Validate AI Conference 2021

David Hand is a co-founder of Validate AI. 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-founder of Validate AI. 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. 

Professor Subramanian Ramamoorthy holds a Chair of Robot Learning and Autonomy in the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh, where he is also the Director of the Institute of Perception, Action and Behaviour. He is a Turing Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute, Executive Committee Member for the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics, Member of the UK Computing Research Committee convened by BCS/IET, and Principal Investigator for the UKRI Research Node on Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Governance and Regulation. He received his PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin in 2007. He has been an elected Member of the Young Academy of Scotland at the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and Visiting Professor at Stanford University and the University of Rome “La Sapienza”.  

His research focus is on robot learning and decision-making under uncertainty, with particular emphasis on achieving safe and robust autonomy in human-centred environments.  

Between 2017 - 2020, he served as Vice President - Prediction and Planning at FiveAI, a UK-based startup company developing autonomous vehicles technology. He continues to be involved with the company as Scientific Advisor. 

Reema is an Associate Director at the Ada Lovelace Institute and has worked for the organisation from its establishment as part of its founding team. She leads the organisation’s public attitudes and public deliberation research, and its broader engagement work on justice and equalities, particularly health and social inequalities, seeking to inform the Institute’s overall agenda to convene diverse voices. 

Reema has just over a decade’s experience in public policy and has advised a range of organisations on their approaches to public engagement, particularly as they relate to understanding lived experience and impacts on underrepresented communities. These include the Bank of England, the Nuffield Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, Understanding Patient Data and the Scottish Government. She is on Engage Britain’s policymaker advisory network, the OECD’s Innovative Citizen Participation network and the Scottish Government’s COVID-19 response public engagement expert working group.

Dr. Tony Bellotti is a co-founder of Validate AI following discussions relating to the Masterclass learning program he delivered in Machine Learning at HMRC. He is now Associate Professor in the School of Computer Science at University of Nottingham in Ningbo, China. Until recently, he was senior lecturer in statistics in the Mathematics department at Imperial College London UK. He received his PhD in machine learning from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2006 and he was a Research Fellow in the Credit Research Centre at the University of Edinburgh from 2007 to 2010. He has taught credit scoring and quantitative methods in retail finance at Imperial College London since 2010. His main area of expertise, research and publication is the application of statistical models and machine learning to consumer credit risk, with particular interest in model risk, dynamic survival models and expected loss estimation. 

Professor Darzi is Co-Director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London and  holds the Paul Hamlyn Chair of Surgery. He is a Consultant Surgeon at Imperial College NHS Trust and the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust. Professor Darzi is Non-Executive director of NHS England, Chair of the Accelerated Access Collaborative and Co-Director of the NHS Digital Academy. He is also Chair for the Pre-emptive Medicine and Health Security Initiative at Flagship Pioneering UK plc. 

Professor Darzi leads a large multidisciplinary team across a diverse and impactful portfolio of academic and policy research, and has over 1,350 peer reviewed publications. His research is mainly in convergence science in areas of engineering, physical and data sciences specifically in areas of robotics, sensing, imaging, digital and AI technologies, including ongoing work leading the global checklist for diagnostic AI.  

In recognition of his academic achievements, Professor Darzi was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a foreign associate of the Institute of Medicine, and is a past president of the British Science Association.  

In 2002, Professor Darzi was knighted for his services to medicine and surgery, and in 2007 he was introduced as Lord Darzi of Denham to the UK’s House of Lords as the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health. He has been a member of Her Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council since June 2009 and was awarded the Order of Merit for exceptionally meritorious service towards the advancement of medicine in January 2016.  

Professor Darzi has been recognised for his efforts in global health, having been awarded the Qatari Sash of Independence in 2014 by His Highness the Emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and the Order of Honour by the President of Armenia in 2017. Most recently, in 2019, Professor Darzi received the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon, in recognition of his contributions to global health and the development of medicine in Japan. 

