The tutors listed below may be subject to change.
Course Director
Based in London, Ajit's work spans research, entrepreneurship and academia relating to artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things (IoT).
Ajit is the Course Director and/or tutor for Continuing Education’s portfolio of artificial intelligence courses for professionals:
Ajit is also a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Engineering Science here at the University of Oxford.
He also 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).
Tutor
Dr David Mc Kee, Chair of the Open Source, Standards, and Platform Stacks at the Digital Twin Consortium / CEO, CTO and founder, Slingshot Simulations
Dr David McKee is the CEO, CTO and founder at Slingshot Simulations, an enterprise fellow at the Royal Academy of Engineering, and chairs the technology working groups at the OMG Digital Twin Consortium. As CTO at Slingshot since 2019 David leads the company’s work on Digital Twins working across Cloud, IoT, and machine learning platforms.
At the Digital Twin Consortium David jointly lead the work on standardising a Digital Twin definition and continues to lead the Technology, Terminology, and Taxonomy working group. He is also responsible for leading the Open Source Initiative and a collaborative effort including Microsoft, Bentley Systems, DELL, and NTT to define a reference architecture for building Digital Twin Systems.
Before forming Slingshot David was a senior researcher at the University of Leeds building these systems for partners including the likes of Jaguar Land Rover and AliCloud.
Tutor
Center for Design Research, Stanford University
Didem cares about the future of the world and nature. She is a computer scientist with a PhD in mechatronics, which can give you an idea about how much she loves to talk about the future and emerging technologies. She is a data person, always finds a way to talk about how important it is to know your data, use it to make decisions, and at some point, expect her to talk about art, visualizations, and visual analytics. Didem is a person who does not hesitate to talk about inequalities and point out her ethical concerns. She dreams of a better world and actively works on improving inequalities regardless of their nature. She is an analytical thinker with a passion for design thinking, a researcher with a future perspective, an engineer who likes problems more than solutions, and a teacher who likes to play during lectures. She is a good reader, sailor, divemaster, photographer, and drone pilot.
Currently, Didem is Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow on Human-centered and Sustainable Cyber-physical Systems at Stanford University. Her project focuses on intelligence, autonomy, and interoperability of cyber-physical systems. She uses data science, design thinking, future thinking, and systems thinking as guiding principles to design future intelligent and autonomous systems. The project is funded by European Commission's prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions which supports excellence in research and innovation. Prior to this project, she was at the Engineering Department of the University of Cambridge as a research associate for several years. She has worked at the intersection of data science and engineering projects with a focus on the design and implementation of digital twins for cyber-physical systems. In addition to being an IEEE Senior Member, she also sits on the advisory board of several organisations and support their strategic development on topics related to responsible artificial intelligence/data science, sustainable technology and equal STEAM education activities for young women.
Tutor
Dirk Hartmann is a distinguished scientist, intrapreneur, and thought leader in the field of Simulation and Digital Twins.
Among many distinctions, he has been awarded the prestigious Wernervon-Siemens Top Innovator by the Siemens CEO and CTO for generating novel products and services cross product lines through his innovations.
In his career he took several leading roles in research, innovation, and development including a lead of a 2-digit million Siemens R&D program and the technical leadership for the Simulation & Digital Twin field at Siemens Technology.
He is a passionate mentor, teacher, and supervisor for the next generation of innovators and experts exploring jointly promising Digital Twin solutions for the industry.
Beyond this, he is a member of several high-level international conference committees and associations like EU-MATH driving industrial mathematics both on a national, European, and international level.
Tutor
Lecturer in Engineering Education, King’s College London
Francesco is a Lecturer in the Department of Engineering at King’s College London, where he teaches interdisciplinary design and mechatronics. He previously worked in the Education Group at MathWorks and provided consultancy services to educators and researchers on the use of MATLAB & Simulink. Francesco has broad expertise in Simulation and Artificial Intelligence, 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 experimental fluid dynamics and a MEng in Civil Engineering from Imperial College London.
Course Director
Lars Kunze is a Departmental Lecturer in Robotics in the Oxford Robotics Institute (ORI) and the Department of Engineering Science at the University of Oxford. At ORI, he leads the Cognitive Robotics Group (CRG).
Lars is also a Stipendiary Lecturer in Computer Science at Christ Church, a Programme Fellow of the Assuring Autonomy International Programme (AAIP), and an Editor of the German Journal of Artificial Intelligence (KI Journal, Springer).
