Suzanne’s research focuses on the discovery and characterisation of extra-solar planets using the transit and radial velocity methods, and on the application of probabilistic machine learning to exoplanet datasets. She often works with data from space telescopes such as CoRoT, Kepler, Hubble and TESS, and is involved in the preparation of future missions such as PLATO. In recent years her research has received support from the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), the UK Space Agency and the Leverhulme Trust.
After a Physics degree at Imperial College, Suzanne Aigrain worked as a Young Graduate Trainee at the European Space Agency’s ESTEC research centre in the Netherlands, before obtaining her PhD in Astrophysics form the University of Cambridge. She was a PPARC Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Cambridge and a Lecturer in Astrophysics at the University of Exeter before moving to Oxford in 2010.
John Armour
Professor of Law and Finance, University of Oxford
John Armour is Professor of Law and Finance at Oxford University and a Fellow of the British Academy and the European Corporate Governance Institute. He was previously a member of the Faculty of Law and the interdisciplinary Centre for Business Research at the University of Cambridge. He studied law (MA, BCL) at the University of Oxford and then at Yale Law School (LLM). He has held visiting posts at various institutions including the University of Auckland, the University of Chicago, Columbia Law School, the University of Frankfurt, the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Private Law in Hamburg, the University of Pennsylvania Law School and the University of Sydney. He is a member of the American Law Institute and an Academic Member of the Chancery Bar Association. Armour has published widely in the fields of company law, financial regulation, and corporate insolvency.
His main research interest lies in the integration of legal and economic analysis, with particular emphasis on the impact on the real economy of changes in company law, corporate insolvency law and financial regulation. He serves as an Executive Editor of the Journal of Corporate Law Studies and the Journal of Law, Finance and Accounting, and has been involved in policy-related projects commissioned by the UK’s Department of Trade and Industry (now BIS), Financial Services Authority (now FCA) and Insolvency Service, the Commonwealth Secretariat, and the World Bank. He served as a member of the European Commission’s Informal Company Law Expert Group from 2014-17.
Chris Bishop
Technical Fellow and Laboratory Director, Microsoft Research
Christopher Bishop is a Microsoft Technical Fellow and Director of the Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge, UK.
He is also Professor of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh, and a Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. In 2004, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, in 2007 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and in 2017 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society.
At Microsoft Research, Chris oversees a world-leading portfolio of industrial research and development, with a strong focus on machine learning and AI, and creating breakthrough technologies in cloud infrastructure, security, workplace productivity, computational biology, and healthcare.
Chris obtained a BA in Physics from Oxford, and a PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Edinburgh, with a thesis on quantum field theory. From there, he developed an interest in pattern recognition, and became Head of the Applied Neurocomputing Centre at AEA Technology. He was subsequently elected to a Chair in the Department of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at Aston University, where he set up and led the Neural Computing Research Group.
Chris is the author of two highly cited and widely adopted machine learning text books: Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition (1995) and Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (2006). He has also worked on a broad range of applications of machine learning in domains ranging from computer vision to healthcare. Chris is a keen advocate of public engagement in science, and in 2008 he delivered the prestigious Royal Institution Christmas Lectures, established in 1825 by Michael Faraday, and broadcast on national television.
Mike Bonsall
Professor of Mathematical Biology, University of Oxford
Mike Bonsall is head of Oxford’s Mathematical Ecology Research Group (MERG), and supervises two of FHI’s DPhil students who are also in MERG: Andrew Snyder-Beattie and Greg Lewis. The focus of this work within MERG is on studying existential risk from biotechnology using the tools of ecology and evolution.
Mike is a population biologist and has research interests across a range of disciplines including biodiversity, ecology, evolution, health and economics.
His research combines quantitative and empirical approaches to addressing cross-disciplinary questions such as the evolution of parental care and cannibalism, evaluating the cost-effectiveness of different strategies for disease control, approaches for combining ecological and evolutionary information for assessing biodiversity, the dynamics of stem cell systems and the role of uncertainty in dynamics of metapopulations. He is a member of the DEFRA Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment and has worked with WHO, FNIH and the EU in developing guidance frameworks for the use of novel biotechnological approaches for pest and vector control.
Nick Bostrom
Director of the Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford
Nick Bostrom is Swedish-born philosopher and polymath with a background in theoretical physics, computational neuroscience, logic, and artificial intelligence, as well as philosophy. He is Professor at Oxford University, where he leads the Future of Humanity Institute as its founding director. (The FHI is a multidisciplinary university research center; it is also home to the Center for the Governance of Artificial Intelligence and to teams working on AI safety, biosecurity, macrostrategy, and various other technology or foundational questions.) He is the author of some 200 publications, including Anthropic Bias (2002), Global Catastrophic Risks (2008), Human Enhancement (2009), and Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies (2014), a New York Times bestseller which helped spark a global conversation about artificial intelligence. Bostrom’s widely influential work, which traverses philosophy, science, ethics, and technology, has illuminated the links between our present actions and long-term global outcomes, thereby casting a new light on the human condition.
He is recipient of a Eugene R. Gannon Award, and has been listed on Foreign Policy’s Top 100 Global Thinkers list twice. He was included on Prospect’s World Thinkers list, the youngest person in the top 15. His writings have been translated into 28 languages, and there have been more than 100 translations and reprints of his works. He is a thrice repeat TED speaker and has done more than 2,000 interviews with television, radio, and print media. As a graduate student he dabbled in stand-up comedy on the London circuit, but he has since reconnected with the doom and gloom of his Swedish roots.
Chas Bountra
Pro-Vice Chancellor for Innovation, University of Oxford
Chas is Pro-Vice Chancellor for Innovation at the University of Oxford, Professor of Translational Medicine in the Nuffield Department of Clinical Medicine, CSO for the SGC, academic lead for the Dementia Drug Discovery Institute and Professorial Fellow at Keble College, Oxford. Chas is an invited expert on several government and charitable research funding bodies, and an advisor for many academic, biotech and pharma drug discovery programmes.
Prior to coming back to Oxford in 2008, Chas was Vice President and Head of Biology at GlaxoSmithKline. He was involved in the identification of more than 40 clinical candidates for many gastro-intestinal, inflammatory and neuro-psychiatric diseases. More than 20 of these molecules progressed into patient studies and more than five of these delivered successful “Proof of Concept” data. He was involved in the launch and development of the first treatment for Irritable Bowel Syndrome (Alosetron) and was the first to show that neurokinin NK1 antagonists are anti-emetic in preclinical and clinical studies.
His current interests are in using structures of novel human proteins to generate small molecule inhibitors, screening in human cells to identify novel targets for drug discovery, and then developing clinical candidates for evaluation in patients, pre-competitively. He is also helping students and academic colleagues translate their research for the benefit of patients, society, industry and economy.
Under Chas’s leadership the SGC has published >600 peer reviewed papers, the group has become a leader in human protein structural biology and epigenetics chemical biology, and is arguably one of the most successful open innovation, public – private partnerships in the world. He has in the past 11 years helped to attract in excess of £200M of funds (cash and ‘in kind’) from the Wellcome Trust, ARUK, IMI, BIS, FAPESP, patient groups, UKRPIF and 10 pharmaceutical companies.
