Meet the Speakers

Deepna Devkar is Vice President of Data Science & Engineering and heads up the Data Intelligence team. She works to understand the CNN audience across devices and build recommendation systems that increase user engagement across all CNN brands.

Prior to joining CNN, Devkar started as Vice President of Data Science Products for WarnerMedia, where she led a team of data scientists, engineers and product managers to build scalable data science products across WarnerMedia’s brands. She also held positions at Viacom and Dotdash (formerly about.com) where she attained expertise in the linear TV space and digital media and publishing landscape, respectively. Before her transition into data science, she spent over a decade in scientific research, studying the psychological and neural underpinnings of human behaviour.

Recently, she was recognized for her contribution as Folio’s Top Women in Media, Corporate Champion in 2018. Devkar has enjoyed working on projects ranging across audience segmentation, content recommendation and personalization, search engine and revenue optimization. She is most passionate about evangelizing data science and regularly speaks at meetings and conferences.

Robin is a technical executive with expertise leading business strategy, technology and operations. She is an innovator and storyteller with consistent track record of engaging winning teams

At UPS, Robin leads the Business Relationship Management team supporting $200M in technology strategic initiative investments and the UPS Global Smart Logistics Network. In previous UPS assignments, she led customer experience and the successful digital transformation of the global CRM platform and master data management.  Robin participates in numerous UPS steering committees, ensuring technology investments are aligned with business strategy and transformation goals. Prior to UPS, Robin has held executive roles in software and hardware engineering, chief technology officer, quality, marketing and customer service at HP and Tyco International Retail Security.

Robin earned a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering and MBA in Technology Management. She holds seven design patents and remains hands-on as a certified Salesforce.com administrator. Robin is active in the UPS Women’s Leadership Development BRG, Georgia State University MIS Advisory Board, Society of Women Engineers, Women in Technology International and Technology Association of Georgia.

Rahma is the Director of Engineering for the Restaurants group at Deliveroo. She focusses on helping Deliveroo becoming the best partner for its restaurants and driving growth and profitability for restaurants. Prior to this, Rahma was a senior engineering leader at Wealthfront where she led the financial services area.

Michelle King is a leading global expert in gender and organizations, and the Director of Inclusion at Netflix. Michelle has spent her career advancing women in innovation and technology, leading global diversity and inclusion programs and advocating for women at work. She is the former head of the UN Women’s Global Innovation Coalition for Change, and is an Advisory Board member for Girl Up, the United Nations Foundation’s adolescent girl campaign, and host of The Fix, a podcast that shares the stories, challenges and triumphs of women across innovation, technology and entrepreneurship. She speaks frequently on the topic of gender equality, and contributes regularly to Forbes on the topic of women’s advancement at work. Her work has been published in Harvard Business Review, Huffington Post, Scoop and TIME magazine. Michelle is a published, award winning academic with a PhD, a Masters in Psychology, and an MBA.

Madhu Narasimhan is Executive Vice President and leader of the PVSI division of Wells Fargo’s Group Portfolio Delivery & Agile Delivery. In this role, she supports PVSI’s change delivery & agile transformation, focusing on structure and continuous improvement, enabling the group to enhance capabilities to better support PVSI business units; and more directly build on, share, and leverage knowledge and talent.

Prior to joining Wells Fargo, Narasimhan was the executive leading virtual channels and analytics for Kaiser Permanente. She has led large staffs of product and technology personnel to deliver cross-channel, integrated technologies and experiences. Narasimhan has developed enterprise-level integration strategies, led vendor implementations, and managed enterprise application services at scale.

Narasimhan holds a master’s degree in computer science from the University of California, Riverside, a bachelor’s of engineering in computer science from Birla Institute of Technology, India and an engineering project manager certification from Caltech. She completed executive programs at Harvard Business School and Stanford Business School.

Narasimhan is passionate about mentoring and promoting women in technology. She also actively volunteers to promote science awareness and inspiration in elementary school levels and is a founding member of the Bay Area Elementary Science Olympiad Foundation established in 2007.

She is based in Oakland and lives in the Bay Area.

Listed as one of the UK's Top Most Influential Women in Tech & an international multi-award winner for her services to Diversity & Inclusion in industry, Sheree (@nirushika) is the Head of Diversity & Inclusion, Monzo; Board-Appointed Global Ambassador, Women Who Code; Contributor, Forbes.

