About our speakers
Networkshop48 online, 22–24 April 2020
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.
View the programme to watch a recording of Beth's keynote talk - are we ready for AI?
Anna Wilson
Anna is technical architect in the services architecture team at HEAnet, the Irish NREN.
Anna says that "full stack" means everything from the browser to BGP.
She received the GÉANT Community Award in 2019.
We will be livestreaming Anna's talk on Thursday 23 April 2020.
Dr James Hetherington
Dr James Hetherington is director of digital research infrastructure at UK Research and Innovation
James is the first UKRI director of digital research 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.