He has given over 400 invited lectures. In 2012 he was voted one of the “top innovators in the industry”, in 2014 received the “Rita and John Cornforth Award” from the Royal Society of Chemistry, in 2017 and 2018 was voted “Master of the Bench” from the Medicine Maker Power List, and in 2018 was awarded the “Order of the British Empire” in the New Years Honours List.
Samuel Conway
Chief Executive Officer, Zegami
Co-founder and CEO of Zegami with a passion for how future technology is shaping business, Conway has 15 years of experience in global industry, data analytics and tech innovation – particularly around machine learning and human cognition.
After a successful project with Oxford University, Zegami was founded in February 2016 with Samuel as CEO. Sam is focused on building and commercializing this unique Visual Data Exploration platform, which makes it easy to create commercial insights and monetize both structured and unstructured data, from multiple sources, from images to documents and APIs to video.
Samuel holds a degree in Biomedical Engineering (BSc BEng) and an MBA (Int Business) from Flinders University in South Australia. He then worked within the Manufacturing industry as a business analyst and global project coordinator, before becoming National Quality Manager for a large Steel company. The experience gained working within these industries led Samuel to start Coritsu Group in 2011, focused on helping organizations understand the role of technology within their company.
Sue Daley
Associate Director, TechUK
Sue leads techUK’s work on cloud, data analytics and AI and has been recognised as one of the most influential women in UK tech by Computer Weekly. Sue has also been recognised in UK Big Data 100 as a key influencer in driving forward the Big Data agenda, shortlisted for the Milton Keynes Women Leaders Awards and was recently a judge for the Loebner Prize in AI. In addition to being a regular industry speaker on issues including AI ethics, data protection and cyber security, Sue is a regular judge of the annual UK Cloud Awards.
Prior to joining techUK in January 2015 Sue was responsible for Symantec’s Government Relations in the UK and Ireland. She has spoken at events including the UK-China Internet Forum in Beijing, UN IGF and European RSA on issues ranging from data usage and privacy, cloud computing and online child safety. Before joining Symantec, Sue was senior policy advisor at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). Sue has an BA degree on History and American Studies from Leeds University and a Masters Degree on International Relations and Diplomacy from the University of Birmingham. Sue is a keen sportswoman and in 2016 achieved a lifelong ambition to swim the English Channel.
Charlotte Deane
Head of Department, Statistics, University of Oxford
Charlotte is Head of the Department of Statistics and leads the Oxford Protein Informatics Group, who work on diverse problems across protein structure, interaction networks and small molecule drug discovery; combining theoretical and empirical analysis with special interest in AI. She collaborates with experimentalists in academia and industry in experiment design to leverage the power of computation for biological insight.
Her work focusses on the development of novel algorithms, tools and databases that are openly available to the community. These tools are widely used web resources and are also part of several Pharma drug discovery pipelines. Charlotte has consulted extensively with industry including Roche, Medimmune and UCB and has set up a consulting arm within her own research group as a way of promoting industrial interaction and use of the group’s software tools.
Natalia Efermova
Research Fellow in Marketing and Reputation, University of Oxford
Dr Natalia Efremova’s research focuses on applications of machine learning tools to marketing problems under the Oxford Future of Marketing Initiative.
Natalia has a background in both academia and industry research. Over the past 10 years, she has been working in the field of deep learning for image and video processing in the domains of biometrics and emotion recognition. Her work has been commended for successfully meeting challenges set for the global research community in these areas, and her research has been published in the top machine learning conferences (IEEE/FG, IJCNN, HRI, IEEE/ICME).
Previously, Natalia was an Associate Professor in the Department of Economical Mathematics and Statistics in Plekhanov’s Russian University of Economics, where she taught courses on neural networks, intelligent systems and decision-making to undergraduate and postgraduate students.
Ian is a highly accomplished entrepreneur, designer, and systems architect. In 2003 he co-founded Oxford-based Mode 7, a renowned and disruptive company in the online gaming space. He has also designed and developed technology currently in use today by high profile clients such as the BBC and Sky.
Thomas Hellmann
DP World Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, University of Oxford
Dr. Thomas Hellmann is the DP World Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Saïd School of Business, University of Oxford. He holds a BA from the London School of Economics and a PhD from Stanford University. He previously was faculty at the Graduate School of Business (Stanford, US), and at the Sauder School of Business (University of British Columbia, Canada). His research focuses on entrepreneurial finance, entrepreneurship, innovation, and public policy. He is the Academic Advisor of the Oxford Foundry, the Academic Director of SBS Entrepreneurship Centre, and Academic Director and Site Lead of the Creative Destruction Lab – Oxford.
Rita Hendricusdottir
Program Manager in Regulatory Navigation, University of Oxford
Dr. Rita Hendricusdottir is the Program Manager in Regulatory Navigation for Medical Devices working on developing tools to make navigating the medical device regulation easier and more accessible.
Rita did her undergraduate in Medical Biology and Master in Neuroscience at the VU University Amsterdam. She completed her PhD at the MRC centre for Developmental Neurobiology at King’s College London studying the actin binding protein Drebrin, its function and regulation. During her PhD she developed new analysis tools for live cell imaging. Rita played a significant role in setting up and leading the training workstream within ELIXIR, a European infrastructure for biological research data. Rita has also been instrumental in leading the development of large eLearning training program for the pharmaceutical industry.
Phil Howard
Director of Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford
Philip Howard is the Director of the Oxford Internet Institute and a Statutory Professor at Balliol College, Oxford. His research has demonstrated how new information technologies are used in both civic engagement and social control in countries around the world. His research and opinion writing has been featured in the New York Times, Financial Times, and many other international media outlets. Recently, he was awarded the National Democratic Institute’s 2018 “Democracy Prize” and Foreign Policy magazine named him a “Global Thinker” for pioneering the social science of fake news.
Fred Kemp
Deputy Head of Licensing and Ventures, Oxford University Innovation; Digital Health
“Digital technologies, machine learning and augmented intelligence have the potential to transform healthcare – to deliver new, more accurate diagnoses; earlier interventions; new modes of healthcare delivery; rapidly scalable efficiencies; and thus, improved patient outcomes and cost-savings. Particularly in mental health, we also see the opportunity for not just diagnostics, but also clinically-proven digital therapies to support and improve wellbeing. Thirdly, analysis of population level data combined with patient-reported data and multiomics will also deliver new insight, resulting in new treatments and better, more personalised, healthcare”
For the last six years, Fred and his team at OUI have made it their mission to help digital health innovators and entrepreneurs realise this vision and change healthcare for the better. In that time, he has helped create over 30 companies and raise over £100M in investment.
To deliver all this requires not just a strong multidisciplinary approach, with clinicians, researchers and developers coming together, but also access to translational and seed funding, as well as experts in clinical trials, medtech regulations, health economics, healthcare procurement and commercial modelling, to guide innovators through the challenges and complexities of bringing transformational healthcare technologies to market.
With OUI supporting innovation from both local NHS trusts (OUH and Oxford Health), as well as the University, The Hill is a central part of this vision. Since its inception, Fred has been a strong supporter, recognising the need for a focal point to engage and support the diverse Oxford Digital Health community.
Similarly, the regulated software development and data analysis environment that Lab10x provides has long been integral to Fred’s goal of a seamless ecosystem across the region to support and accelerate digital health innovation.