Sheree is a global Diversity & Inclusion leader, having worked in many regions providing leadership and training to C-suite/Executive leadership to develop fully formed focused diversity and inclusion strategies. She has created tailored data driven strategies through engaging all employees, including C-suite, which has enabled authentic change. Sheree has what has been described as “infectious confidence with expertise in the diversity and inclusion space”, which leads to the ability to ensure people, of all levels, understand the business benefit of diversity and inclusion whilst becoming champions, in their own roles.

As a passionate advocate for gaining/retaining women in the industry, she launched & led the award-winning U.K. expansion of Women Who Code (womenwhocode.com), since 2013.

As an industry leader, she has spoken at many global events, conferences and leadership sessions and is regularly profiled for her work. Sheree & her work have been featured in many publications, such as Forbes, FastCompany, Evening Standard, HuffPost, Business Post, Marie Claire, Wired, ComputerWeekly, The Guardian, Sunday Telegraph, Newsletter & many more. Links are provided below.

The aim of her career is ensuring people are aware of the fantastic opportunities the industry has to offer & make certain that all humans are able to benefit from these & reach their full career potential.

Liz Borowsky is the Senior Vice President of Platform Engineering at Akamai Technologies. Her team develops the core of Akamai's Intelligent Platform, with software encompassing everything from the base Kernel and OS near the machine layer, to the Mapping Control System. This software routes approximately twenty-five percent of all internet traffic through Akamai's worldwide distributed network daily, and underpins all Akamai Products and Services. In this role, Liz collaborates with leaders throughout the company to innovate and enhance Akamai’s products in addition to improving efficiency, performance, agility, and security of the Intelligent Platform itself.

Liz has a PhD in Computer Science from UCLA studying the theoretical underpinnings of Distributed Systems.  Liz and her PhD advisor were jointly awarded the 2017 Dijkstra Prize for Distributed Computing for this work.  She has tried the three major models of "What to do with a PhD in Computer Science?,” having worked in an Industrial Research Lab, as a Professor in Academia, and in Industry, holding Individual Contributor through Executive positions. Throughout her career the common thread has been a focus on solving problems of optimization and coordination in distributed systems. She loves thinking about how independent parts of a system with different characteristics can be made to work efficiently together. She currently applies this skill to Akamai’s technical systems which optimize the internet, as well as to the people development and strategic collaboration aspects of her role.

Jean Lau is the head of engineering where she leads a globally distributed and diverse team of technologist. In this role, she is charged with turning the Lumada product portfolio into a software-as-a service delivery model and advancing Hitachi Vantara’s scale-of-digital and scale-by-digital objectives. Lau joined Hitachi Vantara in 2018 to run the product management and engineering team for Industrial IoT, Edge to Cloud Platforms. Since that time, she has transformed Lumada Edge Intelligence from vision into successful customer deployment. Lau’s success was driven by her ability to guide the product strategy, vision, GTM, architecture, operation model, team structure and more which ultimately ensured these products were successful to the business and customers.  

Lau has more than 25 years of engineering experience over which time she has developed a passion for building world-class engineering teams with a diversity mindset and delivering trusted products that enable customer success. For 20 of these years, Lau has held leadership roles at leading businesses such as Sybase, SAP, and GE Digital. At GE Digital, she was responsible for delivering Predix Edge to cloud products and helping to drive the company’s digital transformation. Outside of work, Lau enjoys spending time outdoors, especially in the mountains, hiking, climbing, skiing and backpacking. 

Mimi Omokri has a long and varied career, serving as an executive for numerous high-profile companies and currently, Uber’s Head of Business Development for Sub-Saharan Africa, one of the fast-growing regions for the company.

Prior to Uber, Mimi led commercial payments and built the Sub-Saharan Africa enterprise business at Mastercard from the ground-up at a time when startups were chipping away at incumbents and new technology was creating opportunities for all players. Name an innovation that’s changed commercial payments—mobile, e-commerce, AI, virtual—and Mimi has been there in the trenches.

She also understands the importance of bringing leading brands together through partnerships. Mimi has forged relationships between Amadeus and many notable companies — Citibank, Harrods, British Airways, Visa, Ethiopian Airlines, MTN Group and others — to give people in Europe, Middle East and Africa easier access to their bank accounts and the ability to send payments on the platform.

