Keynote Speakers
Gillian Docherty OBE
Chief Executive Officer at The Data Lab
Abstract: The pace of change for our world will never be this slow again, we are in the heart of that change; leveraging technology and creativity to hopefully shape a new world and solve problems that matter. How do we make the most of the opportunities we have to make a difference, to use our skills and experience to help shape the future world for our children?
Short biography
Gillian Docherty is chief executive of The Data Lab, an innovation centre with a mission of maximising the value for Scotland from data. Gillian is passionate about the opportunity for using Data to drive economic and social benefits.
Formerly of IBM, Gillian is a visiting professor at Robert Gordon University, a TED speaker and was named Digital Leader 2018 for the UK.
Gillian was named CEO of the year at the Digital Technology Awards 2017 and was also in the UK’s top ten most influential people in data according to DataIQ. Gillian is on the Board of Glasgow Chamber of Commerce, a trustee of Beyonder Involve Charity and an Industry advisor to Previse.
Gillian has a degree in Computing Science from the University of Glasgow, an Honorary Doctorate from Robert Gordon University and is married with a daughter.
Paul Burt
Engineering Manager at BBC
We are All Stories
The BBC has the oldest and largest media archive of its kind anywhere in the world. Paul Burt of BBC Design and Engineering will discuss the technical challenges of making this vast and unique archive available and searchable to content producers, and unleashing a new wave of machine learning tools on it to help discover the as yet untold stories that lurk within the data.
Short biography
Paul Burt is Engineering Manager for BBC Platform. Before joining the BBC, Paul worked as a systems and software engineer all over the world from Stockholm to Sydney, returning to his homeland of Scotland in 2013. He is lucky to work every day with the largest and longest-established media content archive of its kind anywhere in the world and has a passion for data, functional programming and serverless computing.
Dr Mathias Kern
Senior Research Manager, Resource Management & Optimisation at BT
Will AI make me redundant – an industrial researcher’s view
A real hype surrounds Artificial Intelligence (AI) and in particular Machine Learning (ML) right now, and many corporations rush to adopt AI techniques across their businesses. Advances in these areas will surely transform our world, and their impact on the jobs of the future is hotly debated by academia, industry and the press. While some argue that many jobs will be lost, others point to the enormous potential of AI creating new work opportunities. In this talk, we take a brief look at the history of AI, take stock of where we are and what is possible right now, and explore what the future work landscape might look like – all in the context of BT, one of the UK’s leading communication companies.
Short biography
Mathias Kern is a senior research manager in BT’s Applied Research team, and his research interests focus on the application of AI, optimisation and simulation techniques to real-life resource management problems. He gained his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Essex researching population-based optimisation methods, and has been with BT since 2004.