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The Future of Technology
Jo Hannaford
Head of Technology, EMEA & Global Head of Quality Assurance Engineering @ Goldman Sachs
The Future of Technology
Damien Hooper-Campbel
VP, Chief Diversity Officer @ eBay
A presentation by Damien Hooper-Campbel.
Career Advice Clinic
Sign up for your one-to-one with our guest speaker Benedicta Banga, Founder @ LeadHer Initiative.
This is a safe environment for you to seek professional advice for your short or long term career decisions.
Taster Classes
Is ‘FinTech’ really a new concept? Right from the beginning of reformed investment banking, technology has been a critical piece of the financial jigsaw…but its perception, prioritisation and purpose has shifted in way that mimics the rest of the technology industry. Join J.P. Morgan as they recognize key moments in ‘FinTech’ to date and consider the way the story so far will help to shape the future.
The Aligned Enterprise
Sonya Iovieno
Head of Venture & Growth Banking @ Silicon Valley Bank
The Future of Technology
From building Europe’s largest travel and leisure website lastminute.com to non-executive director of Twitter and working in government, Martha Lane Fox will talk about how it is essential that women are part of the tech sector and why history can teach us to build the best possible future.
Career & Personal Development
Imposter Syndrome affects 70% of people at least once in their lives; and yet, we think it’s only ourselves. Imposter Syndrome robs us of our ability to embrace our successes, and instead makes us think irrationally about our abilities and performance. This syndrome not only drains self-confidence, but it can derail your career. I will offer some techniques and insights into Imposter Syndrome that will urge attendees to take responsibility for success, and project confidence.
Career & Personal Development
Julie Barbosa
Save The Children UK
For those who want to think creatively about engaging their audiences, this inspiring session will share thought-provoking ways to deliver and deepen customer engagement through happiness. Focusing on case studies from around the world, from a driver who carefully decorated his tuk-tuk to the sign language interpreter who danced with the crowds at Hyde Park, this session shows that happiness is efficient and infectious – and is a powerful way to engage others.
Workshop
Emerging Technologies
Kathryn Brett Goldman
CEO & Founder @ The Cybermaniacs
We’re in an unprecedented time in history. This session will explore the technology beyond the hype and what to watch out for as these new areas are not known for smooth sailing. Kathryn addresses how companies can look at digital transformation, emerging technology & investment. She uncovers what cultural, governance, financial factors should be in place and what decision making techniques you can consider.
Entrepreneurs & Female Founders
Laila Dupuy
Founder @ Kitchin Table
This session would capture the determined entrepreneur spirit that success never comes from sticking to what you know. Yes, starting a business with little money and/or in an industry you know nothing about is risky, but it can also have great rewards and presents an opportunity to disrupt an industry. Takeaways would include practical tips and advice to get female entrepreneurs started, even if they don’t know exactly where to start.
Taster Classes
Daniela will cover the key differences between the front and back end development. You’ll gain a deep understanding of why it’s crucial to use a framework when working with the front end development. In addition to all this information, you’ll leave knowing how to build a web application.
The Future of Technology
Dayne Turbitt
Senior Vice President, UK&I Enterprise Business @ Dell Technologies
The Aligned Enterprise
Remote work is the number one desired workplace setup for developers. For companies, it’s easier to hire talent with a global talent pool, and developer productivity and engagement can soar. This talk will share tools and practices for leaders to build and scale a trusting asynchronous, remote-inclusive culture, benefitting distributed and local teams alike.
Deep Dive Tech Workshops
This session will explore how Java development has been brought into the open over the past decade. Several Java developer efforts have brought open source development processes and new levels of transparency and participation into their communities. The Java Community Process (JCP) program celebrates twenty years of Java standards development in 2018. Since the initiation of efforts to expand the developer participation in the Java community, Java standards development is more open that it ever has been.
Diversity & Inclusion Workshops
Starting with the premise that inequalities have been designed and learnt, Fearless Futures believes by definition, that they can be re-designed and un-learnt. Human-centred design is a powerful method and practice for solving problems. Our work builds on its foundations and enriches it by acknowledgement of power and privilege asymmetries through the design process.
Workshop
Career & Personal Development
Why isn't every technology conference like this? We need more women speakers in technology to take the stage - why not you? Every woman has a voice that deserves to be heard. This talk will cover the basics of how to find yours. You will learn how to choose a topic, write an abstract, and get it selected, as well as how to build confidence on stage and discover your personal style as an awesome public speaker.
Career & Personal Development
During this workshop you will: identify the driving force behind what you do, gain clarity on your strengths as well as your potential and create a clear vision of where you want to be in your career. You will be invited to dig deep, and to set clear intentions for where you are heading in your career, aligned to your priorities and values!
