Women In AI & Data Reception

Senior Director of Research

Spotify

Mounia is a Senior Director of Research at Spotify, and the Head of Tech Research in Personalisation, where she leads an interdisciplinary team of research scientists, working on personalization and discovery. Mounia also holds an honorary professorship at University College London. She also holds an additional appointment as a Distinguished Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam. Before that, she was a Director of Research at Yahoo, where she led a team of researchers working on advertising quality. She also worked with various teams at Yahoo on topics related to user engagement in the context of news, search, and user-generated content. Prior to this, she held a Microsoft Research/RAEng Research Chair at the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow. Before that, she was Professor of Information Retrieval at the Department of Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London.

Senior Data Scientist

M&S

Christa-Awa has a background in Computer Science and years of experience in the Personalisation and NLP space. She is a Senior Data scientist at Marks and Spencer where she co-leads the data science work on search and ranking optimisation. At M&S she is also involved in hiring and mentoring early career data scientists. Previously, she worked at Workfinder where she led the data science team in building course recommendations for young people entering the work-force. Other positions she held include roles as research engineer at Fidelity Investments and Machine learning engineer at Just Eat Takeaway, where she worked in the search and recommendations team while co-leading transformative initiatives to diversify the outreach and sponsorships by the company. Having enabled partnerships with Colorintech and supported collaborations with Career Accelerator and Stemettes, she also introduced virtual work experience opportunities for young people during the pandemic.

Lead Quantitative Engineer

Meta

Ghida is a lead quantitative engineer at Meta (previously Facebook) where she designs and builds quantitative systems to help scale and optimize Meta internal cloud and edge infrastructure, used to serve billions of people across Meta family of apps and products. Prior to joining Meta, Ghida worked for 6+ years in the Telco and media industries in multiple analytics and engineering roles, mainly focusing on optimizing large scale distributed systems. She holds a PhD and master’s (Diplome d’Ingénieur) in computer engineering from Institut Polytechnique de Paris. Ghida also teaches a course on using AI for scaling IT operations at the university of Oxford. She is a TEDx speaker and an Expert of the World Economic Forum, providing expertise on the future of computing. In the past, Ghida prepared and delivered the first online course on data science in Arabic attracting 30k+ learners, and built an award-winning platform for connecting refugees to opportunities, among others.

Architecture Lead in AI

BP

Natalia Konstantinova is a great enthusiast with over 15 years' experience in the application of Natural Language Processing, Artificial Intelligence, IT and machine learning technologies to real world problems. 

She is currently a Staff Data Scientist at BP and her role is to develop standards and best practices to accelerate the adoption and implementation of AI enabled solutions, and doing so with the right level of compliance and standards within BP.  

Natalia got her PhD from the University of Wolverhampton and worked in various fields such as machine translation, ontologies, information extraction, dialogue systems and chat bots. Natalia is a strong believer that modern technology can transform businesses and our everyday life.

Data Science Manager & Executive Coach

Workday

Sandi Conroy is a Data Science Manager at Workday & Executive Coach. Her 16-year analytics career spans the Technology, Software, Identity Verification, Lead Generation & Insurance industries. She's committed to building great teams & products.