Dr Beth Singler

Dr Beth Singler is the junior research fellow in artificial intelligence at Homerton College, University of Cambridge.

Beth’s research explores the social, ethical, philosophical and religious implications of advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics.

Beth has spoken on AI and human identity at many museums, events, and science festivals. In 2019, Beth spoke at the Norwich Science Festival, the London Science Museum, and was interviewed by the New Scientist, Forbes, and the BBC, among others. She's also appeared on Radio4’s Today, Sunday and Start the Week programmes and was one of the ‘Hay 30’ best speakers to watch at Hay Festival 2017. 

Beth has also produced a series of short documentaries, with Pain in the Machine winning the 2017 AHRC Best Research Film of the Year Award. She was also one of the Evening Standard’s Progress 1000 – the list of the most influential people in various fields - in both 2017 and 2018.

Beth will be giving a keynote talk at 13:30 on Wednesday 15 April 2020.

Dr James Hetherington

Dr James Hetherington is director of e-infrastructure at UK Research and Innovation

James is the first UKRI director of e-infrastructure, leading on strategy for the software, skills, data services, clouds and supercomputers that underpin computational science and digital scholarship in the UK.

Previously, he was the director of research engineering at the Alan Turing Institute, the UK’s national institute for data science and artificial intelligence. He directed the 'Tools, Practices and Systems' research programme within UKRI's strategic priority programme 'AI for Science, Engineering, Health and Government'. He led a team of research software engineers and data scientists contributing to a huge range of data- and compute-intensive research. 

He was also the founding head of UCL’s Research Software Engineering Group, the first such group in the UK. Prior to founding the UCL team, he was senior scientist at AMEE, a climate change modelling startup, and a senior developer at the Mathworks, maker of MATLAB.

James will be giving a keynote talk at 09:00 on Friday 17 April 2020.

Emma Cardinal-Richards

Emma is the senior network architect at University College London.  

Emma has a wealth of experience working in the higher education sector since her very first job. This has given her a view of the sector from both a pure customer role, in central IT support and being a department based IT manager.

She now has the exciting role of developing and driving the strategy for the central networking services that enable UCL to continue being a leader in teaching, research and innovation.

Emma will be part of a panel discussion, 'Why does networking evolve so slowly?' on 10:15 Thursday 16 April 2020.