Our Speakers

• 

  Professor Sir David Omand GCB

  Visiting Professor of War Studies, King’s College London

  Our closing keynote speaker is currently Visiting Professor in War Studies, King’s College London. Previous posts included Security and Intelligence Coordinator in the Cabinet Office, Permanent Secretary of the Home Office, Director GCHQ, and Deputy Under-Secretary of State for Policy in MOD. He served for 7 years on the JIC. He is the Senior Independent Director of Babcock International. He is the author of *Securing the State* (Hurst), *Principled Spying: The Ethics of Secret Intelligence* (OUP) and *How Spies Think: 10 Lessons from Intelligence* (Penguin Viking).

• 

  Secretary Robert O. Work

  Vice Chair, National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence

  Our opening keynote speaker served as the 32nd United States Deputy Secretary of Defense for both the Obama and Trump administrations, and remains highly engaged in AI policy and defence at the Center for a New American Security, and as the president of TeamWork LLC. Prior to that, he was the United States Under Secretary of the Navy from 2009 to 2013, and served as a colonel in the United States Marine Corps.

• 

  Dame Wendy Hall

  Regius Professor of Computer Science and Executive Director of the Web Science Institute, University of Southampton

  Dame Wendy Hall, DBE, FRS, FREng is Regius Professor of Computer Science, Associate Vice President (International Engagement) and is an Executive Director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton. She became a Dame Commander of the British Empire in the 2009 UK New Year's Honours list, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering. Dame Wendy was co-Chair of the UK government’s AI Review, which was published in October 2017, and is the first Skills Champion for AI in the UK. In May 2020, she was appointed as Chair of the Ada Lovelace Institute. Dame Wendy joins us as a panel member.

• 

  Professor John Cunningham

  Professor of AI, Columbia University, and Chair of the Adarga Scientific Advisory Group.

  John's research is on machine learning and its application to science and industry, including in particular using the tools of artificial intelligence to understand biological intelligence and other complex processes. He holds degrees from Dartmouth College (computer science), masters and Ph.D. from Stanford University (electrical engineering), and a fellowship at the University of Cambridge (machine learning). John will be chairing our panel discussion.

• 

  Sir Chris Harper

  Chair of the Adarga Advisory Group

  From 2013-2016, Sir Chris was Director general of the NATO International Military Staff and prior to that he served as the UK Military Representative to NATO and the European Union, before which he was Deputy Commander, Nato Allied Command Brunssum. He will be hosting a fireside chat with our keynote, Robert O. Work.

• 

  David Talby

  CTO at John Snow Labs

  David is the creator of Spark NLP - the world's most widely used natural language processing library in the enterprise. He has extensive experience building and running web-scale software platforms and teams – in startups, for Microsoft’s Bing in the US and Europe, and to scale Amazon’s financial systems in Seattle and the UK. David holds a PhD in computer science and master’s degrees in both computer science and business administration. David will be a panellist at our panel discussion.

• 

  Dr Deborah Fish OBE

  Scientific Advisor

  Dr Deb Fish is a Fellow at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, specialising in innovative modelling and the application of artificial intelligence to help Defence make better evidence-based decisions. Recent projects (many commissioned through industry and academia) include a review of the application of AI to wargames, AI for ship air defence and other aspects of maritime survivability, and AI for anti-access area denial. She believes that AI has significant potential to augment human input to improve tactics, evaluate new concepts and capabilities, and provide an intelligent adversary against which to train or plan operations. We are pleased to welcome Dr Fish as a panellist at our panel discussion.

• 

  Rob Bassett Cross

  CEO and Founder of Adarga

  Rob is the CEO and Founder of Adarga, and host of our Symposium. He is a decorated former Army officer and widely respected as one of the leading military officers of his generation. Before leaving the military, Rob led future development for a number of ground-breaking defence technology projects. After leaving the Army, Rob worked at J.P. Morgan as an investment banker after which he co-founded Eisvogel Capital and is the founder and non-exec chair of Capstar Group. He is also member of techUK Data Analytics and AI Leadership Committee.

• 

  Dr Colin Kelly

  NLP Team Lead, Adarga

  Colin is the NLP team lead at Adarga and will be joining the panel discussion. Colin is passionate about using natural language processing and artificial intelligence to enable better decision-making and transform knowledge-based organisations. Prior to joining Adarga, Colin worked as an analytics consultant at IBM and PA Consulting, shaping and deploying analytics solutions for financial services, energy and public sector clients. He studied mathematics and computer science at the University of Oxford and holds a Masters and PhD in natural language processing from the University of Cambridge.