Lead Tutor and Course Director
Based in London, Ajit's work work spans research, entrepreneurship and academia relating to artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things (IoT).
He is the course director of the course: Artificial Intelligence: Cloud and Edge Implementations. Besides this, he also conducts the University of Oxford courses: AI for Cybersecurity and Computer Vision.
Ajit works as a Data Scientist through his company feynlabs - focusing on building innovative early stage AI prototypes for domains such as cybersecurity, robotics and healthcare.
Besides the University of Oxford, Ajit has also conducted AI courses in the London School of Economics (LSE), Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM) and as part of the The Future Society at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
He is also currently working on a book to teach AI using mathematical foundations at high school level.
Ajit was listed in the top 30 influencers for IoT for 2017 along with Amazon, Bosch, Cisco, Forrester and Gartner by the German insurance company Munich Re.
Ajit publishes extensively on KDnuggets and Data Science Central.
He was recently included in top 16 influencers (Data Science Central), Top 100 blogs (KDnuggets), Top 50 (IoT central), and 19th among the top 50 twitter IoT influencers (IoT Institute).
His PhD research is based on AI and Affective Computing (how AI interprets emotion).
Guest Speaker
Embedded Vision Solution Architect, Programmable Solutions Group, Intel
Jahanzeb Ahmad joined Intel Programmable Solutions Group (PSG) formally known as Altera in 2013 and is currently working as Embedded Vision Solution Architect. His current responsibilities include architecting machine learning software/hardware architectures and solutions and help customers achieve best possible AI solution on Intel FPGAs. Prior to joining PSG, Jahanzeb did his PhD in computer vision and medical engineering from University of The West of England, Bristol, UK.
Guest Speaker
JJ Bernard has an MSc in Engineering from the Ecole Centrale de Marseille and an MBA from the University of Cambridge. He is also a certified Lean Six Sigma Black Belt.
He currently works at Oracle as a strategy consultant, advising client on their technology investment with regards to their business strategy.
Previously, he has worked as a project manager for Orphoz, a subsidiary of McKinsey & Company, focusing on defining and executing transformation projects.
He has worked in diverse environments such as manufacturing, FMCG, public sector, steelmaking, mining, healthcare and automative.
He has also worked for Accenture, both on business and IT transformation projects, for the financial services industry and the public sector.
Guest Speaker
A Computer Engineering graduate and currently only the 6th Grandmaster in the Datasets tier on Kaggle, Ruchi started her Kaggle journey in the month of May this year and it has been one of her quickest feats. She will be pursuing her Master's degree in Information Systems Management at Carnegie Mellon University from next fall.
Having started coding at an early age and also having completed her Bachelor’s, her interest in this field has only grown with time. She gravitates more towards Data Science and Data Analysis. Working in the technology sector of various MNCs like Sony and Colgate-Palmolive has given her relevant experience in the industry. As businesses today are becoming more inextricably linked with information technology, she strives to utilize her expertise to bridge the gap between technology and business.
Her key interest lies solely in sharing her technical expertise with people. She thoroughly enjoys tackling problems pertaining to technology and coming up with novel ideas. She also believes in Kata - the Japanese ideology of thinking before acting which enables her to be able to focus on not only continuous improvement, but also innovation.
Guest Speaker
Chief Executive Officer, Arctoris
Martin-Immanuel Bittner MD DPhil is the Chief Executive Officer of Arctoris, the world's first fully automated drug discovery platform that he co-founded in 2016. He graduated as a medical doctor from the University of Freiburg in Germany, followed by his DPhil in Oncology as a Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford.
Dr Bittner has extensive research experience covering both clinical trials and preclinical drug discovery and is an active member of several leading cancer research organisations, including EACR, AACR, and ESTRO. In recognition of his research achievements, he was elected a member of the Young Academy of the German National Academy of Sciences in 2018.
Guest Speaker
Consultant, Data Visualisation
Barend Botha is a UK-based consultant working predominantly in the field of data visualisation.