In 2017 Fred’s team also partnered with the Oxford Academic Health Sciences Network to create the “Digital Health Roadmap”, a best-practice reference guide along with many case studies, aimed at sharing the knowledge, expertise and strategic approaches that have helped to make the Oxford Digital Health ecosystem so successful.
Marina Jirotka
Professor of Human Centred Computing, University of Oxford
Marina Jirotka is Professor of Human Centred Computing in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford. She leads an interdisciplinary research group investigating the responsible development of technologies that are more responsive to societal acceptability and desirability. She has recently been awarded an EPSRC Established Career Fellowship – a 5-year investigation into Developing Responsible Robots for the Digital Economy.
Her current projects involve a range of topics in RI: she leads the Responsible Innovation initiative for Quantum Technologies; Co-PI on EPSRC Digital Economy TIPS project, Emancipating Users Against Algorithmic Biases for a Trusted Digital Economy (UnBias); PI on EPSRC Digital Economy TIPS project Rebuilding and Enhancing Trust in Algorithms (ReEnTrust); and co-director of an Observatory for Responsible Research and Innovation in ICT (ORBIT) that will provide RI services to ICT researchers and practitioners. In 2017, she was appointed specialist advisor to the House of Lords Select Committee on Communications for their inquiry into Children and the Internet.
Marina currently sits on EPSRCs Programme Advisory Board for the Digital Economy, the Advisory Board of the Society for Computers and Law and the Advisory Board for the All Party Parliamentary Group on Data Analytics.
Gina Neff
Senior Research Fellow, Professor of Mathematical Biology, University of Oxford
Professor Gina Neff is a Senior Research Fellow and Associate Professor at the Oxford Internet Institute and the Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford. She studies the future of work in data-rich environments. She is an expert on technological disruption across several different industries including health care, media, and construction.
She has published three books and over four dozen research articles on innovation and the impact of digital transformation. Her most recent book, Self-Tracking, co-authored with Dawn Nafus (MIT Press, 2016), focuses on the practices and politics of using consumer technologies to track health and other everyday personal metrics. Her book Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries (MIT Press, 2012) about the rise of internet industries in New York City won the 2013 American Sociological Association Communication and Information Technologies Best Book Award. Professor Neff leads a new project on the organizational challenges companies face using artificial intelligence for decision making. Her research on the technologies for large-scale building architecture and construction tests how to implement changes in work at an industrial scale.
She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University, where she remains a faculty affiliate at the Center on Organizational Innovation. Professor Neff has held faculty and research appointments at the University of Washington, University of California, San Diego and University of California, Los Angeles. She has had fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy. Her writing for the general public has appeared in Wired, Slate and The Atlantic, among other outlets.
Michalis Papadakis
CEO, Brainomix
Dr. Michalis Papadakis is a founder and CEO of Brainomix, an award winning University of Oxford spin-out. Building the company from the ground up, he has significant experience in start-ups and disruptive innovation. He has led the development, regulatory clearance and commercialisation in 25 countries worldwide of AI-based medical imaging, decision support software for stroke diagnosis and treatment. He has secured and managed more than £11 million of private investment and public funding. He was the Scientific Director of the preclinical stroke lab at the University of Oxford and has a PhD in neurosciences from UCL School of Pharmacy. He has been an invited speaker at international stroke conferences and has mentored emerging teams at international innovation competitions.
Sam Spencer
DPhil Student, Oxford University
Sam is a DPhil student at the University of Oxford working in the field of ground-based gamma-ray astronomy. His main research interest is the development of new deep-learning based event reconstruction and background rejection methods for the H.E.S.S. and Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA) telescopes.
John McGonigle
Senior Data Scientist, Perspectum Diagnostics
John is a Senior Data Scientist at Perspectum Diagnostics and an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Medicine at Imperial College London. He develops algorithms for automatic analysis of multiparametric MRI data for eventual incorporation into medical devices. He previously worked in drug development using MRI as a Senior Data Scientist at Invicro, A Konica Minolta Company.
Stefan Zohren
Associate Professorial Research Fellow, Machine Learning Research Group and the Oxford-Man Institute for Quantitative Finance, University of Oxford
Stefan Zohren is an Associate Professorial Research Fellow at Machine Learning Research Group and the Oxford-Man Institute for Quantitative Finance, University of Oxford. He also acts as a consultant for Man Group. Prior to that, Stefan worked on equities market making as a quant researcher/trader at two leading HFT firms in London and coordinated the Quantum Optimisation and Machine Learning project, a joined research project of Oxford University, Nokia Technologies and Lockheed Martin. His background is in theoretical physics, probability theory and statistics. Stefan’s research interests include machine learning applied to finance, particularly market microstructure data, deep learning for time series modelling as well as quantum computing
Keith Channon
Deputy Head of Medical Sciences, Oxford University
Professor Channon is Field Marshal Earl Alexander Professor of Cardiovascular Medicine, Deputy Head of Medical Sciences Division (Research) at the University of Oxford. He is also an Honorary Consultant Cardiologist at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford. Director of R&D for Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. He runs a basic science research group interested in the biology of vascular disease and atherosclerosis, particularly using genetic models, and links these with clinical and translational research in coronary artery disease.
Professor Channon has served as Director of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) at Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and the University of Oxford during 2008-2018. Chairman of the British Atherosclerosis Society, as a member of the Council of the British Cardiac Society and a member of the British Society for Cardiovascular Research and the British Cardiac Intervention Society. He has acted as a consultant and external reviewer for the National Institute of Clinical Excellence, the Gene Therapy Advisory Committee of the Department of Health and the Medicines and Health Care Regulatory Authority. He is an NIHR Senior Investigator, and a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. He plays active roles on grant committees at the British Heart Foundation, the Wellcome Trust and the British Cardiac Society. Professor Channon serves on the editorial boards of a number of cardiovascular journals, including the BMJ journal Heart.
Geneviève Gauthier
Professor of Decision Sciences, HEC Montréal
Geneviève Gauthier is a professor in the Department of Decision Sciences at HEC Montréal. She is a member of GERAD* (Group of Research in Decision Analysis) and on the scientific committee of IVADO** (The Institute for Data Valorization: a Scientific and Economic Data Science Hub). With a background in statistics and stochastic calculus, she teaches financial engineering to master and doctoral students. Her research interests include modelling, measurement and management of risks, derivatives pricing, and financial econometrics. She received in 2018 the SSC Award For Impact of Applied and Collaborative Work from the Statistical Society of Canada for her outstanding contributions to the promotion of innovative statistical methodologies in financial engineering, and in the training of highly qualified personnel. Some of her publications appeared in Review of Financial Studies, Energy Journal, Journal of Risk and insurance, Journal of banking and Finance, and European Journal of Operations Research.
Christopher Burr
Postdoctoral Researcher, Oxford University
Dr Christopher Burr is a philosopher of cognitive science and artificial intelligence. His research explores philosophical and ethical issues surrounding the impact of technologies, such as AI, on mental health and well-being.
Mariano Belinky
Global CEO, Santander Asset Management
Mariano Belinky is Global CEO of Santander Asset Management, since February 2018.
He joined SAM from Santander InnoVentures, the bank’s $200 million fintech venture capital investment fund, which he co-founded and successfully led since 2015.
Before joining Santander InnoVentures, Mariano was a junior partner at management consulting firm McKinsey and Company, where he advised global banks and asset managers across Europe and the Americas.