Prior to Mastercard, Mimi spent over 8 years working at top firms such as Jumia Group, Iroko Partners and American Express in Europe, holding P&L and leadership roles in strategy, sales, marketing, partnerships and product development.

Over the last two decades, Sara DeWitt has worked at the forefront of new digital platforms, in an effort to be everywhere kids are: from websites and mobiles apps to streaming video, augmented reality, 3D-rendered experiences, and wearable technologies. As VP of PBS KIDS Digital, she oversees the Kidscreen- and Webby-award winning pbskids.org website, PBS KIDS streaming video services, the PBS KIDS portfolio of educational apps for children, and the PBS KIDS for Parents digital experiences.  Most recently, Sara led her team through the development of the PBS KIDS 24/7 digital live stream, an integral part of the new PBS KIDS 24/7 services launched in January of 2017. In 2014, she was named one of the top 42 Women Leading in Education by the USC Rossier School of Education, and was selected as one of the Top Women in Digital by Cynopsis Media in 2016 and 2017.  Most recently, Sara gave a TED Talk about the potential media has to positively affect learning.

Before her career in public media, DeWitt worked as a preschool teacher, a management researcher, and studied media habits of children in rural areas of the United States. She holds a BA and an MA in English from Stanford University, and holds a certificate from the University’s Children, Society, and Public Policy curriculum. She is also a military spouse who has moved with her husband and two young sons four times in five years. They currently live in Alexandria, Virginia.

Karen Nadasen, PayU South Africa’s Country Manager, is regularly described as one of South Africa’s most inspiring women in tech, nominated for IT Personality of the Year 2017, listed among 100 Most Influential Young South Africans 2017 and the Regional Winner (SADC) of Africa’s Most Influential Women in Business and Government 2018.

Since taking the helm 3 years ago, PayU has dramatically grown its total Ecommerce Processing Volume, and revenue, whilst costs have reduced significantly during her tenure. All this whilst balancing personal life – Karen started her position as CEO having just returned from maternity leave after 4 months. Originally starting out as a Java developer in a small development house in Cape Town many years ago, Karen’s industry experience, mostly abroad, ranges from FTSE 100 companies, and large multi-nationals, until she decided it was time to move back to beautiful Cape Town where she started at PayU.

Aubrey Blanche is The Mathpath (Math Nerd + Empath), Global Head of Equitable Design & Impact at Culture Amp, and a startup investor/advisor. She questions, reimagines, and redesigns the systems that surround us to ensure that all people access equitable opportunities. Her expertise covers talent programs and accessible product development to event design and communications. She is the inventor of the balanced teams approach and a culture of belonging, and the Balanced Teams Diversity Assessment in the Atlassian Team Playbook. She open sources these methods and releases thought leadership and tools to create positive change at here at aubreyblanche.com.

Sadia has a wealth of experience in the payments industry. She started her career as a developer and moved through several roles before settling at Mastercard. In her current role she works with the Bacs team to ensure an inclusive environment for all and a sustainable delivery pace to benefit the end customers. Vocalink, a Mastercard company operates as the critical national infrastructure for the UK payments system.

Sadia enjoys keeping fit, spending time with her children and husband and working with the local charities. She works with a local community group to help the homeless and acts as a local emergency volunteer.

Richard Davies is the Chief Executive Officer for Banking at Revolut, having joined in July 2019. He is responsible for Revolut’s banking entities around the world, alongside a number of group functions.

Revolut is a radically better digital bank account that includes a debit card, currency exchange, and peer-to-peer payments. We are on a mission to build a fair and frictionless platform to use and manage money around the world. Our platform allows users to transfer, exchange, and spend money at great value rates with a multi currency card that is accepted everywhere.

Prior roles include:

• Commercial Banking Director at TSB
• Global Head of Propositions / Digital - SME Banking at HSBC
• Chief Operating Officer, UK Commercial Banking, at HSBC
• First CEO of challenger bank OakNorth

Richard has a MA Economics and M.Phil Development Economics from Trinity Hall Cambridge.

Sharon Moore MBE was appointed IBM UK CTO for Public Sector in January 2019. She marries the needs of industry with the potential of technology and breadth of IBM, to transform technical capability into real business results. You will often find her on stage discussing the impact and value of technological advancements such as AI, IOT and Blockchain on industry. Sharon has moved into this role following success in IBM’s outsourcing, consulting and sales organisations, building a career as a technical architect with a focus on integration and enterprise architecture.