He is particularly interested in the growing future potential and roles that data analytics and visualisation will play across IoT verticals in in combination with Artificial Intelligence and the resulting products and insights for business and consumers alike.
He draws upon past experience in research, design, development, management and marketing across various domains and disciplines.
Guest Speaker
Senior Cloud Advocate, AI/ML, Microsoft
Amy Boyd is a Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft, having obtained a degree in Computer Science, completing a research project in Natural Language Processing/Machine Learning and an internship at Microsoft’s search engine, Bing.
Amy is passionate about Data Science and Machine Learning and her roles at Microsoft have allowed her to work on many different areas of data science (visualisation, ML, big data, IoT) as well as working on projects with customers across the globe.
Her role as a Senior Developer Advocate helps developers to engage with Microsoft around Microsoft Azure and specifically the Azure AI services by providing content, learnings, and sample code. You will find her sharing her content and learnings online and at in-person events.
Guest Speaker
Technical Account Manager, MathWorks
Francesco is the Technical Account Manager at MathWorks for the University of Oxford. He works in the Education Customer Success Engineering Group and consults educators and researchers on the use of MATLAB & Simulink for their projects. Francesco has broad expertise in Artificial Intelligence, including machine, deep and reinforcement learning techniques with application to Robotics & Control systems, signal processing and IoT. He also holds a PhD in Engineering from the University of Cambridge for his work in image analysis applied to experimental fluid dynamics and a MEng in Civil Engineering from Imperial College London.
Guest Speaker
Ex-Chief Technology Officer, Ocado
Paul Clarke has recently stepped down as Chief Technology Officer at Ocado - a world leader in smart fulfilment and logistics.
After joining Ocado in 2006, Paul initially worked on warehouse control systems and then joined the team designing Ocado’s next highly automated fulfilment centre. After establishing new teams for Simulation and Mobile development, Paul then co-wrote the first of Ocado’s award winning mobile apps.
Ocado Technology, with its 2000+ engineers, is responsible for building all the technology that powers Ocado's end-to-end e-commerce, fulfilment and logistics platforms.
Ocado are now busy signing deals with large bricks & mortar grocery retailers around the world who wish to use the Ocado Smart Platform to operate online grocery scalably, sustainably and profitably.
Having handed over the leadership of Ocado Technology in April 2018, Paul led the Office of the CTO whose mission includes exploring opportunities to use Ocado's technologies and competencies to disrupt other sectors (including vertical farming), research activities and the technology vision and future proofing of the business.
Paul read Physics at Oxford University, before then entering the computer industry. He has worked in software engineering, consultancy, interim management and a number of software start-ups.
Paul sits on a number of government and industry advisory boards including the AI Council, Robotics Growth Partnership (co-chair), ISCF Future Flight, National Food Strategy and the Innovation Expert Group.
In what little spare time he has alongside his work and family, Paul loves to invent and build stuff, design PCBs, write software and generally tinker.
Guest Speaker
Marina is a CTRM Analyst Developer at Anglo American Plc. She has over 15 years experience in Software Engineering, Business Analysis, Agile, project management and full software life cycle in a variety of business domains including Commodity trading and Finance, Machine Learning and AI, e-commerce, e-learning, web-development.
Marina holds an MSc in Software Engineering from University of Oxford and Applied Mathematics degree from Lomonosov Moscow State University.
In February 2020, Marina completed the course "Data science for internet of things" from the University of Oxford.
Guest Speaker
Senior Software Engineer, Microsoft
Since joining Microsoft in 1994, Paul Foster has worked across a wide range of sectors and customers, providing a mix of technical and strategic guidance around the creative use of technology in relation to their business needs.
Paul is currently a principal software engineer at Microsoft. As an established public speaker across Europe and having spent a considerable amount of time working on the cutting edge of technology providing leadership and inspiration on topics like Smart Devices, Cloud Computing, Education and App Development.
Paul is currently focusing on the building of next generation sensor webs which automate the gathering of data from disparate sources, and how to enable the creative analysis of this data to start a new era of perception.