He previously spent 3 years as part of the research technology team at Bridgewater Associates, the world largest institutional money manager, and before as a trader in cash equities and equity derivatives in his native Buenos Aires.
Mariano holds a bachelor‘s degree in Computer Science and Philosophy from New York University and conducted doctoral studies in Artificial Intelligence at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya In Spain.
Jim was appointed Chief Financial Officer of OSE (then called Oxford Sciences Innovation) in 2015, since when he has been an integral part of the team that has invested in over 40 spin-outs from the University of Oxford and has raised over £600m investment funds from strategic investors. He held similar positions at Lonrho Holdings Limited between 2013 and March 2015, Sportingbet plc from 2008 to 2013 and Johnson Service Group plc 2004 to 2007. Jim was also CFO of Informa Group Plc between 1997 to 2004, where he was a founding Director. He trained as an accountant with Deloitte, where he worked for 8 years.
Kathy Willis
Professor of Biodiversity, Oxford University
Kathy Willis is a Professor of Biodiversity in the Department of Zoology, and Head the Oxford Long-term Ecology group (see Oxford Long-term Ecology Lab). Her research focuses on the use of long-term datasets, models and innovative technologies to determine the diversity, distribution and abundance of plants and animals across global landscapes in space and time. This evidence-base is then used to understand biodiversity baselines, the resilience of biological communities to external perturbations, and the distribution of natural capital assets across global landscapes that are important for human well-being. This work is in collaboration with a large network of international partners spanning 20 countries and 4 continents. She has also developed a large collaborative research network across Oxford University (departments of Engineering, Computing Sciences, Geography, Plant Sciences and Zoology). Here the research focus is on the development of end-user tools to ensure that research outputs have maximum societal impact. Recent examples of this work include two web-based tools that remotely determine areas for ecological risk and natural capital assets.
Nathan Korda
Director of Research, Mind Foundry
As Mind Foundry’s Director of Research, Nathan is responsible for delivering cutting-edge machine learning technology into Mind Foundry products. His goal is to make state-of-the-art Machine Learning and Data Science capabilities accessible to all—in applications spanning customer service, pharmaceutical testing and quantum computing.
Prior to this, Nathan led the Mind Foundry Science Programme, developing the prototypes for Mind Foundry’s Machine Learning Platform and building innovative bespoke machine learning solutions through consulting services for clients including top engine manufacturers. He obtained his doctorate from the University of Oxford, and has worked as a postdoctoral researcher in France, and at Oxford University’s Machine Learning Research Group.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathan-korda-a7937853/
Daniel Kroening
CEO, DiffBlue
Professor Daniel Kroening is the inventor of CBMC, a framework for interpreting the meaning of code. He open sourced CBMC and it has flourished in academic and highly technical environments, used everywhere from leading cloud providers, industrial manufacturers and governments.
Mike Osborne
Dyson Associate Professor in Machine Learning, University of Oxford
Michael A Osborne (DPhil Oxon) works to develop machine intelligence in sympathy with societal needs. His work in Machine Learning has been successfully applied in diverse contexts, from aiding the detection of planets in distant solar systems to enabling self-driving cars to determine when their maps may have changed due to roadworks. Dr Osborne also has deep interests in the broader societal consequences of machine learning and robotics. His work on the significance of machine learning and robotics to future labour markets has resulted in both sustained coverage in most major media venues (e.g. his being interviewed on BBC Newsnight, a cover feature in the Economist) and policy impact (including presenting oral evidence to the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee). Dr Osborne is the Dyson Associate Professor in Machine Learning, a co-director of the Oxford Martin programme on Technology and Employment, an Official Fellow of Exeter College, and a co-director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Autonomous Intelligent Machines and Systems, all at the University of Oxford.
Ingmar Posner
Professor of Engineering Science, University of Oxford
Ingmar leads the perception and planning work within the Mobile Robotics Group (MRG). His expertise lies in the design and implementation of machine learning methods that enable an autonomous agent to interpret complex, dynamic environments in a way which permits robust decision-making, planning and exploration on-line and in real-time.
His research tackles questions such as: what semantic information can be inferred about the environment the robot has traversed (e.g. what type of structures and objects can be found? What type of terrain is it travelling on?) and how this knowledge can feed into the decision-making process of an autonomous agent.
Steven Reece
Senior Research Fellow, University of Oxford
A data processing scientist and technical consultant with over 20 years experience, Dr Steven Reece is a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Pattern Analysis and Machine Learning Research Group. He develops novel techniques and computer software for finding patterns in data, for combining multiple sources of data and correcting errors in data. His focus is on data analytics in disaster management applications.
Steven has developed both Bayesian and non-Bayesian approaches to reasoning with uncertainty and have applied my methods to fault correction of NASA astrophysics data, multi-robot terrain mapping, fault detection, social networks, sensor modelling, target tracking and big data economic forecasting. He has consulted extensively with industry including BAE SYSTEMS, DSTL, Pelucid ltd (economic forecasting) and Rescue Global (search and rescue reconnaissance charity).
Louise Richardson
Vice Chancellor, University of Oxford
Professor Louise Richardson is Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford. She was previously Principal and Vice-Chancellor of the University of St Andrews.
A native of Ireland, she studied history in Trinity College, Dublin before gaining her PhD at Harvard University where she spent twenty years on the faculty of the Harvard Government Department and latterly as Executive Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She currently sits on the boards of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Booker Prize Foundation and numerous other charities.
A political scientist by training, Professor Richardson is recognised internationally as an expert on terrorism and counter-terrorism. Her publications include Democracy and Counterterrorism: Lessons from the Past (2007), What Terrorists Want: Understanding the Enemy, Containing the Threat (2006), The Roots of Terrorism (2006), and When Allies Differ (1996). She has written numerous articles on international terrorism, British foreign and defence policy, security institutions, and international relations, lectured to public, professional, media and education groups and served on editorial boards for several journals and presses.
Professor Richardson’s awards include the Sumner Prize for work towards the prevention of war and the establishment of universal peace and honorary doctorates from the Universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh and St Andrews in Scotland; Trinity College Dublin and Queen’s College Belfast in Ireland; Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) in Russia; Notre Dame University in the USA and the University of the West Indies. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the Academy of Social Sciences in the United Kingdom, an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
Steven Roberts
Professor of Machine Learning, University of Oxford
Professor Stephen Roberts is the Royal Academy of Engineering / Man Group Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Oxford, Director of the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance, founding-Director of the Oxford Centre for Doctoral Training in Autonomous Intelligent Machines and Systems (AIMS) and co-founder of the Oxford Machine Learning spin-out company, Mind Foundry. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Statistical Society, the IET and the Alan Turing Institute. He has published extensively, having over 350 publications which have accrued more than 23,000 citations and 20 awards, including two medals from the IET. Stephen’s interests lie in the theory and methodology of machine learning for large-scale real-world problems, especially those in which noise and uncertainty abound. His research focuses on the application of machine learning in the physical sciences (astronomy in particular), environmental monitoring, the engineering industry and finance.
Sir Nigel Shadbolt
Professor of Computer Science, University of Oxford
Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt is one of the UK’s foremost computer scientists. He is a leading researcher in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and was one of the originators of the interdisciplinary field of Web Science. He is Principal of Jesus College Oxford and a Professor of Computing Science at the University of Oxford. He is chairman of the Open Data Institute which he co-founded with Sir Tim Berners-Lee. In 2009 he was appointed Information Advisor by the Prime Minister and, working with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, led the development of the highly acclaimed data.gov.uk website. In 2010, he joined the UK government’s Public Sector Transparency Board – overseeing Open Data releases across the public sector. He was knighted in 2013 for services to science and engineering.