Sharon is also a board member of the CENSIS Innovation Centre. She was honoured with an MBE in the Queen’s birthday honours 2018 for services to women in technology based industries, and presented with the 'Inspirational Women in Leadership' award at the inaugural Scotland Women in Technology Awards 2017. She is Deputy Chair of BCSWomen, leads BCSWomen activity in Scotland, and is a board member of Scotland Women in Technology.

Karina is the Director of Diversity for Google’s EMEA region, enabling an environment of belonging for over 18,000 Googlers in 36 countries.

Prior to joining Google, Karina was the Global Head of Diversity and Inclusion at Vodafone, creating and overseeing the diversity initiatives for over 100,000 people. Central to her role was creating an inclusive culture, driving Vodafone’s ambition to be the best company for women by 2025, and maintain a focus on LGBT+ inclusion, with Vodafone being recognised as a Top global employer for LGBT in 2019.

Previously Karina spent 10 years at Gallup as a successful consultant advising organisations, facilitating thought provoking sessions to executive teams. Karina’s career started with 7 years on the Graduate Scheme at Kingfisher. Karina has a BA Hons in Social and Political Science from Cambridge University and a post graduate Business Diploma from Oxford University.

In 2017, Karina was awarded the Power of Women award for Diversity & Inclusion and in 2014, Karina was the winner of the Asian Woman of Achievement Award for Business. Karina is married with now 2 children, aged 15 and 9 years old.

Anjali has over 20+ years' experience in designing, developing and leading teams to build software solutions for security services; enterprise applications for telecom and management solutions for the wireless industry along with sound management background. In her current capacity at Cisco, she is the Partner Security Architect and Security Officer at Cisco Customer Experience’s Platform Security Group. She is currently leading the Security Center of Excellence initiative and her main focus is developing strategies and solutions for improving the security and privacy posture of Cisco Products. Her specialty is navigating complex landscapes in the areas of container security, data governance, and cyberspace privacy issues. Anjali has been an avid speaker, an influencer in Networking With A Purpose Silicon Valley series in areas of data privacy and cybersecurity. Her expertise is at the intersection of Machine Learning, Networking, and Cybersecurity. She holds a Patent in the field of workload scheduling based on a credit-based mechanism. She is also an Executive Producer of "Diva Motherhood" music video celebrating "mainstream women". Anjali holds a Masters in Computer Science from Dalhousie University, Canada, and a Bachelors in Electronics Engineering from the University of Pune, India.

Pavi Ramamurthy recently joined Upstart as their Chief Information Security Officer. Upstart is the first artificial intelligence lending platform designed to improve access to affordable credit while reducing the risk and costs of lending for their bank partners. At Upstart, Pavi is responsible for their overall security strategy as well as driving and managing security initiatives across the Corporate and Product platforms and also providing security assurance for their partners.

Pavi has close to 25 years of experience working in the software industry with more than 15 years in the security sector. Her previous stints include Anaplan, LinkedIn, VMware, Determina, Vitria Technology and 3Com. Pavi holds a Master’s degree in Computer Engineering from Santa Clara University, CA and a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from University of Madras, India.

Arushi is one of the founding engineers at WhatsApp Business and helped build the first monetization product for WhatsApp post acquisition. Over the last 3 years at WhatsApp, she has led different spaces of WhatsApp Business; from building the backend infrastructure for business platforms, to designing and building products for small-medium businesses. Today, she works closely with large enterprises across the world to engineer products and help define product strategy for communicating with users via WhatsApp Business.

Vicki Huff Eckert is the founder and leader of PwC’s US and Global New Ventures organization – an in-house incubator that designs, develops and markets technology offerings. Vicki’s New Ventures team has evaluated and incubated more than 100 investments globally, introducing the first software-as-a-service solutions to be licensed from the PwC firm, widely known for assurance, tax and consulting services but evolving as a tech brand. As a member of the firm’s US Leadership Team, her experience at PwC and beyond has provided her strong expertise in software and cloud businesses, as well as a track record of building diverse teams.

When Vicki first joined the tech industry, she was often the only woman in the room and sometimes had to fight to be heard -- an experience that many women can probably relate to in a variety of industries. In her opinion, it was just assumed that only a senior man would have valuable ideas. The rest of them were just there to listen and execute. But the culture is changing now.

