AICON Speakers 2019

Dr Adrian Johnston
Adrian is the Director of Operations for Digital Catapult NI tasked with accelerating the adoption of emerging digital technologies within NI based companies. Prior to Digital Catapult Adrian worked for Seagate Technologies for 20 years and lead the Advanced Analytics team.
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Dr Anna Jurek-Loughrey
Dr Anna Jurek-Loughrey is a lecturer in the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB).
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Dr Caoimhe Carbery
I am a Data Scientist at SmashFly where I focus on implementing AI algorithms to help the recruitment process. I have experience in a wide range of AI algorithms and applications, which I am now implementing within the company to develop unbiased algorithms for predicting candidates engagement.
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Chris Johnston
Chris is founder of Adoreboard, an Emotion AI platform for measuring human experiences. Its platform delivers Decision Ready Insights into consumer and employee experiences. Insights generated by Adoreboard’s Emotion AI power decision on experience for brands such as Telstra, Nike, Sky, BMW and Slack.
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Claire Houston
A Software Engineer at Kainos, Belfast, working primarily in AI and Machine Learning. A recent graduate, Claire is a core member of the Artificial Intelligence Capability and has been exploring the use of Chatbots and NLP to change how customers interact with services.

David Meredith
David is a software engineer with fifteen years dev-ops experience in the Web, Enterprise and Grid domains. He completed a PhD in the 2D and 3D computer modelling of lithosphere dynamics, later moving to STFC in 2004 to start a career in e-Science.
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Deepa Mann-Kler
Deepa is CEO of Neon an immersive health technology company; Visiting Professor In Immersive Futures with Ulster University and a Diversity & Inclusion Specialist.
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Frankie Garcia
Frankie Garcia is a Policy and Research Manager at Digital Catapult in London. Frankie works closely with machine learning startups and scaleups to understand their technical and business barriers.
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Kevin Curran
Kevin Curran is a Professor of Cyber Security, Executive Co-Director of the Legal innovation Centre and group leader of the Cyber Security and Web Technologies Research Group at Ulster University. He is also a senior member of the IEEE.
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Kieran McCorry
Kieran McCorry is the National Technology Officer for Microsoft in Ireland and has worked in the technology industry for over 28 years. He is responsible for representing Microsoft to broad audiences in areas such as technology leadership and AI, engendering trust, technology vision, strategic alignment, and relevant policy direction for Microsoft customers.
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Marc Cohen
I build tools, demos, codelabs, and other things to make the Google Cloud Platform easier and more fun to use. Originally from New Jersey, then Seattle, and now live and work in London. I co-authored a book about Google Compute Engine and wrote the product announcement demo. In a previous life, I developed communication systems at Bell Labs and Lucent Technologies.
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Matt Lee
Matt completed a Physics degree at the University of York in 2009 and then trained as a Medical Physicist with the NHS, gaining an MSc in Medical Physics and joined the register of clinical scientists.
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Michael McGoldrick
As Global Content Marketing Manager at MRP, Michael McGoldrick is currently responsible for the management of content across functions and silos to deliver an effective marketing strategy and editorial plan to meet business objectives at the lowest possible cost.
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Michelle Szaraz
Michelle Szaraz is an Innovation Delivery Manager at Digital Catapult in London. Michelle focuses on delivering and innovating Digital Catapult’s flagship AI programme - Machine Intelligence Garage.
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Neil Barlow
Currently Head of Vehicle Policy & Engineering for the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency – the body responsible for keeping the roads safe in Great Britain. Also overall service responsibility across MOT, Heavy Vehicle Testing, Heavy Vehicle Enforcement and Recalls.
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Niall Haslam
Responsible for product development and management for the software team as well as the architecture of the company’s automated segmentation processes. He has a multidisciplinary skillset, key to the company’s development of future products and services.
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Nikita Armstrong
Principal Full Stack Software Engineer with over 7 years’ experience. Currently working within the Applied Innovation space at Liberty IT. Passionate about front end development and has a keen interest in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.