Sir Nigel has a degree in Philosophy and Psychology from the University of Newcastle and a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh. In 1983 he joined the Department of Psychology at Nottingham where he established and led a vibrant AI group. In 1992 he became the Allan Standen Professor of Intelligent Systems. He moved to Southampton’s School of Electronics and Computer Science in 2000. At Southampton he researched the next generation of the World Wide Web and was the first Head of the Web and Internet Science Group.
With over 500 publications, he has researched and published on topics ranging from cognitive psychology to computational neuroscience, Artificial Intelligence to the Semantic Web. He was one of the originators of the interdisciplinary field of Web Science. He is the co-author of The Spy in the Coffee Machine and is an authority on issues to do with privacy and trust in the Digital age. In 2018 he published The Digital Ape: how to live (in peace) with smart machines, described as a ‘landmark book’.
In its 50th Anniversary year 2006-2007, Nigel was President of the British Computer Society. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the British Computer Society. He is a member of the Data Advisory Board and in 2015 the Chancellor asked him to Co-Chair the UK French Data Taskforce.
Andrew Stephen
Director of the Oxford Future of Marketing Initiative, University of Oxford
Andrew is one of the world’s leading academic marketing experts.
He is a leading academic voice on the technology-centric future of the marketing, media, and advertising industries. He has a particular interest in issues that lie at the intersections of marketing, consumer behaviour, and technology, and is a strong proponent of the use of data-driven, analytics-focused approaches to marketing. His research over the last decade has made significant contributions to our understandings of digital marketing and advertising, and especially how social media works for marketers and how consumers behave on social platforms. For this work, he’s been recently recognised by the American Marketing Association as one of the top marketing academics in the world, and the #1 in the UK. He’s also been featured as one of the top 40 business school professors under 40 by Poets and Quants (in 2015) and has won numerous awards for research excellence.
Andrew is the founder and director of the Oxford Future of Marketing Initiative, which is a collaborative network of academic-industry partnerships aimed at producing relevant research and practical thought leadership that shapes the future of the marketing profession.
As a prolific researcher in marketing, Andrew has published in all of the leading academic journals in marketing, as well as in professional outlets such as Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review and top psychology journals. Currently, he is serving as Co-Editor of the International Journal of Research in Marketing and Associate Editor of the Journal of Consumer Research. He is also on the editorial boards of the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of Consumer Psychology. Andrew is a frequent media contributor, blogs regularly about marketing, technology, and analytics issues on the Forbes CMO Network, and is the co-host of the popular Future Proof podcast series on the future of marketing from Kantar and Oxford Saïd.
Mariarosaria Taddeo
Research Fellow, University of Oxford
Dr Mariarosaria Taddeo is Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, where she is the Deputy Director of the Digital Ethics Lab, and is Faculty Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. Her recent work focuses mainly on the ethical analysis of Artificial Intelligence, cyber security , cyber conflicts, and ethics of digital innovation. Her area of expertise is Philosophy and Ethics of Information, although she has worked on issues concerning Epistemology, Logic, and Philosophy of AI. She has been listed among the top 50 most inspiring Italian women working in AI in 2018. ORBIT nominated her among the top 100 brillinat women in AI Ethics. Dr Taddeo has been awarded The Simon Award for Outstanding Research in Computing and Philosophy. She also received the World Technology Award for Ethics acknowledging the originality and her research on the ethics of cyber conflicts, and the social impact of the work that she developed in this area. Since 2016, Taddeo serves as editor-in-chief of Minds & Machines (SpringerNature) and of Philosophical Studies Series (SpringerNature).
Peter Tufano
Dean of Saïd Business School, University of Oxford
Peter is the Peter Moores Dean at Saïd Business School and a Professorial Fellow at Balliol College. Tufano’s research focuses on financial innovation that improves the delivery of services to low income families. He founded a social enterprise for financial product development (http://buildcommonwealth.org/). His work is credited with influencing three US policy initiatives, most recently the U.S. American Savings Promotion Act. As Dean, he has championed initiatives connecting the business school and the university, including the Oxford 1+1 MBA Programme; the blended learning GOTO course (Global Opportunities & Threats: Oxford); and The Oxford Foundry – a university-wide hub for entrepreneurship. Before joining Oxford, Tufano spent 33 years at Harvard, most recently on the Faculty of HBS, where he co-founded the Harvard University Innovation Lab (i-Lab).
Sarah Porter
CEO, InspiredMinds
As founder, Sarah is an award-winning entrepreneur, having launched 21 b2b and b2c technology products in 11 countries since 1996 and a multi million pound company around her three young children. She has a renowned reputation for taking ideas from concept to market with subsequent significant growth globally with InspiredMinds having grown in two years to over 51,000 influencers in a network from 172 countries worldwide.
She is focused on democratising emerging technology and using platforms to empower individuals and organisations no matter their background, status or gender.
She was nominated female tech entrepreneur of the year in 2017, is currently the founder and CEO of InspiredMinds a worldwide artificial intelligence and emerging technology network, an advisor to www.aicommons.com founded by Yoshua Benigo, Stuart Russell and Francesca Rossi, Founder of an AI not for profit www.ada-ai.orgwww.ada-ai.org, a co-founder in the SaRoya Institute a STEAM school in Afghanistan to educate global tech leaders and reduce racial, wealth and gender inequality, Ambassador to the Royal Marsden hospital.
She is also co-Founder of World Summit AI, the largest worldwide AI tech summit and Founder of IntelligentHealth a global summit on AI in medicine, a speaker for the United Nations and a sponsor of the Afghan all girl robotics team. Sarah is an active campaigner for women’s rights globally and keynotes at international events on gender equality, emerging tech and post traumatic success.
Sarah is a regular keynote speaker on start ups, business and women / equality related issues and is an ambassador for the Royal Marsden where she champions the use of AI tech in oncology advances. She is also a fully qualified trauma first responder in medical and humanitarian front line emergency response and volunteers worldwide.
Sandra Wachter
Senior Research Fellow, University of Oxford
Sandra Wachter is an Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow in Law and Ethics of AI, Big Data, and robotics as well as Internet Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. Sandra is specialising in technology-, IP-, and data protection law as well as European-, International-, human rights (online) and medical law. Her current research focuses on the legal and ethical implications of AI, Big Data, and robotics as well as profiling, inferential analytics, explainable AI, algorithmic bias, governmental surveillance, predictive policing, and human rights online.
Sandra is also a Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute in London, a Fellow of the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on Values, Ethics and Innovation, an Academic Affiliate at the Bonavero Institute of Human Rights at Oxford’s Law Faculty and a member of the Law Committee of the IEEE. Prior to joining the OII, Sandra studied at the University of Oxford and the Law Faculty at the University of Vienna and worked at the Royal Academy of Engineering and at the Austrian Ministry of Health.
Mike Wooldridge
Head of Department, Computer Science, University of Oxford
Michael Wooldridge is a Professor of Computer Science and Head of Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, where he is a Fellow of Hertford College. He has been an AI researcher since 1989, and has published more than 350 scientific articles on the subject. 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). Since January 2019, he has been a Programme Director for AI at the Alan Turing Institute.
