In its second edition, the Playfair AI Summit 2016 will explore the frontiers of AI research and how these technologies are leveraged by companies to extend the functionality of products and services, as well as enable entirely new ones altogether. It's overwhelmingly clear that AI is transforming our personal and professional lives, as well as the operations of businesses worldwide. AI also has profound implications for the future fabric and functioning of society.
Keeping with last year's tradition, the Playfair AI Summit 2016 will showcase the brightest academic and entrepreneurial leaders in engineering, research, product development from the most exciting technology companies and Universities. Conversations will be led by the industry's most respected journalists and thinkers.
Stephen Roberts is Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Oxford. Stephen’s research brings intelligent data analysis to large-scale complex problems, especially those in which noise and uncertainty abound; current applications include astrophysics, sensor networks, industrial control and finance.
He has published some 300 papers (with over 13,000 citations), has nine patents and eighteen awards for his research. Stephen is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, the Royal Statistical Society, the IET and the Institute of Physics. He is Director of the Oxford-Man Institute of Quantitative Finance and Director of the Oxford Centre for Doctoral Training in Autonomous Intelligent Machines. Stephen is co-founder and CSO of the machine learning company Mind Foundry.
Matthias Bethge is Professor of Computational Neuroscience at the University of Tübingen (http://bethgelab.org) and director of the Bernstein Center Tübingen (http://bccn-tuebingen.de).
His research lies at the interface of artificial intelligence and neuroscience and focuses on uncovering the representations, algorithms and neuro-computational design principles of perceiving neural networks both in brains and machines.
A practical example of the outcome of this research has been a new method for creating artistic images (http://deepart.io).
José Garcia Moreno-Torres is Chief Data Science Officer at Kreditech, a venture-backed fintech group using technology to improve financial freedom for the underbanked. By combining non-traditional data sources and machine learning, the Company is aiming to provide access to better credit and a higher convenience for digital banking services.
José holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Granada and has been an invaluable member of the Kreditech team since April 2013. He is responsible for the Data Science department focusing on credit scoring and customer lifetime value optimization and yield management.
Jose oversees all data-driven modelling and automated decision making. When given enough data, he can see into the future!
Simon Stringer has been a research mathematician at Oxford University for about 25 years. He has worked across a range of different areas of applied mathematics such as control systems, computational aerodynamics and epidemiology.
For the last decade, he has led the Oxford Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence - www.oftnai.org. The centre houses a team of theoreticians who are modelling various aspects of brain function, including vision, navigation, behaviour, audition and speech recognition. The aim of the centre is to develop integrated models of the brain that display the rudiments of artificial consciousness within the next twenty years.
John Overington is the Director of Bioinformatics at Stratified Medical, where he leads translational drug discovery informatics research and development activities. In this role, John is involved in integrating deep learning and other artificial intelligence approaches to drug target validation and drug optimisation.
John studied Chemistry at the University of Bath, graduating in 1987 and studied for a PhD at Birkbeck College, London in the Department of Crystallography. He joined Pfizer, then Inpharmatica, a start-up biotech company and in 2008 was centrally involved in the transfer of this database to the EMBL-EBI, where the successor is now known as ChEMBL.
Subutai Ahmad is the VP of Research at Numenta, a company focused on understanding the computational principles of the neocortex, and developing technology for Machine Intelligence based on those principles. Subutai’s experience includes computational neuroscience, machine learning, computer vision and building real time systems. He previously served as VP Engineering at YesVideo where he helped grow the company from a three-person start-up to a leader in automated digital media authoring. YesVideo's real time video analysis systems have been deployed internationally on a variety of platforms. Subutai holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Cornell University, and a Ph.D in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Luciano Floridi is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford, where he is the Director of Research of the Oxford Internet Institute. Among his recent books, all published by Oxford University Press: The Fourth Revolution - How the infosphere is reshaping human reality (2014), The Ethics of Information (2013), The Philosophy of Information (2011). He is a member of the EU's Ethics Advisory Group on Ethical Dimensions of Data Protection, of Google Advisory Board on “the right to be forgotten”, and Chairman of the Ethics Advisory Board of the European Medical Information Framework.
Cédric Archambeau is a Senior Machine Learning Scientist with Amazon, Berlin. He manages the algorithms team and served as a technical advisor to Sebastian Gunningham, Amazon Senior Vice President Seller Services. Recently, his team delivered the learning algorithms offered in Amazon Machine Learning (aws.amazon.com/machine-learning). He is interested in large scale probabilistic inference and Bayesian optimization. He holds a visiting position in the Centre for Computational Statistics and Machine Learning at University College London. Prior to joining Amazon, he was leading the Machine Learning and Mechanism Design area at Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble.
Daniel Hulme is the CEO of Satalia that provides AI inspired solutions to solve industries hardest problems. He’s the co-founder of the Advanced Skills Initiative that transitions scientists into industry as data-scientists.
Daniel has a Masters and Doctorate in AI from UCL, and is Director of UCL’s Business Analytics MSc; applying AI to solve business/social problems. He lectures in Computer Science and Management Science at UCL and PCL.
Daniel has Advisory and Executive positions in many companies, he holds an international Kauffman Global Entrepreneur Scholarship and actively promotes entrepreneurship and technology innovation across the globe.