As the Vice President of Content Operations and Assessment, Lynda is responsible for ensuring McAfee’s cybersecurity products have high efficacy and detection rates while keeping customers safe from the latest threats. She leads a global team that ensures all new detections are swiftly identified and solutions released quickly. Prior to this role, Lynda led a global team of senior technical engineers that brought McAfee’s future to life through innovative strategies and prototypes. Lynda also spent over two decades with Intel Corporation holding numerous technical and leadership positions.

A respected expert in her field, she has two patents and won the Intel Achievement Award, the Intel Software Quality Award, and the Society of Women Engineers Emerging Leader and Fellow Awards.

Lynda holds a BS in computer science and is a valued industry conference speaker. She has a passion for coaching, growing, and developing technical leaders and remains active in community outreach programs for the Society of Women Engineers.

Charlene has been a software developer for over 10 years in a range of languages and technologies. She is the founder of Coding Black Females, a non profit to inspire, provide opportunities, and showcase the talents of black women in tech. She is also the co-founder of Meet Up and Code, a community to bring developers together and code together. Charlene is passionate about increasing diversity in tech.

Rebecca Little is Head of Marketing Strategy Planning & Operations at Ericsson, a Digital Storyteller - expert in crafting digital approaches to bring technology to life. She has over 15 years' experience providing sales, marketing and training services to the world's largest IT vendors including; Microsoft, Vodafone, Canon, SAP and their resellers. She has devised multi-touch, integrated, award winning campaigns that have supported thousands of technology business to grow. Author of published paper ‘The Changing Pace of Customer Service – Online Reputation’ Rebecca’s leading-edge of current & future technology adoption. Recognised as one of the first to gain a Master’s degree in Digital Marketing, she passes on her knowledge to inspire younger generations and women to join the Digital and technology industry. Regularly supporting Women In Technology initiatives: Lovelace, IAMCP WIT, BIMA, WIT Network and Microsoft women. Her experience of successfully delivering over 4,000 business, sales and marketing projects for technology businesses and being a leader in one of the largest vendors in the world, puts her in a unique position to inspire women to have a career in technology.

Tanya is MD and Editor-in-Chief of FinTech Futures. She joined the company in early 2016, overseeing the its digital and print publishing operations and strategy. With over 12 years of experience in the industry, she has extensive understanding and knowledge of the banking/financial services technology sector and its participants, as well as of the B2B publishing business.

Cait O’Riordan is the FT’s Chief Product and Information Officer (CPIO). She is responsible for platform and product strategy, development and operations across the FT Group, working in close partnership with editorial and commercial teams. She is on the FT executive board, which is responsible for the company’s global strategy and performance.

Before joining the FT in February 2016 Cait led the BBC’s digital product development for the London 2012 Olympics and played a central role in the user and revenue growth of music app company Shazam.

Sukrutha is the CTO and co-founder of Girl Geek X, and a Senior Engineering Manager at Salesforce. Sukrutha graduated from USC with an M.S. in Electric Engineering. Sukrutha is involved in Bay Area Girl Geek Dinners because she wants to change the world for girls, one geek dinner at a time, and she is passionate about technology, gender diversity, and engineering leadership. Sukrutha was named in Business Insider’s list of “30 Most Important Women Under 30 In Tech“ in 2014 and “San Francisco Business Times 40 Under 40” Tech Titans of 2016. Sukrutha is a new mom to a tiny girl geek and in her spare time trains for races - swimming, cycling and running.

Sinéad O’Brien is a Lead Project Manager at the BBC. In her role in Design and Engineering, she has become a champion for responsible and ethical machine learning. This includes raising awareness of ML practices right across the BBC – and not just amongst the techie community. Sinéad’s background is in broadcast, telecoms and media. She recently completed a Masters in Digital Cultures.

Sharon is a member of the executive leadership team and has global responsibility for making Finastra an inclusive employer in the Fintech industry. She is committed and focused on empowering people to create a culture that attracts and inspires people within the Financial Services industry.

A passionate champion for diversity and inclusion at all levels, Sharon joined Finastra from Vodafone, where she held the position of Global Organization and People Development Director. Before joining Finastra Sharon instrumental in the award-winning diversity and digital work in Vodafone that transformed the culture and company. Sharon is a strong ally to the LGBTQ community and a proud receiver of an OUTstanding 2018 Ally Executives award.