For a short time Paul was a member of a high-wire flying trapeze circus troupe, is a keen roboticist and an international marathon runner.
Guest Speaker
System Architect, Arm
Rob Dimond is System Architect and Fellow at Arm. Rob works in the Architecture and Technology group at Arm where his focus is developing technology in a 3-5 year time horizon for the infrastructure segment (servers and networking). Prior to Arm, Rob was Chief Hardware Architect at FPGA computing startup Maxeler. Rob holds degrees in Electronic Engineering and Computer Science from Imperial College, London.
Guest Speaker
Senior Data Scientist, Smartia Ltd.
Dan is Senior Data Scientist at Smartia, an IOT and AI start-up, where he uses data science to provide value to manufacturing companies.
He previously worked as Senior Consultant for Altran Digital, an engineering and R&D consultancy, and as a Data Scientist at Rolls-Royce, working to apply machine learning to improve manufacturing processes for high value parts.
As well as qualifications in machine learning, Dan is a Chartered Management Accountant and Governor at City of Bristol College, the largest further education institution in the South West of England.
Guest Speaker
Digital Technology Lead, Thales UK
Saed Hussain has been an R&D scientist within Thales UK for 2 years.
He is currently working as a Digital Technology Lead in the aviation business of Thales UK, where he promoting data driven technology and application of AI within the industry.
He is passionate about robotics, IoT and AI applications.
He has a PhD in Neural Network applications and a BEng (Hons) in Robotics.
Guest Speaker
Technical Lead & Senior Quantitative Engineer in the Infrastructure Team, Facebook London
Ghida is a technical lead & senior quantitative engineer in the infrastructure team at Facebook London, where she drives cross-functional efforts around leveraging automation and data science to help scale and optimize Facebook massive infrastructure. In this context, she co-leads an effort around deploying and operating a more product-aware infra, and was recognized as an outstanding contributor to keeping Facebook infra stable in the wake of COVID19-induced demand explosion on Facebook family of apps. Prior to joining Facebook, Ghida worked for 6+ years in the Telco and media industries, in France and the Netherlands in multiple analytics and engineering roles, mainly focusing on capacity scaling and performance optimization of large-scale distributed systems. She holds a PhD and master’s (Diplome d’Ingénieur) in computer engineering from Telecom ParisTech, France top Grande Ecole in ICT. She got her PhD at 26.
In addition to her job, Ghida built Rafiqi, an award-winning platform that leverages artificial intelligence (AI) for connecting refugees to life opportunities. She is a data science trainer who delivered in-person workshops on data science and machine learning to hundreds of domain outsiders, and prepared and delivered the first MOOC on data science in Arabic attracting 27k+ learners. She is an appointed member of the World Economic Forum (WEF) Global Future Councils since 2016, a member of the WEF expert Network, and a WEF Global Shaper who served as a co-curator of the Oxford Hub.
Ghida is a TED speaker and has delivered dozens of lectures and technical talks in academic and industry settings. She also served as an advisor and board member of many NGOs working on bringing more minorities into tech. Ghida has multiple patents and academic publications to her name, and occasionally contributes to technology blogs and to the World Economic Forum Agenda. Most recently, she was recognized as a Franco-British Young Leader, among 20 other leaders from the UK and France including MPs, reputed scientists and artists, in charge of fostering relationships between France and the UK and shaping its future across sectors of society and economy.
Guest Speaker
Anjali is a Digital Solutions Architect at Metrobank, where she helps to deliver advanced technology driven business solutions around diverse themes of Internet Banking, Mobile App, Business banking, and Open banking/PSD2, using agile methodology.
She has over 16 years of IT experience and worked across Banking, Telecom and logistics domains, from inception to the delivery of complex projects.
Anjali is passionate about AI and Machine learning and completed the course "Data science for internet of things" in February 2019 from the University of Oxford.