Hutan Ashrafian MBBS, MRCS, PhD, MBA is a clinician-scientist and active surgeon translating novel technologies and therapeutics in healthcare and policy. He has led R&D as Chief Scientific Adviser at the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London and Chief Medical Officer at a FTSE 100 multinational and is currently Chief Scientific Officer at the global biotech and venture firm Flagship Pioneering in Preemptive Medicine and Health Security and his own start-ups. He has over 20 years of translational clinical, computational physiology, digital and AI trial and product development experience including novel COVID vaccines and national tracing apps. He leads the STARD-AI and QUADAS-AI global guideline initiatives for AI diagnostic accuracy. As honorary lecturer at Imperial College London, he runs the collaboration with Imperial College London, NHS Hospitals and Google on an AI algorithm for Breast Screening and also with NICE on health technological assessment classifications for AI. He was awarded the Royal College of Surgeons Arris and Gale Lectureship and the Hunterian Prize. He has authored >450 publications (including Lancet, Nature, NEJM) and 10 personally authored books ranging from medicine, philosophy and ancient history, also having discovered an ancient lion species and deciphering hidden realities in renaissance art including those of Leonardo da Vinci. He has several eponymous medical signs named after him and described his own procedure - the Ashrafian Thoracotomy. His philosophical work in artificial general intelligence, human rights and solving the simulation argument is taught at law schools and he is regularly featured in historical and scientific documentaries. He has co-edited the major reference text of Artificial Intelligence in Medicine by Springer Nature.  

I am a senior researcher for the Tools, Practices and Systems research programme at The Alan Turing Institute, London. With a focus on Open Research, I co-lead The Turing Way that aim to make data science reproducible, collaborative, ethical and inclusive for researchers around the globe. I involve and support a diverse community of contributors in the project by helping them learn research best practices, exchange skills and become an active member of The Turing Way. 

I am a co-founder of Open Life Science, a mentoring and training programme that empowers researchers to gain an understanding of open science principles, build collaborations with experts and adopt best practices in the context of their communities. 

After receiving my PhD in Bioinformatics, I started my career in community building at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. I am a Software Sustainability Institute fellow, Open Bioinformatics Foundation board member and an active contributor of open source projects. Connect with me on topics such as community building, open science, bioinformatics and representation of marginalised members in data science and research leadership. 

Mark Kennedy is the Co-Director of the Data Science Institute at Imperial College London where he has led a lab and research in Business Analytics to support research and teaching across that broad field. In his own research, he is known for theory and methods the explore the links between meaning construction and the emergence, diffusion, and institutionalisation of innovations at the intersection of technology, practice, and modes of organisation. Mark was educated at Northwestern University and Stanford University. He received his Ph.D. (Joint Program in Management and Organizations and Sociology) and MBA degrees from Northwestern and its Kellogg School of Management and his A.B. in Philosophy (Program in Formal Systems) from Stanford. Before becoming an academic, Mark worked as an engineer and product manager in an AI-related start-up in Silicon Valley (pattern recognition software) and then later as a management consultant at CSC Index. With collaborators in data science, Mark is currently working on methods for using the text of job descriptions to understand the work of organisations and how new technologies are likely to shape a new future of work. 

Maggie Philbin has worked in radio and television for over 30 years on a wide range of science, medical and technology programmes from Tomorrow’s World to Bang Goes The Theory. In 2008 she co-founded TeenTech, an award -winning organisation which works across the UK getting young people innovating, creating, building skills and preparing for a fast changing future. TeenTech helps students, parents and teachers understand the real opportunities in contemporary industry.  

For the past four years she has hosted DataFest for DataLab.  She received the WISE Award for Communication and Outreach for her work promoting diversity in 2013. In June 2016 she was voted most influential woman in UK IT by Computer Weekly and also named 2016 Digital Leader of the Year. She was awarded an OBE in Jan 2017 for her work to promote careers in STEM and the Creative Industries.  In July 2017 she received the Tech4Good Special Award. In 2019 TeenTech was awarded Best Employer and School Outreach.  

She is patron of the Council for Professors and Heads of Computing and has been awarded ten honorary degrees and fellowships for her work.

A human rights lawyer and social worker by background, Arthur Gwagwa is a doctoral researcher at Utrecht University Ethics Institute. His research which centred of socially disruptive technologies and normative political theory covers aspects such as the role of data-centric technologies, AI, and algorithms in cognitive emotional wars and political polarization. He has advised on cultural aspects of the IEEE Standard P7003- Algorithmic Bias Considerations and has written papers on AI deployments, benefits and risks. Arthur sits in the Editorial Board of Stanford Journal of Internet Trust and Safety. 

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) - a national knowledge transfer consortium bringing together UK's top academic institutions, government departments, and the GovTech start-up communities together. She also leads the computer science contributions to Urban Dynamics Lab, an EPSRC Digital Economy Hub hosted at UCL. Zeynep was a Policy Fellow at the Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP), University of Cambridge, before joining UCL in 2016. She has over five years of executive experience in the non-profit sector and obtained her PhD in statistical pattern detection from Imperial College London. 