Nazanin Delam is a Senior Software Engineer at Netflix. Nazanin is passionate about UI development, she loves JavaScript. At Netflix, she works on UI features on the WEB to enhance user experience across devices. Prior to Netflix, she worked in the Finance industry as a Software Architect for four years.

Nazanin is dedicated to advancing the role of women in engineering. She volunteers with Hour of Code teaching high school girls how to code and serves as a member of Women Who Code and Women Tech Makers to mentor engineers.

When she’s not working, you’re most likely to find Nazanin building AI applications and robots with JS, exploring the world, playing games, or curled up with a good book.

Tracey is the Clinical Technology Director at the Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Trust. Tracey has worked in healthcare for 30 years, starting her career as a Radiographer. In 2017 she changed roles in clinical leadership to a technology role within the IT division. This career change led to a steep learning curve within the IT environment involving the management of two critical patient information systems, procurement of an enterprise system and accountability for all medical devices used in the trust. From this position Tracey is leading a Women In Technology Initiative WITI to support three objectives for junior and clinical women working in or with technology, these include: mentoring & coaching, professional & personal development and an informal forum to network. Her aim is to increase career opportunities into senior management and help to reduce inherent invisible barriers both individual and organisational through creating a more inclusive environment.

Eva has been with Sky’s Startup Investments & Partnerships as a Senior Investment Manager since January 2019. Before, Eva was part of the Episode 1 Ventures team focusing on early-stage deep tech investments. From 2014, she was an Investment Director at Day One Capital, a Budapest based early-stage tech investor, until she left for pursuing an MBA in London in 2017. She sat on the Advisory Board of AImotive, a leading self-driving car startup with a full-stack software solution.

I am a military officer in the United States Air Force with a mission to integrate effective AI into the Department of Defense. I am passionate about solving problems in the intersection of analytics, policy, and defense and my unique experiences in leadership and technical disciplines have helped me in guiding change within the defense sector.

Jenny is part of the global Process Innovation and Advanced Operations team at Universal Music. This team works across the business standing up new ways for consumers to find and access Universal’s music and improving the way music is created, distributed and preserved. Jenny is currently helping to shape and implement a major transformation of the ways creative metadata is captured, stored and shared in Universal Music’s systems and how it is then synchronised across the industry to make sure that when you play a song, the right people are identified and paid.

Anu Gali is an Engineering Leader at Uber leading Data and ML Platforms at Uber. Her team is responsible for Trips, Revenue Forecasting, helps business Optimize Spend across Operations and Business units and predicts Customer LifeTime Value across all our users. As a tech leader, Anu has built high performing engineering teams from the ground up and steered large-scale projects in Data, ML, Web, e-Commerce and Mobile technologies for companies such as Uber, Groupon, Shutterfly, and Adobe. Anu strongly believes in having an entrepreneurial mindset and in helping others to reach their potential. A few years back, in her spare time, she co-founded a company and released a social entertainment app “IntoMovies”. She also volunteers for a number of charitable organizations and STEM programs.

With close to a decade of management experience, Naomi Rutledge has built successful teams in a wide variety of industries with companies from 10 to 10,000 employees.

She manages 2 teams at The New York Times that provide critical, high scale functionality to readers and the newsroom alike and she has been involved in creating and executing diversity initiatives within the workplace.

Before The New York Times, she worked at Hearst in both the newspaper and magazine divisions as well as in a research and development capacity. Her team launched a partnership with MSN for casual games and as an individual contributor she single handedly created one of the first Google Home apps, which was presented at Google I/O.

Naomi graduated from Harvard University on full scholarship and within a year worked her way up at a small import and distribution start up to be their Director of Sales. After that she advised and helped shape multiple start ups and launched a small media company.

Building the site for her media company led her to attend a coding bootcamp after which she transitioned into exclusively engineering roles. She has experience leading operations, marketing, sales and engineering teams.

Devon Edwards Joseph is a Data Engineer supporting the success of Data Science projects. Transitioning into data from a non-traditional background, Devon is passionate about mentoring and supporting others to switch into the field and thrive. In 2019, she sat on the Young Professionals’ Board of the UK WISE Campaign for gender parity in STEM fields, and is currently a Co-Organiser of the 700 member-strong London Artificial Intelligence Club for Gender Minorities. In 2019, Devon was pleased to have been shortlisted for Woman of the Year by the Women in IT Excellence Awards, and was named on the Computing.com 2019 Most Influential Women in UK Tech list.