Who is this workshop for?
Do you find yourself drifting through life, living for the weekends and holidays? Perhaps you’re on that treadmill of life with no clear direction on where you are heading OR experiencing change, uncertainty, stress and anxiety OR maybe you have landed yourself a great job, and are not sure what to do next!
Key Takeaways:
Workshop
Emerging Technologies
Lucy Pearson
Co-Founder @ Unplugged
Can we embrace technology without getting lost in it? This talk is for anyone who is curious about the trajectory we're travelling on. It provides insights on the way we approach the changing landscapes of business, technology and human connection.
Entrepreneurs & Female Founders
How can sustainable business be good business - May Al-Karooni from Globechain, an innovative reuse marketplace will show you how you can save money, create social, economic and environmental impact and gain the financial returns required.
Soft Skills
Dr. Catherine Aczel Boivie
Executive in Residence @ Simon Fraser University
The key for getting ahead in your career is to constantly build your contacts, skills and knowledge while maintaining a professional image. This session will discuss how you can cultivate opportunities for self-promotion, build relationships and use networking opportunities to enhance professional growth and support career objectives without looking obnoxious or self-aggrandizing.
Taster Classes
Today’s users demand tailored, dynamic, and constantly refined experiences. Join this session to see how to leverage microservice architectures, understand how application intelligence is created and how to source image technology. You'll see live demonstrates for creating, sharing and deploying microservices - you'll leave inspired to take your microservices to the next level!
The Future of Technology
Laura Malcolm
Digital Lead & Market Units Executive @ Avanade
A thought-provoking and interactive session in which we explore the ways that technology will change every part of your life.
The Aligned Enterprise
Joanne will focus on how to create an inclusive environment including how to build inclusive leaders.
Career & Personal Development
Presentation Led by Alicia Skubick - Marketing Director @ Intuit
Emerging Technologies
This presentation explores the benefits of using Augmented Reality at school and how innovative technologies like Augmented Reality can change the way we learn in future. Why are technologies entering our lives as consumers so rapidly? Why does the business sector and the education sector in the digital transformation era remain in the 'analog age'?
Darya highlights the importance of the use of emerging technologies for education as one the main steps to move education from analog age and catch up with industry revolution 4.0. This presentation gives a general overview on how AR can be beneficial for both educators as a tool and kids as an educational aid that involves all the senses: audio, visual and kinetic.
Key takeaways: thought provoking topic in order to understand the importance on new technologies for developing essential skills in their learning process.
Entrepreneurs & Female Founders
Imogen Berman
Co-Founder @ Think Plan Thrive
Jared Ruddy
Co-Founder @ Think Plan Thrive
If you are a startup founder working on fundraising, we know your time is precious. That every moment counts. But it's often difficult to know what to focus on. We've reviewed, tweaked and built almost 50 startups investment pitches just this year. We’ll share simple but powerful ways to build a startup pitch that investors really engage with and highlight what it is they're looking for.
Soft Skills
Presenting to a technical audience can be a challenge. You need to make sure you bring the 101's along on the journey with you, as well as challenging and inspiring the 401’s. Creating deep and engaging material takes a lot of work for a presentation, and when you consider the scale of effort required to do the same thing with workshops or bootcamps, the level of effort is significant.
Taster Classes
As data is getting richer and richer nowadays, how to deal with it is becoming more and more critical for companies in all industries. Apache Kafka provides a distributed streaming platform that helps us process this data in a simple, efficient and reliable way. I will be showing you a few use cases of Apache Kafka, including a project that I have worked on and is now in production. I will also highlight the challenges we faced while working with Apache Kafka, as we all know, nothing is perfect and it's all about trade offs.
The Future of Technology
Verity Harding
Co-Lead @ Deepmind - Ethics in AI
Artificial intelligence has the potential to be one of the most important and widely beneficial scientific breakthroughs ever made, but may have uneven impacts that are hard to predict. Verity Harding will discuss why building inclusive technology is the only way to ensure AI's benefits are are distributed fairly and equally.
The Aligned Enterprise
In this interactive talk, I will be sharing with you some of the things that you can put in place to create a fairer and more balanced company. Where your commitment to this invites everyone into the conversation.
Career & Personal Development
As a woman entering the tech world, no one gives you a manual, but there are unique challenges that all women face in the workplace that you don’t learn from a textbook or classroom.
Career & Personal Development
Workshop
Emerging Technologies
This presentation shares how VRAR can distract and engage people away from pain and how technology can enable us to be Human. This is the story of developing virtual and augmented software applications for the health service for and with patients. Deepa will use two specific case studies of building BreatheVR a VR app for people in chronic pain and Whack A Mo an AR game for children in hospital.