Guest Speaker
Manager, Verizon 5G London Lab
Cynthia manages Verizon’s 5G London Lab and works closely with senior stakeholders of FTSE 100 companies to identify and solve business challenges through the use of 5G and multi access edge compute. She previously worked for Verizon’s Innovation Lab based in Waltham, MA and San Francisco, CA in a similar capacity, primarily focused on IoT and applications of the future as the standards for 5G were being tested and developed.
Cynthia holds a Bachelor’s degree in Child Advocacy and family policy from the University of New Hampshire.
Guest Speaker
Amita Kapoor is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electronics, SRCASW, University of Delhi, and has been actively teaching neural networks and artificial intelligence for over twenty years, and she is an active member of ACM, AAAI, IEEE, and INNS.
Amita completed her masters in Electronics in 1996 and her Ph.D. in 2011.
During her Ph.D she was awarded a prestigious DAAD fellowship to pursue a part of her research work in Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany. Amita was awarded the Best Presentation Award at the Photonics 2008 international conference.
Amita has more than 50 research publications in international journals and conferences, and has co-authored four books, including the best-selling “Deep learning with TensorFlow2 and Keras” with Packt Publications.
Passionate about using her skills for the betterment of society and humankind, Amita spends her spare time in various AI-related IoT and healthcare open source projects. She was recently awarded the Intel AI Spotlight Award 2019 for her work on the early detection of Acute Myeloid Leukemia using AI.
Amita’s present research areas include Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, IoT, Deep Reinforcement Learning, and Robotics.
Guest Speaker
Dr. Saeed is a futurist, thought leader, author, and a public keynote speaker. He is a veteran of the UAE technology industry with over 30 years of experience in driving technology adoption in various public sector organisations. He has been in many positions: the founder and former Director General of the Emirates ID Authority, a former member of the scientific advisory committee of the UAE Space Agency, and a former Advisor to the Minister of Foreign Affairs on information technology.
Currently, he is the director of the Center for Futures Studies at the University of Dubai, an adjunct lecturer of public policy science & technology track at the Mohammed Bin Rashid School of Government, the chairman of the board of Smartworld (a leading digital solutions provider in the UAE), President of the Digital Engineering Chapter at the UAE Society of Engineers, and a board member of the Emirates Safer Internet Society.
He is on advisory board of well-known startups including Virtual Rehab Inc and 01Gov, and also on advisory boards of several universities in the UAE.
He co-authored the book Digital Nation: How the UAE is building a future based on tech innovation. A first-of-its-kind book on the unique journey of the UAE to build a future based on harnessing disruptive technologies such as artificial intelligence and driving digital innovation.
He has written several articles and reports that were published at Harvard Business Review Arabia and Dubai Policy Review Journal.
Dr. Saeed’s main interest is in foresight and researching the impact of emerging technologies on business and society. He strives to drive futures thinking in leadership to influence shaping the future of governments and creating a better world for all.
He was recently interviewed as a special guest with Professor Dame Wendy Hall on Brave Conversation Southampton. Dr. Saeed has earned his PhD in biomedical Engineering from Drexel University, Philadelphia, USA in 1994.
Guest Speaker
Senior Software Engineer, Avast Software
Bojan Komazec has been working in IT industry for over 15 years. He currently holds the position of Senior Software Engineer in Avast Software where he develops various security and privacy products.
Bojan's interests span from code craftsmanship and cyber security to Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things. He is an active blogger and speaker at several IT Meetup groups where he enjoys sharing experience and knowledge.
Bojan studied Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications and in 2004 received master's degree from University of Novi Sad, Serbia.
Guest Speaker
Machine Learning Engineer, AppliedAI.de
Surya is a Machine Learning Engineer at AppliedAI.de, an AI hub based in Munich, Germany.
He started his journey in Artificial Intelligence during his studies at Imperial College London, where he worked on a range of Robotics and AI projects, including a biotechnology startup developing smart wear for reducing tremors.
He previously co-led the Cloud Google Developer Group in London.