Andrew Zisserman
Professorial Research Fellow, University of Oxford
Andrew Zisserman is a Royal Society Research Professor. He holds the
chair in Computer Vision Engineering within the Department of
Engineering Science, University of Oxford, where he heads the Visual
Geometry Group. He is one of the principal architects of modern
computer vision, and is known internationally for his pioneering work
in multiple view geometry, visual recognition, and large scale
retrieval in images and video. He has authored over 400 peer reviewed
papers in computer vision, and co-edited and written several books in this
area. His recent research has focussed on audio and visual recognition.He is a fellow of the Royal Society.
Linnet Taylor
Associate Professor, Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT)
Linnet Taylor is Associate Professor at the Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society (TILT). Her research focuses on digital data, representation and democracy, with particular attention to transnational governance issues. She leads the ERC Global Data Justice project, which aims to develop a a conceptual framework for the ethical and beneficial governance of data technologies on the global level. The research is based on insights from technology users, providers and activists around the world.
Melinda Mills
Professor, University of Oxford and Nuffield College and Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science
Melinda Mills, MBE, FBA, is Professor at the University of Oxford and Nuffield College and Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science (www.demographicscience.ox.ac.uk). Her research is in the area of combining molecular genetic and social science data and thinking, statistical and behavioural models. Her current work focuses on integrating and linking multiple high-dimensional data sources for nowcasting and real-time prediction.
Alena Buyx
Director, Institute for History and Ethics of Medicine Technical University of Munich (TUM)
Prof. Dr. med. Alena Buyx is Professor of Ethics in Medicine and Health Technologies and Director of the Institute for History and Ethics of Medicine at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). She has previously held appointments at the University of Kiel, University of Münster; Harvard University, and University College London; and she was Assistant Director of the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, London.
Alena Buyx is a medical doctor with postgraduate degrees in philosophy and sociology. Her research spans the whole field of biomedical and public health ethics, with a particular focus on the ethics of medical innovation and health technologies, such as embodied AI in health. She also works on various issues in research ethics and questions of solidarity and justice in public health and health care provision (see recent book Solidarity in Biomedicine and Beyond, Cambridge University Press 2017, with Barbara Prainsack). She pursues an interdisciplinary approach of embedded ethics and collaborates with clinical colleagues as well as with colleagues from various other disciplines. She is a member of various national, international and university committees, regularly advises large international research consortia and is a sought-after speaker and expert for media appearances. She has been a member of the German Ethics Council since 2016 and was appointed to the WHO Expert Advisory Committee on Developing Global Standards for Governance and Oversight of Human Genome Editing in 2019..
Paul Newman
Co-Founder & CTO at Oxbotica
Paul Newman is Co-Founder & CTO at Oxbotica, the universal autonomy software company. He creates and leads teams building the technology that will drive the next generation of autonomous vehicles.
His pioneering approach to autonomy is being successfully harnessed for real-world application at Oxbotica – on roads in four continents, down mines, across warehouses and around airports.
With a global reputation as a creator and innovator of autonomous vehicle (AV) technology, Paul is also BP Professor of Information Engineering at the University of Oxford, and Founder & Director of Oxford Robotics Institute.
Guy Avery
Software Development Manager at Navtech Radar Ltd
Following a short career as an infantry officer, Guy became involved in software engineering within the telecoms industry during the rapid expansion of high speed data services. Following several roles as a development manager, he joined Navtech Radar in 2008 with the remit of expanding and modernising the company’s software products. Over the last 10 years he has contributed to the Navtech sensor and software solution evolving from a little-understood novelty to a world-leading security and safety system.
David Clifton
Professor of Clinical Machine Learning, University of Oxford
Professor Clifton is with the Department of Engineering Science of the University of Oxford. He is a Research Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and leads the Computational Health Informatics (CHI) Laboratory, which focuses on creating healthcare interventions based on AI. His research focuses on the development of machine learning for healthcare technologies. Prof. Clifton’s research has been awarded 25 scholarships and prizes, including a Grand Challenge award from the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, which is a personal award that provides long-term strategic support for “future leaders in healthcare”. In 2018, his lab of 27 researchers opened a second site in China, with support from the Chinese government, and in 2019 will open the Wellcome Trust’s first “Flagship Centre”, which aims to improve hospital care in resource-constrained settings from its base in Vietnam. He is the AI Research Director of Sensyne Health, a British “Clinical AI” company listed on the London Stock Exchange in 2018. With collaborators, he was Overall Winner of the inaugural Vice-Chancellor’s Innovation Award in 2018 which aims to recognise leading interdisciplinary research across the entirety of Oxford University.
Claire Bloomfield
Chief Operating Officer, National Consortium of Intelligent Medical Imaging
Claire is a senior research management professional, with experience of working both directly as an academic researcher and also as a senior research administrator.
Claire obtained her Doctorate in Neuroscience at the University of Oxford, and held research fellowships in Oxford and the United States before moving into a career as a research management professional. Claire worked for the Medical Research Council, the largest of the seven publicly funded government agencies responsible for coordinating and funding research in the UK. Claire supported the research funding and governance activities of 700 researchers across the MRC Units and Institutes in the South East, and was involved with establishing the first MRC University Units- a new strategic concept for the MRC.
Claire then returned to the University of Oxford, to establish the CRUK Oxford Centre. The Centre was a new type of entity for the University, being a virtual centre with the mission to facilitate research across a variety of disciplines and different Departmental structures to enhance cancer research activity at the University and Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. The Centre’s research mission to harness world-leading science to cure cancer is delivered through a model of boundary spanning networking and facilitation of new research activities.
Claire has supported a range of high-profile multidisciplinary and pan-Divisional grant initiatives for the University (with a combined value of over £250m), and has most recently focused on early detection for cancer and the use of AI for health care. Claire is now leading the delivery of one of these initiatives, as COO for the new National Consortium of Intelligent Medical Imaging, which will be the launchpad for further growth of AI for health care in the university.
She also oversees new strategic initiatives in cancer research across the university, through her role as the Head of Strategy and Innovation for the CRUK Oxford Centre.
Rt. Hon. Lord Drayson
Chief Executive Officer, Sensyne Health plc
Lord Drayson is an engineer and science entrepreneur. Following his PhD in robotics he has over 25 years of experience in founding and leading successful businesses built on science and technology.
His latest venture is Sensyne Health plc, a Clinical Artificial Intelligence company, which listed on the AIM market of the London Stock Exchange in August 2018.
In addition to his experience as a science entrepreneur, he was a Defence Minister and Minister for Science and Innovation in the UK Government between 2005 and 2010 following his appointment to the House of Lords in 2004. He is a member of Her Majesty’s Privy Council, a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, an Honorary Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences and a non-executive director of Airbus. He is passionate about motorsport and currently holds three world land speed records for electric vehicles.
Mari Sako
Professor of Management Studies at Saïd Business School
Mari Sako is Professor of Management Studies at Saïd Business School and a Fellow of New College, University of Oxford. Her areas of expertise include global strategy, outsourcing and offshoring, and professional services. Her current research includes the impact of artificial intelligence on legal business models, funded by the UKRI-ESRC programme “Unlocking the Potential of AI for English Law”
She is member of the advisory board of Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute, and conducted studies of Alternative Legal Services Providers in 2016 and 2018. She teaches Global Strategy for the Executive MBA and directs the Oxford Diploma in Global Business.