Entrepreneurs & Female Founders
Sue Marshall
CEO @ Abodoo
Running a business - particularly a start up is tough - but can be hugely rewarding. The presentation will look at a number of key areas and the mistakes I have made and what I have learned. 90% of startups fail- hopefully some of these experiences will help to ensure yours isn’t one of them.
Soft Skills
Alexandra Fitzgerald
Product Manager, Big Data Platforms and Services @ Expedia
I‘ve changed countries, careers, and genders. And while experiencing those changes you can lose your voice, and the ability to be yourself. You may find structures suddenly stacked against you, and your natural behaviours suddenly dictated by new, unexpected, and unseen rules.
Taster Classes
Have you fallen into a role that requires project management? Are you curious about how project management could help you get things done more efficiently? Then come along to this taster class to learn practical components of project management, and walk away with real tools to help you succeed, whatever your job title may be.
The Future of Technology
Bo Young Lee
Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer @ UBER
Tech Talks
Suzie McFarlane
Advanced Analytics, Platform Lead @ ASOS
The Aligned Enterprise
Deep Dive Tech Workshops
Mahmood Hanif
Managing Director @ JPMorgan
Build a machine learning model to analyze text using Jupyter notebooks and Python. Get a sense of the steps and trade-offs when building real-life machine learning models. Join forces with other techies in teams to solve a sentiment analysis problem with prizes available for the winning team! We will use a mob programming development approach so you do not necessarily have to have coding expertise to participate. Participants will be grouped based on their experience so you can learn from one another.
This workshop is aimed at: Anyone who is interesting in Natural Language Processing
Prerequisite knowledge: No coding experience is required; mob programming experience may be beneficial
Key Takeaways: Build foundation knowledge in building models and how to apply to a realistic analysis problem; experience mob programming method
Workshop
Diversity & Inclusion Workshops
We often underestimate the power and productivity of a thriving team, to give organisations, products and services a leading edge. This is an experiential workshop that aims to explore multidimensional leadership to build diverse and resilient teams in emerging technology environments. Are you a start-up in the process of building a team or perhaps you are scaling up and considering how to develop your existing team? This workshop will help you to consider natural inclinations, alongside skills and experience to build a thriving team, helping you to attract gamechanging talent or nurture your existing team to remain at the cutting edge with your innovation.
This workshop is aimed at Entreprenuers, Founders, CEOs, Co-Founders, Project Managers, all Leaders or aspiring leaders who want to nurture the best teams.
Prerequisite knowledge: No prior knowledge is necessary, just an open mind and willingness to experiment!
Key takeaways: An understanding of multidimensional leadership to build diverse and resilient teams in emerging technology environments.
Workshop
Career & Personal Development
Alison Krill
MD @ BAML
Managing diversity is about valuing individuals and respecting what each individual brings to the team. It’s ensuring that an open and inclusive culture exists that enables individuals to effectively contribute. As a leader with experience working in three regions, I will share my insights on effectively managing diverse teams. Managers and individuals looking to successfully build a culture of diversity will benefit most from this session.
Career & Personal Development
Gareth Davies
Co-founder, Facilitator and Executive Coach @ The Bravest Path
Bethan Davies
Co-founder, Facilitator and Executive Coach @ The Bravest Path
Do you want to play bigger but feel held back? Do you dream of moving into a higher role in Tech or leading a big project but worry about whether you are good enough, or what other people might think?
This interactive workshop is focused on identifying our inner critic and perfectionist tendencies that hold us back, recognising the fears we all have, and learning how to move forward despite them.
This workshop is aimed at:
Anyone who wants to be braver and kinder to themselves, taking positive steps in their career and personal life without feeling paralysed to move forward or worried about what others may think.
Pre-requisite knowledge:
None
Key Takeaways:
Through attending this workshop, you will:
Workshop
Emerging Technologies
Neha Chaudhry
Founder @ Walk in To Beat
Neha was inspired to help people with Parkinson’s after witnessing her late granddad struggle with the condition. Her Smart Walking Stick uses sensors and stimulators concealed in its handle to monitor walking patterns and provide vibrations to help overcome freezing. Neha will share how the data collected by the stick in real time can be pulled wirelessly for analysis and may help in long-term condition management of the patients.
Entrepreneurs & Female Founders
Before Pam Bateson and Wendy Roberson co-founded Thrive Partners in 2015, they’d been worked together for many years. In this session, you’ll hear the story of how their relationship has changed and grown, from the first steps of setting up their on-demand coaching service, to travelling the world as one of the Mayor of London’s top tech companies. You’ll get top tips about setting up your own business, their personal highs and lows, and insight about the importance of choosing the right partner.