Guest Speaker
Data Scientist
Jakub Langr graduated from the University of Oxford where he also taught at OU Computing Services. He has worked in data science since 2013, most recently as a Data Science Tech Lead at Filtered.com and as an R&D Data Scientist at Mudano. Jakub is an author of "GANs in Action" by Manning Publications, which has been translated to 5 languages.
Jakub also designed and taught Data Science courses at the University of Birmingham, numerous private companies. Jakub is currently the CEO of a Creation Labs, a stealth startup taking advantage of recent advances in computer vision.
Guest Speaker
Data Scientist
Ayşe Mutlu is a data scientist working on Azure AI and devops technologies. Based in London, Ayşe’s work involves building and deploying Machine Learning and Deep Learning models using the Microsoft Azure framework (Azure DevOps and Azure Pipelines).
She enjoys coding in Python and contributing to Open Source Initiatives in Python.
Guest Speaker
Philip is a doctoral student currently studying Artificial Intelligence at the University of Manchester with a Masters Degree in Data Science and Bachelors Degree in Mathematics. The primary focus of his research relates to the application of Reinforcement Learning to Real-World Tasks with the integration of Natural Language.
Philip first applied Reinforcement Learning in a commercial environment with his Master's dissertation to recommend the order and design of data visualisations for client presentations within an insurance consulting business.
Since then, he has demonstrated some of his other ideas publicly including meal planning and recommending strategy decisions within a popular video game. The public demonstrations have gained notoriety within the data science community, including two separate monetary awards from Kaggle (Google) for their novelty, and has put him at the forefront of the field.
Guest Speaker
Business Development Lead, Amazon Web Services Internet of Things (EMEA)
Claudiu is a senior professional with 20 years of experience in strategy, business analytics, data-driven decision systems and large-scale technology transformations.
He is currently the Business Development Lead for Amazon Web Services Internet of Things in Europe, Middle East and Africa.
He has significant experience in Internet of Things/ machine to machine technology and digital transformation using could computing platforms, from digital customer experience and digital processes to entire new lean enterprise business models.
Claudiu has a degree in Economics, an Executive MBA and a Master in Computer Science with focus on data analytics and expert systems/ artificial intelligence.
Guest Speaker
Head of EMEA Security Presales & Architecture, Verizon
Based in Oxfordshire, Suk has been working in the IT & telecoms industry for the last 20years. Suk has extensive experience in delivering large business transformation programs for enterprise customers as well as supporting in-house corporate strategy teams.
Suk currently leads the security enterprise architecture solutions practice for Verizon which has provided a great platform to work collaboratively with organisations in looking at how to plan, prepare and manage cyber security programs across multiple verticals and disciplines.
Suk has a MBA from Warwick Business school that focused on strategy and operations. Suk’s interests include the phenomena and impact that 5G will bring to the digital world and the opportunities of collaboration that come with it.
Guest Speaker
Daniela Petruzalek is a software engineer currently working on the data infrastructure team at GoCardless, a fintech based in London, UK. She is specialised in data and backend engineering, being a Google Cloud Certified Data Engineer and a Google Developer Expert in Go and GCP.
In her previous work, she was a tech lead at ThoughtWorks, helping to build a data platform for calculating credit scores, and a software engineer at Globo.com, leading the recommendation platform team.
In her spare time she likes to travel the world giving talks at tech conferences, contribute to open source projects, read and spend time with her cats.
Guest Speaker
CEO and founder, Emotion Research LAB
Maria Pocovi is CEO and founder of Emotion Research LAB, a computer vision company which explores how machines understand human emotions. Since 2014 the company has provided facial emotion recognition algorithms with on-line and on-premises solutions for real time applications.
Maria is passionate about human technology interaction and the process of bringing new applications to the market which help companies empower emotional sensing on devices to prepare brands to provide the next generation of services, products and experiences to their customers.
Maria graduated in Marketing and Business Administration from ESIC University, has an MBA from Catholic University in Valencia and an MBE from European University of Madrid.
