Maria Luciana Axente

Responsible AI & AI for Good Lead, PwC UK

In her role as Responsible AI and AI for Good Lead at PwC, Maria advises partners across industry, academia, governments, and civil society, on how to harness the power of AI in an ethical and responsible manner. She has played a crucial part in the development and set-up of PwC’s UK AI Center of Excellence, the firm’s AI strategy and development of PwC’s Responsible AI toolkit, firm's methodology for embedding ethics in AI. Maria is a globally recognised AI ethics expert, a Advisory Board member of the UK Government All-Party Parliamentary Group on AI, UNICEF AI for Children and tech UK Data and AI Leadership committee, a Fellow of the RSA and an advocate for gender diversity in AI, children and youth rights in the age of AI.

Nikita Fadeev

Portfolio Manager, Fasanara Digital

Nikita Fadeev discovered Bitcoin back in 2016 and was amazed by its volatility and large arbitrage opportunities in the market. In 2018 he started a joint-venture with Fasanara Capital, a London-based quant hedge fund, to launch one of the first market neutral funds exclusively focused on digital assets. Nikita also founded The Quant Conference, a forum looking to bridge the gap between talent and opportunities which has since become the largest quant conference in the world.

Vanessa Eriksson

SVP, Chief Digital Officer, Zenseact

Vanessa Eriksson is a pioneer and a leading-edge data practitioner with several years of experience in Data Strategies; including Data Security & Compliance and Innovation. She served as the Chair of PwC’s CDO Advisory Board and on Gartner’s North America & EMEA Data and CDO Advisory Boards. An active voice in the data and analytics community, Vanessa has spoken at numerous conferences, has been featured in several publications, including invited as a Guest Speaker at Gartner’s CDO Panel in London. Presently, the Chief Digital Officer at Zenseact, Vanessa leads the organization in managing petabytes of data as an asset, protecting its critical systems and sensitive information from cyber-attacks, while simultaneously leading the IT backbone, in pursuing Autonomous Driving. Her previous experience (2014 - 2020) includes Chief Data Officer at Nets, Chief Data Officer Advisor EMEA at PwC and Chief Data Officer at Telia. A mother of 3 daughters, Vanessa very feels strongly about encouraging girls in tech and has since 2017 effectively launched GiT (Girls in Tech) events in Sweden in collaboration with 4 international organizations to promote her cause. Women in Leadership and Gender Diversity are topics that are close to her.

Bill Magro

Chief Technologist, High Performance Computing, Google

William (Bill) Magro is Chief Technologist for High Performance Computing at Google, where he drives HPC strategy and customer success for Google Cloud.

Magro joined Google in 2020, after 20 years at Intel, where he was Intel Fellow and Chief Technologist for HPC. There, he served as a key strategist and driver for Intel’s HPC business, with a focus on software and solutions and on emerging technologies and trends, including HPC and Cloud and Exascale Computing.

A recognized leader in the InfiniBand industry, Magro helped found the OpenFabrics Alliance and served as InfiniBand Trade Association Technical Working Group co-chair from 2007-2020.

Magro has been a prominent voice in the HPC community for over two decades and regularly participates and presents in HPC conferences, advisory boards, and panels.

He joined Intel in 2000 with the acquisition of Kuck & Associates Inc. (KAI). Prior to KAI, Magro spent 3 years as a post-doctoral fellow and staff member at the Cornell Theory Center at Cornell University. He holds a bachelor's degree in applied and engineering physics from Cornell University and a master's degree and Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Sahar Asadi

AI Research Lead, King

Sahar is AI research lead at King where she drives AI research on reinforcement learning, content generation, and user understanding for the game. Sahar has obtained her Ph.D. in mobile robot olfaction from Applied Autonomous Sensor System, Orebro University. Her research focus is on bringing research to product and production responsibly. Throughout her +9 year-long industry journey, she got to apply research to real problems in many different domains: user experience at Spotify, distributed deep learning at Clusterone, information retrieval and NLP at Meltwater, and product recognition at OculusAI. In addition, Sahar is a co-founder of Women in Data Science, AI & ML Sweden Group which has been focused on growing the community, collaboration, and ecosystem for women practitioners in the field in Sweden for the past 4 years.

Ming Tang

Chief Data & Analytics Officer, NHS England and NHS Improvement

Ming has over 20 years’ experience in managing and delivering large scale change involving implementation of new operating models in complex and challenging environments.

She joined the NHS in October 2009, initially leading commissioning support services in the West Midlands as the Managing Director for Healthcare Commissioning Services and then as the Managing Director for South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw Commissioning Support Unit.

Ming is currently the Chief Data and Analytics Officer for NHS England and NHS Improvement responsible for strategic development of data and analytics capability across NHS.

The Data and Analytics service provides NHS England and NHS Improvement with the resources to support system transformation, strategic information assets, digital tools and analysis to underpin policy development and predictive capabilities to enhance decision making and improve health and care services.

Prior to joining the NHS, Ming was a Partner with Accenture specialising in Strategy and Supply Chain work. She has worked in Europe, North America, and Southeast Asia where she was the Managing Partner for the Supply Chain Practice for 3 years.

Her experience spans global clients in Consumer Goods, Retail, Pharmaceutical, Manufacturing and Utility sectors. Ming holds a first degree in Pharmacy and an MBA from Warwick University.

Niraj Parihar

Executive VP, Leader - Insights and Data, India at Capgemini

Niraj Parihar is the Executive Vice President, Leader - Insights and Data, India at Capgemini. His current role involves portfolio shift and creating innovation and value for the customers in the evolving space of Data, Digital and Cloud.

Niraj Parihar is an accomplished senior leader in IT Industry with successes in a diverse set of roles of a consulting organization. He has 23 years of total experience including leadership roles in leading large practices, global delivery & operations, P&Ls, Sales and Territory Management.

He has strong international exposure that comes from working in USA for 14 years, India for 7+ years and extended periods of service in European countries. His domain expertise is in Insurance and Financial Services.

James Scapa

Founder, Chairman and CEO, Altair

James R. Scapa brings more than 35 years of engineering experience to his dual role of chairman and CEO of Altair, a title he has held since the company's inception in 1985.

Through Scapa's leadership, the company is now a global technology company that provides software and cloud solutions in the areas of product development, high performance computing (HPC) and data analytics. Today, the company employs over 3,000 engineers, scientists and creatives with more than 86 offices in 25 countries.

With more than 11,000 customers globally, Altair software enables customers to enhance product performance, compress development time and reduce costs.

Scapa earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Columbia University and a master of business administration degree from University of Michigan.