Professor Sako read Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE) at Oxford, and holds an MSc and a PhD in Economics. She taught at the London School of Economics, and held visiting positions in France, the US and Japan. Mari made a significant contribution to the understanding of Japanese firms and the auto industry through the MIT International Motor Vehicle Program (IMVP). Insights from the fieldwork to understand lean production and quality control are also informing her more recent research on what professionals such as lawyers do.
Ross Upton
CEO & Founder, Ultromics
Ross is the founder and CEO of Ultromics, a University of Oxford tech company that has built an AI based platform to predict patient outcomes in the field of cardiovascular imaging. The “EchoGo” platform will improve both clinical outcomes in patients and save billions for healthcare systems world-wide. Ross has a broad scientific background in clinical science and biomedical engineering having undertaken 1 undergraduate and 3 graduate degrees, receiving multiple grants for technology innovation, being selected as finalist for the 2015 Young Investigator Award in Lisbon and most recently being an inductee on the 2019 Forbes 30 under 30 lists: “Science and Healthcare” and “Big Money” .
Aiden Doherty
Group Leader in Biomedical Data Science
Aiden Doherty is a group leader in biomedical data science at the University of Oxford. His research interest is in the development of reproducible computational methods to extract meaningful health information from complex and noisy sensor data in very large health studies. This builds on experience at Microsoft Research, Dublin City University (both in computing departments) and the University of Oxford (population health and biomedical engineering). In 2015 Aiden was one of only three Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions COFUND Award winners (selected from ~9000 Marie-Curie fellowship holders between ’07-’13) for his contributions to health sensor data analysis.
Manjari Chandran-Ramesh
Investment Director, IP Group plc
Dr. Manjari Chandran-Ramesh, is an Investment Director within the Technology Partnership at IP Group plc where she takes an active role as a non-executive director in various software assets of the portfolio whilst also evaluating new opportunities. She brings over 8 years of software commercialisation experience focussing on AI, robotics, machine learning and quantum computing. At IP Group, she has been responsible for the trade sale of TheySay Ltd. Manjari has a PhD from University of Oxford (Prof. Paul Newman) which she did on a Rhodes Scholarship. Immediately prior to her current role she worked at Oxford University in its Innovation department and earlier to that as a post-doctoral researcher in the Computer Science department.
Michael Veale
Lecturer in Digital Rights and Regulation, University College London Faculty of Laws
Michael Veale is Lecturer in Digital Rights and Regulation at University College London Faculty of Laws and Digital Charter Fellow at the Alan Turing Institute. He specialises in technology law and policy concerning the social impacts of machine learning and privacy-preserving data analysis, and social considerations around data-driven technologies on the ground. He holds a PhD in Science, Technology, Engineering & Public Policy from UCL on ‘Governing Machine Learning That Matters’. His research has been cited by national and international bodies, regulators, the media, been presented in the US Senate and debated in Parliament. He has consulted for a range of national and international organisations around data-driven technologies and society, including the European Commission, World Bank, the Commonwealth, the Law Society and the Royal Society and the British Academy. He tweets at @mikarv.
Alan Winfield
Senior Research Fellow, Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford
Alan Winfield is Professor of Robot Ethics at the University of the West of England (UWE), Bristol, UK, Visiting Professor at the University of York, and Associate Fellow of the Cambridge Centre for the Future of Intelligence. He received his PhD in Digital Communications from the University of Hull in 1984, then co-founded and led APD Communications Ltd until taking-up appointment at UWE, Bristol in 1992. Winfield co-founded the Bristol Robotics Laboratory where his current research is focused on the science, engineering and ethics of cognitive robotics.
Winfield is an advocate for robot ethics; he sits on the executive of the IEEE Standards Association Global Initiative on Ethics of Autonomous and Intelligent Systems, and chairs Working Group P7001, drafting a new IEEE standard on Transparency of Autonomous Systems. He has recently been appointed a member of the World Economic Forum Global AI Council. Winfield has published over 240 works, including Robotics: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2012); he lectures widely on robotics, presenting to both academic and public audiences, and blogs at http://alanwinfield.blogspot.com/
Sorin Cheran
AI Chief Technologist at Hewlett Packard Labs
Sorin Cheran has spent many years driving the Artificial Intelligence programme at Hewlett Packard and now works with Global Vice President Beena Ammanath on the development of HPE’s commercial AI offering. His work at HPE spearheads the development of the AI-as-service business model, providing companies with a way to make best use of their data. Sorin is passionate about AI but also strongly believes in the socially-aligned importance of beneficial and ethical AI. He obtained his PhD in Computer Science (Artificial Intelligence) from Universita degli Studi di Torino in Italy and also has a Masters in Nuclear Physics.
Martin de Heaver
Managing Director, ORBIT (Observatory for Responsible Research and Innovation in ICT)
Martin de Heaver is formerly Executive Director at CPC and has founded and run a number of new and established enterprises. He has also been supporting new entrepreneurs as a judge and mentor at the London Business School since 2004. He has also delivered research projects funded by EU frameworks 4/5 and 7 and InnovateUK, and is a former Visiting Senior Research Fellow at King’s College London.
Jun Zhao
Senior Research Fellow, Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford
Jun Zhao is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on enabling better transparency and control of personal information, analysing what happens to personal data, and designing interfaces to present this information to the users. This personal information can be generated by a wide range of digital things, like smartphones, smart home devices, etc. I care about building better technologies to empower users so that they can have better controls and knowledge about what happens to their personal data.
Currently, Zhao leads the EPSRC IAA KOALA project, spreading the word on privacy risks associated with children’s usage of mobile devices, to schools and young families. She received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Manchester and was a Lecturer at Lancaster University before joining Oxford University in 2015
Antoniya Georgieva
Scientific Director of the Oxford Centre for Fetal Monitoring Technologies, University of Oxford
Dr Antoniya Georgieva is based at the Nuffield Department of Women’s and Reproductive Health and at the Big Data Institute, University of Oxford. She developed her career building on her expertise in machine learning and mathematics, but specialising in data analytics for monitoring the fetus during childbirth. Dr Georgieva is leading an ambitious programme to develop data-driven decision-support in this clinical field, by working with the world’s largest and most complete birth cohort of routinely collected maternity and fetal monitoring data (100,000 births and growing). The goal of her team’s work is to ultimately benefit families and health providers by reducing fetal brain injuries, perinatal deaths and unnecessary interventions during childbirth.
Alex Rogers
Professor of Computer Science, University of Oxford
Alex Rogers is a Professor of Computer Science who applies artificial intelligence and machine learning within physical sensor systems to address real-world problems focusing on sustainability. His recent work has addressed future energy systems, such as the smart grid, citizen science platforms, and environmental monitoring. He was the co-founder of a home heating advice spin-out, called Joulo, that combined a unique low-cost temperature logger with cloud-based analytics. His current work focuses on the development of a low-cost, open-source, smart acoustic sensor, called AudioMoth, which is widely used for environmental and biodiversity monitoring.