Cassandra Rommel specialized in distributed systems at Northwestern before pursuing a career with early stage hardware startups. After her tenure as a founding engineer at Brilliant, working on IOT in the consumer smart home space, Cassandra took on a new challenge helping bring IOT to the industrial world with Samsara, one of the fast growing startups in Silicon Valley. She is passionate about hardware, startups, women in STEM, and her dog Archie.

Sope is a husband, father, public speaker and leadership coach who helps leaders nurture winning relationships personally and professionally.

He has spent over 15 years working in multiple organisations, leading cross generational high performing teams and understands the pressures and challenges that come with operating in a complex, fast-paced and ever-changing work environment.

He is on a mission to help leaders develop the right qualities required to lead themselves and others better, ensuring they grow both personally and professionally.

Aurelia Abena Attipoe is currently an Analyst with the Change Management team at Bank of America. She is passionate about the right utilization of resources to create shared value for business owners and their communities. She is the Founder of Pitch Hub, a social enterprise that focuses on equipping young entrepreneurs with soft skills necessary to grow their business. Pitch Hub was nominated for the 2019 Young Achievers Awards in the Emerging Brand of the year Category. In 2017, Aurelia was recognized with the highest honour at the 2017 Global Youth forum in Dubai for her work with Pitch Hub. She has always lent her voice to initiatives that empower women and young people.

She has presented on many platforms including the 2018 Global Youth Forum hosted in Paris where she spoke about the start-up ecosystem in Ghana and the 2018 Women Arise Summit along with the Vice President of Liberia. Aurelia is a social activist and an entrepreneur who seeks to transform Africa and the world.

Priya is a Cloud Architect working for Google's strategic Cloud customers across EMEA. She started her career as a software developer in India and then moved to work in France and the UK. She has a myriad of life experiences in different industries like Telecom, Banking, OS internals, Transportation, Virtualization and now in Cloud computing. She actively participates in tech and diversity events. She is passionate about innovating solutions, giving presentations, writing blogs on her vision for future tech and she currently has five patent filings.

Clara is Senior Backend Software Engineer at Over (recently acquired by GoDaddy) and works remotely from Pretoria. She spends most of her days building APIs (Go, swoosh of Kotlin, some DevOps) to make Over for Web come to life. Over is a creativity app for individuals and companies to easily create compelling visuals for their online presence. In 2018, she was named a Next Generation Women Leader by McKinsey & Company. Apart from a love for technology, Clara also enjoys art as a hobby. She is passionate about mentoring as a means to create new waves of young stars in South Africa.

Ruth joined Kin + Carta Create as a Senior Agile Delivery Lead in January 2020. Having developed her career at IBM and giffgaff, Ruth’s experience spans waterfall and agile approaches, client focussed projects and product led teams. A self-confessed evangelist, Ruth’s an advocate for continuous improvement, a challenger of the status quo and full time diversity and inclusion champion. She’s a a proper northerner who enjoys copious amounts of Yorkshire tea, G&T with a healthy portion of Agili-ty! When she’s not in the office, Ruth tries to stay fit playing hockey and is also part of the West End Musical Choir.

Lindiwe Matlali holds degrees and qualifications from the University of Cape Town, Stanford University, University of Pretoria and Columbia University. Her numerous accolades include: Destiny Magazine Power of 40 a list of South Africa’s powerful women under 40, MTN Women in ICT Community Builder Recognition Award 2018. She was recently awarded the 2019 Commonwealth Point of Light by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. She has just been appointed by the President of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa to serve as Commissioner for the Fourth Industrial Revolution responsible for the development of the 4IR strategy for South Africa.

Clare Sudbery is a lead engineer with Made Tech ( https://www.madetech.com/). She is a maths graduate with 20 years of software engineering experience. She has a particular interest in teaching and mentoring; encouraging women into IT; and banishing impostor syndrome.

Nine years ago she returned to IT with a sigh of relief after a few years 'break' as a secondary school maths teacher. Since then she has embraced all things XP. She is on a mission to awaken the inner geek in clever women (and men) everywhere.

Clare is a published novelist, and blogs at https://medium.com/a-woman-in-technology and https://insimpleterms.blog/. She loves her job.