Zeynep's primary research interests lay in digital ethics and algorithm assessment, looking into the algorithmic fairness issue in particular. A core focus for her research is to develop a system design and engineering perspective into these types of complex societal problems introduced by the ubiquitous adoption of algorithmic decision systems in everyday situations and important life decisions (hiring, loan applications, criminal sentencing etc.).

Zeynep is also globally recognised for driving both academic and public conversations around data science and artificial intelligence applications in governance and public policy. Her work on 'Algorithmic Government' focuses on automating public services and supporting civil servants in using data science technologies. She is mainly interested in infrastructure and methodology development to support government transformation processes in this domain. 

Paul Martynenko is the Deputy Chair of the Alliance for Data Science Professionals. In late 2019 he was one of the originators of the work which led to the formation of the Alliance in July 2021.  

Paul is the former Vice President and Technical Executive for IBM in Europe where he had a special focus on technical professions. He was the President BCS The Chartered Institute for IT 2017-18 and a trustee for 5 years. He is the BCS Chair of Registration and Standards Committee. Paul is a Distinguished Visitor at NPL and an external board member of the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. He holds a BSc in Computer Science from Lanchester Polytechnic, an MSc in Science Communication from Imperial College (2017) and an honorary Doctor of Technology from Coventry University. He is a Fellow of the BCS.  

Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye is an Associate Professor at Imperial College London. He currently is a Special Adviser on AI and Data Protection to EC Justice Commissioner Reynders and a Parliament-appointed expert to the Belgian Data Protection Agency (APD-GBA). In 2018-2019, he was a Special Adviser to EC Competition Commissioner Vestager co-authoring the Competition Policy for the Digital Era report. His research has been published in Science and Nature Communications and has enjoyed wide media coverage (BBC, CNN, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, etc.). His work on the shortcomings of anonymization has appeared in reports of the World Economic Forum, FTC, European Commission, and the OECD. Yves-Alexandre worked for the Boston Consulting Group and acted as an expert for both the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the United Nations. He received his PhD from MIT in 2015 and obtained, over a period of 6 years, an M.Sc. from UCLouvain in Applied Mathematics, an M.Sc. (Centralien) from École Centrale Paris, an M.Sc. from KULeuven in Mathematical Engineering as well as his B.Sc. in engineering from UCLouvain. 

Marc Canellas is the Chair of the IEEE-USA AI Policy Committee and an Assistant Public Defender in the Office of the Public Defender for Arlington County, Virginia. As Chair of the AI Policy Committee he leads a group of over AI experts advocating to the U.S. federal government to ensure policies support the future of AI and its related workforce while preventing harms to human rights, safety, privacy, cybersecurity, and intellectual property. IEEE also operates one of the largest standards-setting organizations in the world and Marc is member of the IEEE P3119 Standard on AI Procurement. As a public defender he represents people accused of crimes who cannot afford an attorney, typically people of color, people in poverty, and people with mental and substance use disorders. His clients are those first and most often targeted by unvalidated AI systems so he has participated in litigation in state and federal court challenging the validity and reliability of forensic technology for criminal prosecution. His research on how to understand, govern, and validate human-AI systems from novel DNA software in the criminal legal system and voting machines to autonomous vehicles and autonomous weapons systems has been published in Slate, Just Security, IEEE Computer, Communications of the ACM, IEEE Transactions on Human-Machine Systems, the Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making, and forthcoming in AI Magazine. He earned his Ph.D. in aerospace and cognitive engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a J.D. from New York University. He also served as an IEEE-USA Congressional Fellow for U.S. Representative Derek Kilmer (WA-6) from 2017-2018 where he was responsible for policy, appropriations, and media relating to science and technology, justice, defense, and cybersecurity, among other areas. 

Shakeel is a co-founder and CEO at Validate AI Community Interest Company. 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.  

 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. 

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.

Ed Humpherson was appointed as Director General for Regulation in October 2013 and took up post in January 2014. He is head of the Office for Statistics Regulation which provides independent regulation of all official statistics in the UK. The aim of OSR is to enhance public confidence in the trustworthiness, quality and value of statistics produced by government.

Prior to joining the Authority, Ed was a Board Member and Executive Leader for Economic Affairs at the National Audit Office, a post he held since July 2009. This role included responsibility for the overall strategic direction of NAO’s work on economic affairs.

Ed Humpherson was educated at the University of Edinburgh. Ed is a Chartered Accountant and a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.