His areas of expertise lie in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence (AI). His goal is to enable robots to understand their surroundings, to act autonomously, and to explain their own behaviour in meaningful human terms. To this end, his research concerns the design and development of fundamental AI techniques for autonomous robot systems. He focusses on the combination of knowledge representation, reasoning, machine learning, and robot perception; motivated by applications in complex, real-world environments.
Lars studied Cognitive Science (BSc, 2006) and Computer Science (MSc, 2008) at the University of Osnabrück, Germany, and partly at the University of Edinburgh, UK.
He received his PhD (Dr. rer. nat.) from the Technical University of Munich, Germany, in 2014. During his PhD, Lars worked on methods for naive physics and common sense reasoning in the context of everyday robot manipulation. He contributed to several national, European and international projects including RoboHow, RoboEarth, and the PR2 Beta program.
In May 2013, Lars was appointed as a Research Fellow in the Intelligent Robotics Lab at the School of Computer Science at Birmingham University. Here he worked on qualitative spatio-temporal models for perception planning and knowledge-enabled perception, contributing to the European research projects STRANDS and ALOOF.
He was a visiting researcher in the JSK Lab at the University of Tokyo, Japan (Summer 2011) and the Human-Robot Interaction Laboratory at Tufts University, US (Spring 2015).
Tutor
Namrita is a senior strategic executive with CXO level success in leading organisations transform their businesses leveraging digital and technology.
Currently, she is the Chief Digital Officer at Aditya Birla Chemicals, Filaments and Insulators (CFI)
Over the past two decades she has been both an entrepreneur and part of the corporate world across sectors (Agriculture, Automotive, Chemicals, Retail, Travel & Hospitality, Technology), working in India, US & UK with FTSE 100 companies like Inchcape, Tata Group (USD$100bn), Mahindra Group (USD$20billion) & Aditya Birla Group (ABG, USD$60bn)
An award winning digital transformation thought leader and practioner, Namrita’s forte lies in creating competitive advantage for organisations by re-defining business models, re-imagining customer experiences, re-engineering business processes, building people capabilities and orchestrating shifts in organisation culture.
Over the past few years, particularly, Namrita has been leading the smart manufacturing & supply chain transformations working on building IIoT platforms which house digital twins for critical assets, driving energy optimisation, împroved asset & plant reliability, AR / VR & cobots led safety & training initiatives; logistics platforms for better cost & productivity efficiency; third party integrated business planning platforms for better demand forecasting, supply planning & dynamic scenario planning for the VUCA world we live in.
A technology evangelist, Namrita is deeply committed to building data driven organisations; fostering a data & analytics culture; driving Responsible AI, defining data & AI ethics policy & governance; predicting & mitigating data privacy & security risks; enabling data based value creation & responsible innovation.
Namrita is also an Independent Board Director and a Shadow Board member at CFI.
Additionally, she is a Start Up Mentor and Life & Leadership Transformation Coach and gives back to community by teaching and serving as an advisory member across different industry bodies including NASSCOM’s Cloud Advisory committee, one of the founding member’s of IAMAI’s Chief Digital Officer’s Club and across various committees at DMAi India
Namrita’s accolades include digital transformation awards for Taj Hotels, Club Mahindra, Mahindra Auto and Aditya Birla Chemicals.
More recently she was also the recipient of the CIO100 Game Changer Award by Foundry.
She was featured at TEDx Gateway Salon in Mumbai in November 2022 amongst the top ten women leaders at Aditya Birla Group who are Breaking Barriers and recognised in CXO Junction as one of the top 10 most followed Chief Digital Officer’s in India in Dec 2022.
Guest Speaker
CEO and Founder, Winniio
Reality Researcher and Digital Twin Specialist, Nicolas Waern is a widely recognized subject matter expert in leveraging digital twin technology to digitally transform the built environment lifecycle.
He is the co-chair of the Manufacturing working group, the telecommunication working group for the Digital Twin Consortium, the Director of Dcarbon Solutions, the interim CSO of EDX Technologies, and the founder and CEO of WINNIIO Consulting.
He has developed an innovative NASA-inspired reality improvement methodology for creating digital twins in any industry with special attention to the unique needs of real estate ecosystems through his globally recognized subject matter expertise in Smart Cities, Smart Buildings, BIM to Twin strategies and the Global energy transition.
