Women In AI & Data Reception schedule

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. 

You would never build a model without knowing exactly what you're optimizing for. When we solve technical problems we work methodically, but when we think about our careers we often let our progress and direction be influenced by our circumstances. Designing your career with the same thought and intentionality you give to your work will help you build the most satisfying career. 

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.

· What is the current state for women in AI and data, how is this reflected and how do we improve this?

· How do we work to educate, encourage and support more women to join the industry and how do we also retain and support them within their future careers?

· What can both individual companies and industries as a whole being doing more to ensure there is the correct balance within their data and AI teams?

Myrna is responsible for identifying how to use data and machine learning to keep Ocado at the cutting edge of eCommerce, supply chain, logistics and robotics. As lead for responsible AI and Robotics, she also ensures that Ocado develops these technologies in a fair, transparent and trustworthy way.

Previously Myrna led responsible ML at the BBC, where she designed the first comprehensive standard for responsible ML in media, the BBC’s Machine Learning Engine Principles. 

Myrna is a former British diplomat. She has worked on international economic and climate negotiations, and served in Kosovo, Belgium, Germany and Israel.

Krisztina Sinkovics is AI Research Engineer at Small Robot Company. She has been working on ML and DL research and engineering for the past six years, tackling applications in a multitude of areas ranging from ultrasonic non-destructive testing and healthcare to per-plant farming and the application of GANs in geophysics. Her recent work combines robotics, computer vision and efficient learning under semi-supervised and unsupervised settings.

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.

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.