Karen is a Technical Lead (ex-ThoughtWorks) and Engineering Manager specialising in scaling and leading high performing software delivery teams. She is passionate about the intersection between technology, people and leadership, and believes that successful team synergy comes from talented, diverse individuals who always support and raise their peers.

Daniel is responsible for coaching and leading a team of technical cloud transformation architects who will help customers accelerate their migration to the cloud. One of the main priorities of the role is to create a customer-centric culture, completely focused on helping our customers achieve their goals.

Julia Barbosa is development and effectiveness specialist, with a consistent track-record of leading people and organisations through change, equipping others with tools and skills to thrive. She works as a facilitator and strategist, leading global strategic projects focusing on improving personal and business capability. Julia speaks and writes about personal development, the power of failure in learning and happiness in the workplace.

Dr Hannah Rudman is a highly experienced IT Professional with distributed ledger technologies expertise. Hannah is Senior Challenge Research Fellow & Data Policy Lead at Scotland’s Rural College.

Hannah was an Associate Director at international firm BOP Consulting ‘17-‘18, establishing their Organisational Transformation capability. During '16-'17, she worked with global science and tech solutions company Leidos as Associate Principal Consultant, developing their Digital Transformation practice. Hannah founded and ran Envirodigital 2009-16, creating digital products that gave people agency to reduce carbon in their businesses and lives.

Hannah was elected as Fellow of the British Computer Society in 2016, as Honorary Fellow at Durham University in 2015, and as Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce in 2007. She is also an experienced non-executive director and serves as Board Trustee for the National Galleries of Scotland.

Lise is the Practice Lead in Data and AI at Sword IT Solutions, and has a strong background in Data Architecture and customer-facing roles delivering high-end Data Analytics Solutions. She manages client engagements as well as evangelising the benefits of Data and AI to the wider tech community.

Lise is from Norway and decided to study Computer Science at Strathclyde University. Her father worked in technology and without his support she would have found it difficult to move to the UK and find the course that was right for her. Lise can now look back on a 30-year long career in technology from software developer through to data architect.

She has a 15-year-old daughter who would like to study Computing. Lise wants to support her as she understands the challenges that are still there for women in technology.

Priya leads the Quality and Automation global teams at Hogarth Worldwide, a WPP subsidiary company. Holding degrees in Engineering and IT Marketing, she uses her knowledge and expertise in the fields of Automation and Emerging Tech to inspire her team and improve their digital processes.

Priya has a pragmatic style of leadership and is passionate about making the workplace a better place for her team, both in its culture and in its workflow. She can often be found reading up on the latest developments in Artificial Intelligence and Robotic Process Automation, some of her personal interests.

Ivana Bartoletti is Technical Director, privacy, at Deloitte and supports businesses in their privacy by design programmes, especially in relation to new technologies.

Ivana was awarded ‘Woman of the Year’ (2019) in the Cyber Security Awards in recognition to her growing reputation as an advocate of equality, privacy and ethics at the heart of tech and AI.

She is a sought after commentator for the BBC, Sky and other major broadcasters and news outlets (Guardian, Telegraph) on headline stories where the tech economy intersects with privacy and data law and politics.

Ivana launched the Women Leading in AI Network in May 2018, a thriving international group of scientists, industry leaders and policy experts advocating for responsible AI. Their 2018 report made waves among tech leaders, international institutions and the media, who backed many of its recommendations.

Bartoletti is Co-editor of the Fintech Circle’s AI Book, their first major publication focused on how AI is reshaping financial services.

Ivana's first book will be released in 2020 by Indigo Press: https://www.waterstones.com/book/an-artificial-revolution/ivana-bartoletti/9781911648116

Namrata Sarmah started her career as a software engineer in Bangalore (India) more than 12 years ago. She developed her career internationally and moved into Product Management after finishing her Masters at Manchester Business School in 2012. Throughout her career, she has worked in a variety of sectors like IT, FMCG, Telecom, Media Production, Healthcare, Beauty, and Broadcast. She's currently a Senior Director of Product at Viacom. She is an Advisor at start-up incubators like Antler and Virgin StartUp. Namrata also sits on the board of the Middlesex Learning Trust and few other organisations as a Non-Executive Director. She is the founder of two popular networking groups - The Career Mums Club and The BAME Leaders Network. She is an alumna of the University of Cambridge and Manchester Business School.

Recently, she has been listed in the FT Top 100 Most Influential Leaders in UK Tech.