Professor Catuscia Palamidessi

Short Bio: Catuscia Palamidessi is Director of Research at INRIA Saclay (since 2002), where she leads the team COMETE. She has been Full Professor at the University of Genova, Italy (1994-1997) and Penn State University, USA (1998-2002). Palamidessi's research interests include Privacy, Machine Learning, Fairness, Secure Information Flow, Formal Methods, and Concurrency. In 2019 she has obtained an ERC advanced grant to conduct research on Privacy and Machine Learning. She is coauthor of more than 200 scientific publications, and she has been PC chair of various conferences including LICS and ICALP, and PC member of more than 120 international conferences. She is in the Editorial board of several journals, including the IEEE Transactions in Dependable and Secure Computing, the Journal of Computer Security, Mathematical Structures in Computer Science, and Acta Informatica. She is serving in the Executive Committee of ACM SIGLOG, CONCUR, and CSL (Computer Science Logic).

Professor Jill MacBryde

Short Bio: Jill MacBryde is Professor of Innovation and Operations Management at Strathclyde University where she is also Director of the Hunter Centre for Entrepreneurship. Jill is Co-Director (with Jan Godsell) of the ESRC Made Smarter Network Plus, “InterAct.” The overall aim of the Made Smarter challenge is to help UK manufacturing become more productive and competitive through the innovation and diffusion of digital technology. Made Smarter also needs to support manufacturing to achieve Net Zero by 2050. Whilst technology is important, there are many social and economic factors that will be hugely influential in achieving these aims. InterAct seeks to “pioneer human insight for industry” and is a call to arms for academics from the social sciences to support the innovation and diffusion of digital technologies that will result in a stronger, more resilient, manufacturing base.

The theme throughout Jill’s work is operations management in changing environments and her current research projects include productivity in manufacturing, the impact of Covid on UK manufacturing, innovation in aerospace supply chains, and the future of manufacturing work.

Jill also works with policy makers and government organisations, and is currently a member of the Innovate UK/ESRC Innovation Caucus and a member of the Innovate UK Future Flight Advisory Board.

Research areas: Innovation Management, Competitiveness, Manufacturing, Performance

Niall McCann - Policy Advisor, Programme Manager, Legal Identity, UNDP

Short Bio: Niall McCann recently completed his assignment as Policy Advisor and Project Manager on Legal Identity with UNDP, based at UNHQ in New York (and later Brussels). In this position, he provided policy and programme support guidance to all UNDP Country Offices supporting national partners on design and rollout of civil registration, national ID programmes, digital ID initiatives, and innovations in identity management (including potential applicability of expanded use of biometrics and blockchain technology, etc. A regular speaker at events hosted by partners such as the World Bank and the Biometrics Institute, he has been an Advisory Board member of the ID4Africa movement since 2016, and was Chair of the Global Civil Registration and Vital Statistics Group in 2021-22. Prior to his assignment at UN HQ, he previously spent more than 20 years supporting national electoral management and identity management bodies in field-based posts for the UN, European Union and Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe in countries such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Romania, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Lebanon, Kenya, Zambia, Yemen and Afghanistan.

Professor Saeema Ahmed-Kristensen

Short Bio: Saeema Ahmed-Kristensen is a Professor of Engineering Design and Innovation, Co-director INDEX Initiative of Digital Economy and Deputy Director of DIGITLab, UKRI £12.4M Next Stage Digital Economy Centre, bringing experience from Royal College of Art (Head of Design Products) and Imperial College London, Cambridge Engineering and Denmark. Saeema’s research focuses upon improvements of both products (including product service systems) and processes (creative, product development and innovation) through developing a scientific understanding of the processes, contributing to Design cognition, knowledge and data structuring, Data driven design, Quantifying User experiences. She has worked with diverse industries; aerospace (Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems); oil (AK MH); consumer (GN Netcom); medical (Novo Nordisk), and across psychology, computing and design. She works closely with a range of industries; complex product, aerospace (Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems); oil (AK MH); consumer (GN Netcom); medical (Novo Nordisk), and adopts a multidisciplinary approach including psychology, computing and design, for example leading to approaches to auto-index aerospace reports, through an ontology based on design cognition and Natural Language Processing. Her research was one of the first to use a human centred approach to structuring and automating indexing of knowledge, and; to develop approaches to quantify user experiences, leading to a data driven-approach to assess comfort in headsets (now embedded within GN Netcom Product development processes and leading to awards for comfort).

Suzanne Weller - Head of Research at Privitar

Short Bio: Suzanne Weller leads the Privitar Labs team, a technical innovation team dedicated to the research and development of advanced, practical solutions to challenging data privacy problems.

Privitar leads the way in Modern Data Provisioning, combining people, processes and technology to enable efficient, effective and responsible use of data. Innovation in privacy research is crucial in meeting the needs of our customers to safely utilise data and the team focuses on this area. Privitar Labs are developing solutions including approaches to understand and mitigate privacy risks, methods to securely link and compute over distributed datasets, and techniques to reduce privacy risk in unstructured data.

Suzanne is also a member of the UK Royal Society Working Group on Privacy Enhancing Technologies, which brings together an expert group to explore the potential of the application of Privacy Enhancing Technologies to different sectors enabling research and innovation while protecting sensitive information.