Scott Osprey
NCAS Scientist, Department of Physics, University of Oxford
Scott’s research focuses on better understanding climate variability and improving the representation of this variability within global climate models. This work includes identifying and accounting for the effects of modelled processes not otherwise resolved, but nonetheless thought important for climate impacts. One such example includes the intermittent and small-scale waves born of random tropical convection which combine to produce the most conspicuous mode of climate variability beyond the seasonal cycle – the QBO. Scott is interested in new ways of applying machine learning (ML) techniques for constraining these small-scale effects within climate models. He is also interested in applying new ML tools for identifying causal pathways linking different components of the climate system.
Following study at the University of Canterbury in his native New Zealand, Scott took up a position at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire applying novel inverse methods to ocean-atmosphere models of the North-Atlantic. In 2004 he moved to the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford before becoming a core scientist with the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS). He is a coordinator of multi-national research groups: QBOi – towards improving our understanding of winds within the tropical stratosphere; and GOTHAM – a Belmont-Forum / JPI-Climate consortium examining climate teleconnections and their impact on vulnerable regions.
Helen Margetts
Professor of Society and the Internet at the University of Oxford
Helen Margetts is Professor of Society and the Internet at the University of Oxford, and from 2011 to 2018, she was Director of the Oxford Internet Institute. She is now Director of the Public Policy Programme at the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. From 2000 to 2004, she was Professor of Political Science and Director of the School of Public Policy at UCL. She holds degrees in Mathematics (Bristol), Politics (LSE) and Government (LSE). She has researched and written extensively on the relationship between technology, politics, pubic policy and government including over 100 articles and and six books on the topic, the latest of which (co-authored with a multi-disciplinary team) is Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action, which won the Political Studies Association’s W.J.Mackenzie prize for best politics book in 2017. She sits on the UK government Digital Economy Council, the Home Office Scientific Advisory Council and the Board of the Ada Lovelace Institute. In 2018 she received the Friedrich Schiedel prize from the Technical University of Munich for research and research leadership in technology and politics. In 2019 she was awarded the OBE for services to social and political science in the Queen’s new year’s honours list, and was made a Fellow of the British Academy.
Frank Von Delft
Professor of Structural Chemical Biology, University of Oxford
Frank von Delft is Professor of Structural Chemical Biology at the University of Oxford, where he heads the Protein Crystallography group of the Structural Genomics Consortium; and Principal Beamline Scientist at Diamond Light Source, head of the I04-1 experimental station and the associated world-first XChem facility for fragment screening.
He is also Visiting Professor at the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Johannesburg. As structural biologist, he is seeking to reshape how protein structure determination transforms rational drug design, by developing and making the new methodologies and tools available through platforms and products to ensure they are widely and routinely used by researchers world-wide.
John Fox
Chairman, OpenClinical CIC; Chief Scientific Officer, Deontics Ltd; Professor of Cognitive Science and Systems Engineering, Lincoln College – Oxford University
John has spent most of his career working in artificial intelligence and cognitive science. He was educated at Durham and Cambridge universities and then spent a period in the USA with AI Founders Allen Newell and Herbert Simon at Carnegie-Mellon University. He returned to the UK to join the Medical Research Council where he worked on clinical decision systems and trialled possibly the first real-time AI diagnosis system in the NHS.
In 1981 he joined the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (now Cancer Research UK) where he set up the Advanced Computation Laboratory which straddled computer science, artificial intelligence and biomedical software engineering. The group was awarded the 20th Anniversary Gold Medal of the European Federation of Medical Informatics for its work on PROforma, a formal language for modelling clinical decisions and care pathways (J Am Medical Informatics Association 2003), and associated software for supporting patient care. This technology has been used in a wide range of clinical applications, with some 15+ successful published trials.
In 2007 he moved to Oxford University to set up an interdisciplinary collaboration in cognitive science and systems, in collaboration with Edinburgh University and UCL which included a clinical applications incubator programme at the Royal Free Hospital.
He has led or co-founded a number of AI startups including Expertech (acquired by Inference Corp) and InferMed (acquired by Elsevier); the collaboration between Oxford and the Royal Free Hospital led to a commercial spinout, Deontics (www.deontics.com), and OpenClinical, a social enterprise aimed at improving patient care through innovative AI and knowledge engineering techniques (www.openclinical.net).
John has published widely in computer science and software engineering as well as AI and cognitive science. His book Safe and Sound: Artificial Intelligence in Hazardous Applications (MIT Press 2000) still appears to be the only general treatment of the safe use of AI in medicine and other critical fields. He can be contacted through his LinkedIn page at https://www.linkedin.com/in/john-fox-914a19b/.
Alejo Nevado-Hogado
Director of Artificial Intelligence at Cristal Health; Informatics Lead for TNDR
He is also the Director of Artificial Intelligence at Cristal Health. For both roles and groups, their focus is on the applications of machine learning and bioinformatics to mental health care.
The main technologies that they apply and develop in their laboratory are bioinformatics, artificial intelligence and high performance computing, and they apply these to data coming from biotech laboratories (i.e. genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics and metabolomics from human samples and iPSC cells) and hospitals or GP practices (i.e. Electronic Health Records and cohorts of volunteer patients). In the case of biotech data, bioinformatics methods allow them to know which are the metabolic processes associated with neurological diseases, such that appropriate pharmaceutical targets and drugs can be developed. In the case of hospital and GP data, artificial intelligence and neural networks allow them to extract from the text notes written by doctors what are the diagnoses, medications, symptoms and medical test results of millions of patients, which in turn can be analysed to evaluate the most efficient treatment per patient (personalised medicine), or whether certain drugs are serendipitously ameliorating psychiatric conditions (drug repurposing). Often, they combine biotech and hospital/GP data to validate laboratory results with real world evidence, such that any target or treatments we propose increases its chances of succeeding in the final stages of clinical trials. In all cases, high performance computing is the software (e.g. concurrent programming, threading or CUDA) and hardware (e.g. our 40 GPUs computational cluster) of choice to perform all these calculations in hours rather than years.
Nick de Pennington
Innovation & Population Health Lead at OUH NHS Trust, Founder and CEO of Ufonia, Co-founder of The Hill
Background as a neurosurgeon with over 15 years of frontline clinical experience.
Start-up entrepreneur and co-founder of health innovation lab.
Ufonia (autonomous speech-based monitoring of health) is applying artificial intelligence technologies to solve the biggest challenges in healthcare.
Jessica Morley
AI project lead at DHSC/NHSX & MSc Student at Oxford Internet Institute
Since studying the social impact of digital technologies for my undergraduate degree thesis at the University of Oxford in 2012, I have been passionate about understanding the ethical, philosophical and practical ramifications of the increasing use of technology in critical industries, notably healthcare and financial services. I have gained extensive experience in this time in how to research (both quantitatively and qualitatively) and design evidence-based policies in response, to ensure technology can be utilised to help people, organisations and society achieve collectively-desired aims whilst minimising the potential negative ramifications. This has included experience in managing multi-stakeholder projects and culminated in my spending the a significant proportion of the last couple of years as the lead tech advisor for data-driven tech at UK Department of Health and Social Care (soon to be NHSX), leading the development and co-authoring of the Code of Conduct for data-driven health and care technologies and several other related programmes – including designing the State of the Data-Driven HealthTech Ecosystem survey. For the past year I have done this whilst also studying the for my MSc in social science of the Internet at the Oxford Internet Institute. Specifically, I study the ethics and philosophy of using healthcare information with Professor Luciano Floridi as a member of the Digital Ethics Lab.
