Validate AI Directors

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 Shakeel is the CEO of Validate AI, a community interest company he co-founded in 2019 with academics from Imperial College London and the University of Oxford. The organization advances AI validation to promote safe and trusted AI systems. It fosters collaboration across private, public, and academic sectors to enhance AI capabilities globally. With a decade in financial services, Shakeel specialized in machine learning, leading major AI projects. As AI Capability Building Lead at the UK tax authority, he developed trusted AI systems and introduced an award-winning AI risk management methodology in collaboration with government and academic experts. He has contributed to international AI capacity-building programs, including for the OECD and global tax administrations. Passionate about education, Shakeel has designed AI masterclasses with industry-leading academics. He holds a Master’s in Operational Research from Strathclyde Business School, which equipped him with skills in mathematics, programming, and problem-structuring for AI. 

 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.  

 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 . 

Dr Mark Kennedy is Co-Director of Imperial College London's Data Science Institute and Director of Business Analytics. Prior to joining Imperial, Dr. Kennedy was at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business. Prior to becoming an academic, Dr. Kennedy was a software engineer and management.

Dr. Kennedy studies how innovations become real. When people encounter the novel and unfamiliar, they first ask, "Is this anything?" When collective answers are more 'yes' than 'no', innovations gather momentum and either gain widespread legitimacy or, in rarer cases, incite backlash and social or legal sanctions. Both outcomes are facilitated by categorising innovations so they become proper elements of socially shared ontologies. Dr. Kennedy's research explores the dynamics of categories and social ontologies using quantitative methods for text and network analysis and qualitative and inductive methods. His publications have appeared in American Sociological Review, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Journal of Management Studies, and Research in the Sociology of Organizations.

Current research projects include (1) the emergence and spread of AI and its impact on organisations and society, (2) understanding backlash to negative externalities associated with innovations in organising in both historical cases and current skirmishes over data science and AI, (3) methods of text analysis for identifying complementarities and observing meaning construction, and (4) understanding how individuals pick the people they rely on for friendship, help, and advice in work and life.