to ensure data and AI work for people and society. A human rights lawyer and leading authority on the intersection of technology policy and human rights, Carly has advised industry, government and non-profit organisations on digital rights, privacy and data protection, and corporate accountability. She has worked with the European Commission, the Council of Europe, numerous UN bodies and a range of civil society organisations. She was formerly Legal Director of Privacy International, an NGO dedicated to promoting data rights and governance. 

 Martin is Chief Scientist and CEO of Evolution AI, and a specialist in machine reading technologies. He is the Chair of the Royal Statistical Society Data Science Section, the professional body for data science in the UK. He also runs the largest machine learning community in Europe, Machine Learning London. Martin’s work has been covered by publications such as The Economist, Quartz, Business Insider and Tech Crunch. 

 Tom Smith is Managing Director at the Data Science Campus, joining the Office for National Statistics (ONS) in 2017. He was co-founder and, prior to joining ONS, chief executive of Oxford Consultants for Social Inclusion (OCSI), a research and data ‘spin-out’ company from the University of Oxford.

Tom has more than 20 years’ experience using data and analysis to improve public services. Working at the intersection of government, academia and industry, he has led data & research projects with hundreds of local and national public and community sector organisations, including the government’s English Indices of Deprivation. His primary research interests are in using data science to improve public services, machine learning, and assessing non-traditional data sources to improve our understanding of society and the economy.

A life-long data addict, Tom has a PhD in computational neuroscience, evolving neural networks for robot control (Sussex, 2002), an MSc in knowledge-based systems (Sussex, 1997), and MA in theoretical physics (Cambridge, 1994). He is vice-chair of the Royal Statistical Society Official Statistics section, and previously chair of the Environment Agency Data Advisory Group, and a member of the Open Data User Group ministerial advisory group to Cabinet Office. He has also acted as an external advisor on opening-up, sharing and using data for multiple government departments.