Oliver Wilson
Oliver has ten years’ experience of software engineering, the majority of which he has spent in the gambling industry, in Europe and Asia.
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Dr. Paul O’Reilly
Dr. Paul O’Reilly is Head of Research and Algorithm Innovation at the Philips Computational Imaging, Discovery and Education centre in Belfast. He is a graduate of Queen’s University Belfast with a B.Eng in Mechanical Engineering and a PhD in Control Engineering.
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Dr. Radu Dobrin
Dr. Dobrin is the Head of the Oncology Bioinformatics group at Bristol-Myers Squibb and holds an Adjunct Professor position at Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai. His team is responsible for advancing Bristol-Myers Squibb’s industry leading oncology pipeline through the application of cutting edge bioinformatics approaches.
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Ricardo Sueiras
Ricardo is an enterprise evangelist at Amazon Web Services; he works with enterprise executives and technology leaders to help them adopt the cloud and transform their businesses. He has over twenty years of experience leading emerging technology and innovation programmes and has been working with cloud technologies since 2008. He is passionate about cloud, innovation and open source and is excited about how cloud accelerates and amplifies customers’ ability to innovate.
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Robert Grundy
Dr Robert Grundy is the founder of Anglezarke Life Sciences, Interim CEO of Health Innovation Research Alliance Northern Ireland and Chair of Matrix, Northern Ireland’s science and technology panel. He was previously CEO of CIGA Healthcare Ltd and Director of Commercial Development and Licensing at Almac Discovery.
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Rob Procter
Rob Procter is Professor of Social Informatics in the Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick and a Faculty Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science and AI, where he chairs the social data science interest group.
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Scott Morrison
Scott started with Diaceutics to enable the integration of machine learning into the business process, since then has went on to head up the data science team. Scott has 8 years experience in the data field, with a masters in data science and prior to Diaceutics held a senior position in the advanced analytics group at Seagate Technology.
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Stephen Allott
I love helping entrepreneurs and their businesses reach their potential and I have always been fascinated by the potential of technology to transform our lives. Although I am a generalist, I have thought a lot about financial planning and management, sales management, attracting great talent and enabling senior management teamwork. Above all problem solving is the most critical management skill for success.
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Stephen Browning
Stephen is leading the Next Generation Services programme as part of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund. This programme is aimed at supporting the transformation of our Accountancy, Insurance and Legal Services sectors by the responsible use of AI and data. Prior to this role, he headed the organisation’s Enabling – Digital team and the SBRI programme.
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Stuart Greenlees
Stuart has been coding, designing and architecting solutions for over 20 years and currently works for Liberty IT. He is passionate about solving problems using a customer centric approach with the aim to build simple, elegant and intuitive products.
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Stuart Millar
Stuart drives the recently formed AI/ML function for Rapid7 in Belfast, where he is also completing his PhD in applying deep learning to solve significant cyber challenges. In addition, he is part of CSIT's Security Intelligence group, where his work in deep learning for mobile malware detection saw him awarded the status of Mobile World Scholar by GSMA at Mobile World Conference this year.
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Theodosis Georgiou
Theodosis Georgiou is the Chief Scientific Officer of WILD AI. His main responsibility within the WILD team is to oversee WILD’s technology and to optimise user personalisation and training plans through Artificial Intelligence.
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Tom Kirkham
Dr Tom Kirkham is a Business Development Manager at the Hartree Centre. He works across various technologies in the Hartree Centre drawing on experience as a Computer Scientist for over 15 years.
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Tony O’Donnell
Diverse business and societal challenges are driving public and private sector organisations to innovate more and faster than ever before. Improving productivity of manufacturing operations, enabling appropriate healthcare for an aging population and successfully adapting to a changing climate are only three of the many challenges facing us today.
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Wendy Moore
Wendy has a PhD in Molecular Oncology with a focus on the identification of novel biomarkers in colorectal cancer and the development of clinical drug resistance. She has worked for Queens University Belfast for over 16 years as both a translational wet-lab based researcher and a bioinformatician in personalized medicine within many oncology disease areas.