Nicolas is a thought leader in edge native strategies, federated digital twinning, and distributed intelligence. Nicolas excels at consolidating fragmented IoT data sources into a strategic AI-ready data fabric for the built environment providing informed perspectives on immersive XR visualization and human-centered design considerations enabling path-creation strategies leveraging digital twins in the AEC space.
He is a keynote speaker, workshop leader, and sought-after educational expert when it comes to problem-solving, and digital transformation coupled with Digital Twin implementation strategies towards hi-fi holographic societies at scale coupled with 5G/6G national digital twin strategies.
Tutor
Rajkumar Bondugula has earned a M.S. and a Ph.D. from University of Missouri-Columbia, USA, both in Computer Science with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence (AI). He has co-authored 20 peer-reviewed scientific publications, a book titled "Application of Fuzzy Logic in Bioinformatics", 16 patent applications and his work has been cited over 250 times in the academic literature. He is a frequent guest lecturer in multiple universities, an executive faculty at Emory University Continuing Education, and a frequent podcast guest speaker. In nearly two decades, he has professionally used AI for computer vision, computational biology, e-commerce, social intelligence, Fintech and Telecom. In addition, he is also an expert in natural language processing and distributed computing.
He joins us from Verizon, where he is currently an AI Luminary Scientist and Data Science Fellow. He leads Digital Twin initiatives and is responsible for AI and Simulation modeling aspects of Digital Twins. In addition, he also leads the development of Cognitive Classifiers used for corporate data management.
Before Verizon, Raj was a Distinguished Scientist and a Fellow at Equifax. He was responsible for leading a team of Data Scientists and Big Data Engineers to develop innovative solutions to hard problems that lead to organizational growth in 3-5 years. Prior to Equifax, he did a brief stint at a startup called Shoutlet, established data science practice at Home Depot, lead a machine learning team at Sears Holdings Corporation and was a scientist at Department of Defense Biotechnology High Performance Computing Software Applications Institute.
Tutor
EDUCATION BUSINESS LEADER, DASSAULT SYSTEMES, EURONORTH
Tamara MONTI is the Education business leader for global software company Dassault Systèmes in Northern Europe, with the main objective to empower the workforce of the future.
She is working closely with Education and Industry leaders to demonstrate the value of the 3DExperience platform to upskill all engineers to speed up sustainable innovation.
She earned a PhD degree in Electromagnetics in 2013 and has been a visiting researcher at the Trieste Synchrotron, at Temple University of Philadelphia and at the University of Maryland at College Park working on microwave nanotechnology.
She held a postdoctoral position at the University of Nottingham from 2014 to 2017 on high power microwave material processing.
In 2017, she joined CST, subsequently acquired by Dassault Systèmes as part the SIMULIA brand, where she was one of the computational electromagnetic experts, supporting customers in the transportation and mobility industries.
Course Tutor
Dr.prof. Yogita Khedkar-Chaudhar has 11 years of teaching experience and 15 years of counselling experience in Clinical Psychology.
She is assistant professor at New Arts, Commerce & Science College, Ahmednagar and a practising clinical psychologist.
She is interested in the future of education, including new pedagogies for inclusion.
Her work during COVID with students and the community has made her realize the need for new modes of engagement with learners to master skills rapidly and in non-conventional ways.
Yogita's research includes topics such as Emotional Maturity, game addiction, occupational stress, mental health and Women’s Mental Health, Statistical Analysis in Psychology, Social Adjustment and Motivational Conflicts.
Therapies she has practised include Cognitive Therapy, Behavioural Therapy, CBT, Person Centred Therapy, Psychoanalysis, Relaxation Techniques, Self-Hypnosis, Existential Therapy, Reality Therapy, Music Therapy.
She is working on pedagogies for learning in virtual environments.
Guest Speaker
Director of the Center for Virtual Expression (VCeX)
College of Liberal Arts at Southern Illinois University
Pinckney Benedict graduated from Princeton University, where he worked primarily with the author Joyce Carol Oates, in 1986 with a bachelor’s degree in English and from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1988 with an MFA in Fiction.
He has published a novel and three collections of short fiction, the most recent of which is Miracle Boy and Other Stories. His work has been published in, among other magazines and anthologies, Esquire, Zoetrope: All-Story, the O. Henry Award series, the Pushcart Prize series, the Best New Stories from the South series, The Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction, and The Oxford Book of the American Short Story.
Benedict is the Director of the Center for Virtual Expression (VCeX) of the College of Liberal Arts at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, and the founder and director of SIUC’s Digital Humanities Laboratory.
