A bit of AI show

Terry McCann

Director of AI & Co-Owner | Accelerating Big Data & AI

Terry is a Microsoft Artificial Intelligence MVP. Terry holds an Masters degree in Machine Learning and is the Director of AI for Advancing Analytics - A Data Analytics Microsoft Gold Partner.

Arafat Tehsin

Solution Architect at EY

Arafat is a Solution Architect at EY and Microsoft MVP (AI). He has been working with Global ISVs of Microsoft and developing some next-gen solutions using cutting-edge Microsoft technologies. He's also an active contributor for the community especially on the Azure AI side. He's one of the co-founders of the Bot Builder Community and has been writing / speaking about Microsoft Azure AI and Power Platform.

Akanksha Malik

Data Scientist, Telstra Purple and Microsoft AI MVP

Akanksha is a Data Scientist at Telstra Purple, a Microsoft AI MVP and an international speaker. After studying Financial Maths and Actuarial Science at UCC, Ireland, she realised she wanted to work with people as well as numbers. At Purple, she is working with clients to help them solve problems by making more informed decisions with data. She is a firm believer of diversity and inclusivity. She loves machine learning, and that it is becoming more accessible to everyone. She is an avid advocate for women in STEM and is currently the network director of Women Who Code Melbourne.

Alibek Jakupov

Data Scientist at Expertime

After having finished the IITU International Information Technologies University in Kazakhstan, I won the French Government Scholarship in 2016 and started my studies at the EISTI Graduate School in Computer Science and Mathematics Engineering in France. In 2017 I joined Expertime as a software engineer intern. The work implemented during this internship has provided the foundation to the brand new project called What Do They Think. I am a regular contributor to stackoverflow and my personal blog where I share my experience of performing data science on Azure.

Willem Meints

Technoloy Advocate/Microsoft AI MVP

Willem Meints is an AI/machine learning expert for Info Support and Microsoft AI MVP. He has worked for years on several machine learning algorithms and recently wrote a book about deep learning using CNTK.

Jernej Kavka

Microsoft AI MVP, Solution Architect at SSW

With 10 years of experience in software engineering Jernej has worked on full-stack .Net development, mobile applications, and Microsoft Cognitive Services. He worked on some of Australia's largest corporates with great customer satisfaction.

Marta Rodriguez Martinez

Programme Lead - Data and Advance Data Fellowships

Hi there, I am Marta - Programme Lead for all Data Programmes at WhiteHat. Originally from Spain - my accent is a good give away - I moved to London nearly 10 years ago to start my career as a newly qualified MEng in Industrial Engineering but...Data got on the way. And for the past 9ish years I've been working with global corporations – first as a consultant and then as part of the Travel Team at Microsoft - designing and implementing Business Intelligence programmes to support organisations' Digital Transformation strategies. Despite my technical background, I have always been extremely passionate about education, people development and social mobility; and it was this passion that led me to volunteer with the Access Project as a physics tutor and then to WhiteHat.

Jean-Pierre Riehl

Innovation Director, Avanade

Obsessed by Data, Power BI Fan, Innovation-driven, Business-oriented, Artificially-Intelligent, Community leader, I drive innovation and tech-passion at Avanade (after doing the same thing at Azeo for 10 years before being acquired by Avanade). I work for more than 20 years on challenging projects, from web to IoT including a lots of Data and AI. I am awarded as Data Platform MVP since 2008 and I’m intensively involved in French Communities.

Ines Montani

Founder at Explosion

Ines Montani is a developer specializing in tools for AI and NLP technology. She’s the co-founder of Explosion and a core developer of spaCy, a popular open-source library for Natural Language Processing in Python, and Prodigy, a modern annotation tool for creating training data for machine learning models.

Saba Samiei

Founder of comfort.ai

I want to make #ArtificialIntelligence everyone's comfort zone! Follow me on my Comfort.AI page for more!

Ari Bornstein

Head of Developer Advocacy at Grid.ai

Head of Developer Advocacy at http://Grid.ai & PyTorch Lightning. Ex-MSFT and BIU NLP. Enthusiast of all things AI/ML, History & Israeli Tech. Opinions are my own.

Gary Pretty

Senior Program Manager on the Conversational AI team at Microsoft

Gary is a Senior Program Manager on the Conversational AI team at Microsoft, focused on delivering innovative SDKs and tools including Bot Framework Composer and Azure Bot Service. Formerly a Microsoft AI MVP, Gary also co-founded the Bot Builder Community project on GitHub.

Anneleen Artois

Azure Cloud Solutions Architect

Azure Cloud Architect. Passion for Data & AIWoman singer Loves Natural Language Processing & Accessibility Technology Mechanical arm. Spontaneous and Opinionated. Runner. Woman running

Eve Pardi

Microsoft AI MVP

Eva is a skilled Software Developer and Data Scientist. Eva has been working close to Microsoft since her first years of university, as a Microsoft Student Partner first, and now as a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional. She has worked with Azure Infrastructure (Azure AD, Datacenters, etc.), then Mobile and Web development, and today she has expanded her focus with Data Science and the Machine Learning (ML)/AI services provided by Microsoft. She’s a familiar face as speaker at conferences, meetups and other community events, sharing her passion for AI and how it can be used to improve life quality around the world. Board member of Global AI Community and AI42. Eva also writes articles about her projects and researches and is mentoring and supporting people who would like to start in the field of Data Science and AI.

Robrecht Vandendriessche

Data Scientist @ Arinti

Quirine van Walt Meijer

Senior Designer in Conversational AI

Kenji Takeda

Director of Academic Health and AI Partnerships for Microsoft Research Outreach

Dr Kenji Takeda is Director of Academic Health and AI Partnerships at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK. He is working to empower researchers to develop and deploy human-centric AI and machine learning, particularly to transform healthcare by exploiting data in the cloud, empowering those at the frontline of healthcare, and moving towards precision medicine. This includes medical imaging with Project InnerEye and working with the global healthcare data research community. He regularly advises funding agencies and research organisations on innovation and technology strategy, including the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, Science and Technology Funding Council, Medical Research Council, Wellcome Trust and Health Data Research UK. He is a visiting industry fellow at the Alan Turing Institute and visiting fellow at the University of Southampton, UK. He was previously global lead for Microsoft’s Azure for Research program, helping researchers take best advantage of cloud computing, including through data science, high-performance computing, and the internet of things. He spent over 20 years in academia as Associate Professor of Aeronautics and has a passion for developing novel computational and system-wide approaches to tackle fundamental and applied problems in science, engineering, and healthcare. He has extensive experience in cloud computing, high performance and high productivity computing, and engineering (aeronautics and astronautics, aerodynamics, aeroacoustics, and flight simulation). He has received numerous awards, including the inaugural Royal Academy of Engineering Innovation prize, Royal Aeronautical Society Silver Award, and the Royal Academy of Engineering/ExxonMobil Gold medal for excellence in university engineering learning and teaching. He worked for many years as a freelance computer journalist with ZDNet, GameSpot, Computer Gaming World, and PC Pilot.