Industry speakers announced for Scotland’s first ‘DataTech’ event 

Eleven data analysts, developers, engineers, and scientists from the public sector, academia, and industry will speak at the inaugural DataTech event at the National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh on the 14 March. After responding to a call for proposals, the speakers have been selected to join three keynote speakers, Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, Jared Lander and Debbie Bard.  

DataTech is a new technical day event, part of DataFest19, bringing together technical communities, practitioners and academics alike, who work on similar challenges across different sectors. It will provide a platform to learn from one another and forge new collaborations.

The speakers will cover a range of topics from supercomputing, to deep learning, to tools for data visualisation. Stochastic Solutions chief executive Nick Radcliffe will discuss the science of bad data and test-driven data analysis, whereas Piers Campbell, Data Science Lead at Kainos, will talk about a collaboration with the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency to improve road safety using Machine Learning.

Dr Caterina Constantinescu, data scientist at The Data Lab and chair of DataTech’s organising committee said: “We’re thrilled to have these 11 talented researchers and data scientists join our first-ever DataTech event. This event was a direct response to feedback from prior years of DataFest. It’s great to facilitate an event where Scotland’s data community can share new methods, best practices and practical applications. The interest and number of submissions that DataTech has generated exceeded our expectations and is testament to Scotland’s rise as a global centre of data.”

The 11 speakers who have been announced for DataTech19 are:

–Nick Radcliffe, CEO, Stochastic Solutions Limited; Visiting Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of Edinburgh; Organizer, PyData Edinburgh
–Ben Moews, Postgraduate Student, Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh
–Valentin Radu, Research Associate, University of Edinburgh, School of Informatics
–Boris Mitrovic, Lead Data Scientist, Mudano
–Benjamin Bach, Lecturer for Design Informatics and Visualization, University of Edinburgh
–Euan Gardner, Senior Information Development Manager, NHS National Services Scotland
–Piers Campbell, Data Science Lead, Kainos
–Alex Gibberd, Lecturer in Statistics, Lancaster University
–Matthew Collison, Teaching Fellow, School of Computing, Newcastle University
–Nick Brown, Data architect, EPCC
–Anastasia Ushakova, Teaching Fellow (Postdoc Tutor), University of Edinburgh

The theme for DataFest19 is collaboration and doing #datatogether. It is a celebration of the groups, collectives, communities, and teams who together have envisioned a path for the future of data and are taking steps to implement it.

DataFest19 has been extended to two weeks for the first time, to take into account the huge interest in the DataFest Fringe Events programme around the country, which is expected to be bigger than ever before. Fringe events include meetups, debates, public engagement and Data Science training programmes. 

The extended DataFest19 follows on from the success of DataFest18, which saw in excess of 3,000 participants, and over 45 events, including hackathons, networking and inspiring workshop sessions for school pupils stretching from Edinburgh and Glasgow to Inverness, Dundee, and Aberdeen. 

The festival will also see the return of Data Talent, the annual collider event that brings together aspiring data science and engineering students with employers from across the country.

Women in Data Science will also return this year. It is part of the world-wide Women in Data Science initiative by Stanford University. It brings together women data scientists and school girls to showcase what a data career looks like, and inspire the female data leaders of the future.