Guest Speaker
Vice President, Deutsche Bank
Hamaad is a principal data scientist with expertise and experience in machine learning and quantitative analytics applied to banking and insurance.
He has extensive expertise in deep learning and Bayesian inference, among other areas of machine learning, applied to various financial services use cases such as Asset Liability Management (ALM) and actuarial pricing, among other financial services use cases.
Hamaad holds an MSc in Applicable Mathematics from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and a BSc in Economics from the University of Manchester.
Guest Speaker
Kajal is a Machine Learning Engineer working with Machine Learning and AI projects for a large global consultancy.
She has worked on use cases like anomaly detection, sentiment analysis, classification, transactional AI assistants, complex big data processing, data analytics, document digitisation etc. Kajal also has been a part of multiple hackathons conducted within and across IT industries.
She is also awarded with Amazon Pride Card for her research contribution to “Women In AI” project of IIIT, Bangalore
She has won special recognition for her project 'Transactional AI assistant'. She also has been honoured as 'Master Hacker' in Makeathon at a regional level in India.
Kajal has also been leading a research project (non-commercial) working with a German company on pricing optimization using Reinforcement Learning (RL).
Her project involves working on RL on pricing optimisation strategy for revenue increase and customer retention using a mixture of algorithms based on Markov Decision Processes (MDP).
Guest Speaker
Co-founder of Blesh
Devrim Sonmez is regarded as a high performing executive and entrepreneur with over 19 years of experience at intersection of digital and technology with various industries, over 10 years of Executive Board experience and taking a strategic role in securing M&A deals worth over $170 million in technology.
In 2013, he became the CEO and co-founder of Blesh Inc. which is an award winning and innovative start up in IoT space developing IoT platforms and solutions through its own research and development. It is among the top Global 5 Mobile Proximity Solution providers and is considered the first global beacon solution provider of Google Physical Web technology since 2014 with exports more than 30 countries.
He is still the Cofounder and the Board Member of Blesh.
Alongside these positions, Mr. Sonmez has sat on the board of several more companies and associations including IOT.ATL a program of US Metro Atlanta Chamber that intends to boost the region’s tech sector in the burgeoning industry of Internet of Things products and software, the highly prestigious TUBISAD (Turkish Informatics Industrialists Association) and English Ninjas (An innovative mobile startup for English practicing), where his influence plays an integral part in grow and success.
Devrim holds a Mathematics Bachelor of Science from the leading Turkish university in Ankara, the Middle Eastern Technical University graduating in 1998 and a Master of Business Administration from the Koc University in Istanbul, graduating in 2005.
Guest Speaker
Matthew (Matt) E. Taylor focuses his research on developing intelligent agents, physical or virtual entities that interact with their environments. His main goals are to enable individual agents, and teams of agents, to learn tasks in real-world environments that are not fully known when the agents are designed; to perform multiple tasks, rather than just a single task; and to robustly coordinate with, and reason about, other agents.
Additionally, he is interested in exploring how agents can learn from humans, whether the human is explicitly teaching the agent, the agent is passively observing the human, or the agent is actively cooperating with the human on a task.
Current approaches that his teams are investigating include working on improving reinforcement learning through demonstrations, teaching reinforcement learning systems through action advice, and training agents with discrete human feedback.
Matt is an Associate Professor of Computing Science at the University of Alberta and a Fellow and Fellow-in-Residence at Amii. He is the Director of the Intelligent Robot Learning (IRL) Lab and a Principal Investigator at the Reinforcement Learning & Artificial Intelligence (RLAI) Lab, both at the University of Alberta.
Matt is also Adjunct Professor at Washington State University and was formerly the Principal Researcher at Borealis AI in Edmonton, the artificial intelligence research lab for the Royal Bank of Canada.
He has been a PI or co-PI on over $6M USD in competitively awarded research funding from federal, state, and industrial sources, including the National Science Foundation CAREER award. He has (co-)supervised seven graduated PhD students and six graduated MS students, as well as published over 100 peer-reviewed papers in conferences and journals.
He has delivered invited talks for the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI).