Tom Standage is Deputy Editor of The Economist. He is also responsible for the newspaper’s digital strategy and the development of new digital products, including Espresso and Economist Films. He joined The Economist as Science Correspondent in 1998 and was subsequently appointed Technology Editor, Business Editor and Digital Editor. He is the author of six history books, including “Writing on the Wall” (2013), “The Victorian Internet” (1998) and “A History of the World in 6 Glasses” (2005), a New York Times bestseller. He studied engineering and computer science at Oxford University and takes a particular interest in technology's social and historical impact.
Sebastian Riedel is a Reader in the Department of Computer Science at University College London and leads the UCL Machine Reading group. He is an Allen Distinguished Investigator and received $1M award from the Paul Allen Foundation to 'move the needle' towards answering broad scientific questions in AI. He is a Marie Curie fellow, was a finalist for the Microsoft Research Faculty Award and received a Google Focused Research award. Sebastian is generally interested in the intersection of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, and particularly interested in teaching machines to read and to reason with what was read.
Tom Chatfield is an acclaimed British writer, broadcaster and tech philosopher. He studies how we might improve our experiences of digital technology and better understand its use in work and living through critical thought. The author of six books exploring digital culture – most recently "How to Thrive in the Digital Age" (Pan Macmillan) and "Live This Book!" (Penguin) – his work has appeared in over two dozen countries and languages." Tom is currently a Visiting Associate at the Oxford Internet Institute and holds a PhD from the University of Oxford
George Danezis is a Reader in Security and Privacy Engineering at the Department of Computer Science of University College London, and Head of the Information Security Research Group. He has been working on anonymous communications, privacy enhancing technologies (PET), and traffic analysis since 2000. He has previously been a researcher for Microsoft Research, Cambridge; a visiting fellow at K.U.Leuven (Belgium); and a research associate at the University of Cambridge (UK), where he also completed his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Prof. R.J. Anderson.
His theoretical contributions to the Privacy Technologies field include the established information theoretic and other probabilistic metrics for anonymity and pioneering the study of statistical attacks against anonymity systems. On the practical side he is one of the lead designers of the anonymous mail system Mixminion, as well as Minx, Sphinx, Drac and Hornet; he has worked on the traffic analysis of deployed protocols such as Tor.
Brian Dammeir is the Senior Product Manager for Data and Risk at Adyen. Currently, Brian is leading Adyen’s efforts in the fraud and auth-rate optimization spaces, further expanding the capabilities of RevenueProtect and RevenueAccelerate. His current focus is on BIN-based authorization uplift logic, transaction relationship mapping, dynamic 3D Secure routing, and leveraging machine learning and scaled A/B testing in payments performance prediction.
Before Adyen, Brian worked in the online fraud and risk space across Silicon Valley, mitigating badness at Google and Airbnb and consulting in risk mitigation for Bay Area startups
Lenny Austin is a veteran founder of several startups, having designed and developed online technologies for two decades. He is currently the co-founder and CTO of Ravelin, a startup focusing on preventing online fraud through real-time behavioural analysis, graph networks, industry expertise and machine learning. Ravelin is backed by three of the top VC firms in London and a select consortium of angels. Lenny is also the leader of the AppliedAI community, which meets regularly to present cutting edge commercial applications of AI. When he isn't fighting fraud, Lenny has an appetite for extreme sports and travel.
Kenneth Cukier is the Senior Editor for data and digital products at The Economist, following two decades as a foreign correspondent in Asia, Europe and US focusing on technology and business. He is coauthor of the award-winning book “Big Data: A Revolution that Transforms How We Work, Live and Think,” a bestseller translated in over 20 languages. In 2002-04 he was a research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Kenn is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and on the board of directors of International Bridges to Justice. He is currently writing a book on AI and business strategy.
Kristjan Korjus is the machine learning team lead at Starship Technologies, responsible for making their autonomous delivery robots intelligent. In his spare time, Kristjan led a successful GitHub project where they were first to replicate the notorious Atari playing AI by DeepMind and he is also co-author of the 3rd best selling book in Estonia in 2014 "Bedside Reading About Mathematics". He is finishing a Ph.D. in Machine Learning and holds a first class master's degree in mathematics from The University of Manchester.
Jeremy Kahn is a London-based senior reporter for Bloomberg News, where he covers technology companies and tech-related issues. He has written about cloud computing, music streaming, artificial intelligence and battle between droids and drones for last mile delivery. Prior to joining the technology reporting team in late 2015, Jeremy spent more than four years as a senior writer for Bloomberg Markets and Bloomberg Pursuits magazines, where he wrote feature articles about everything from the psychology of traders to counterfeit classic cars.
Playfair Capital is a London-based early stage venture firm investing in entrepreneurs building technology companies that reinvent the way we live, work and play. Our focus is on companies where AI technology, data, and user experiences are core competencies. We partner closely with our entrepreneurs to provide them with the financial, operational, and strategic support required to grow. Since our inception, we've invested in 40 companies across the UK, Europe, the US and Africa including DueDil, Appear Here, Mapillary and Dojo.
300 attendees and 17 speakers including:
- Mustafa Suleyman, Google DeepMind
- Jaan Tallinn
- Ben Medlock, SwiftKey/Microsoft
- Blaise Thomson, VocalIQ/Apple
- Gabriel Brostow, UCL
Videos here; As seen in Bloomberg, WSJ, WashPost, Business Insider, Techworld