Soft Skills
As women in tech we juggle our work and personal lives, instead of trying to balance everything at once, we are going to look at a different approach, work life integration. In this presentation we will discuss how to better leverage your time and focus on being more time-efficient. April will use her real world experience as a woman in IT, triathlete, and a family focused individual to share how she makes her time work for her.
Taster Classes
Lisa uses her experience from working in one of the UK Police Cyber Crime Units to highlight how hackers use information we put on platforms such as Facebook to launch targeted attacks. In this session you will be become the hackers. You will walk through how intelligence is gathered and how malicious emails are crafted. You will never look at Facebook friend requests in the same way again....
The Future of Technology
Managing work-life integration can be challenging at every stage of your career. Whether you are a young professional, an expert or a manager who needs to juggle their career and personal life. But how can you manage both your work and your life? Nicola will share tools and examples to show you how this is possible from every level and not just the top.
The Aligned Enterprise
How can you use digital ways of working to help you to effectively lead organisational transformation? Hear Lara’s successful strategies for breaking down silos and working effectively across multiple departments.
Career & Personal Development
Making the jump from techie to business leader may seem like a leap, but the problem solving skills you’ve learnt may just be the key to helping you crack the corporate world. Those looking to break into business often overlook the transferrable skills they are armed with, and self select out of the business industry due to the belief that there is no feasible career path they can follow. Zoe Cunningham, Managing Director, Softwire, discusses how she went from coder to CEO, and highlights how technology experts can adapt their abilities and take the first steps towards getting a business role, without having to start all over or sacrifice a stable career path.
Entrepreneurs & Female Founders
Lia Zorzou
Business Coach & Mentor @ Girapp Innovations
VCs assess founders about it & founders can’t succeed without it. Discover the extraordinary benefits of Emotional Intelligence to succeed in business and in life. Join this talk to learn how to create the internal emotional strength to execute leadership in the best way; learn how to use your silence to connect and use your voice for the highest impact things.
Soft Skills
It’s a tale as old as the hills that devs and non-devs speak different languages. But that’s all it is, a tale. In her fast-paced and (hopefully) fun talk, Marie will use real world examples and actionable exercises to show how both sides can work together to create better products, services and customer experiences, whilst making each other’s lives easier at the same time.
Taster Classes
Caroline Denoon Slater
UK Security Leader @ Oracle
Join Caroline’s dynamic taster class on GDPR and making sure your company is ready. This hands on workshop will cover 3 focus areas; the right to be forgotten, data transfer and accountability, security and break notification. The session will kick off with a maturity test with attendees leaving with an actionable task list to push for greater GDPR.
The Future of Technology
Tech Talks
This talk will look at Big Data terms and technologies (eg Data Lake, Hadoop, Spark, Data Science, AI, Machine Learning) and explore where and how they can be used within a business.
The Aligned Enterprise
Becca Bright
Organisational Psychologist and Co-Founder @ We Love Work
In today’s world change is constant and inevitable, especially within the tech space. Often we find during periods of change employee engagement drops and productivity and performance decreases. Becca will explain how the brain perceives change and why this leads to reduced engagement.
Diversity & Inclusion Workshops
Join JPMorgan for an insightful and practical discussion on how value can mean different things to each of us, how to recognize what you value and articulate this to your manager. Learn about the small differences that distinguish a strong personal brand to one that falls flat. Prepare for your next 1-1 with confidence; asking for what you need to feel recognized and rewarded in the workplace.
This workshop is aimed at: Individuals seeking confidence-building tools for building a personal brand, researching your value and having those difficult conversations.
Prerequisite knowledge: None
Key Takeaways: How to approach conversations about money, flexible working, environmental changes, relocation or other key topics that impact your worth.
Workshop
Career & Personal Development
Emerging Technologies
Viola Sommer, COO at Auticon, will discuss the untapped potential of neurodiverse cognitive strengths within the tech industry. Auticon specialises in placing IT consultants who are autistic. Viola will share her views on the benefits of neurodiversity, common misconceptions, and offer practical advice on integrating, working with and managing staff on the autism spectrum.
Entrepreneurs & Female Founders
Sukhi Julta
Founder and COO @ MarketOrders
This session will provide you with a practical guide for how to prepare your first (or next) round of investment capital for your startup. You’ll gain an understanding of what investors want to see and learn how to develop your fundraising game plan. Whether you’re an entrepreneurial person who someday could be seeking investment capital, or a startup founder or CEO of an early-stage company looking to raise funds, this session will provide you with the knowledge you need to succeed.
Soft Skills
For example, cultural differences can be interpreted as gender bias and taken personally during communication. At the end of the session a listener will be able to have a more rational approach to understanding human behaviour and what drives it. Followed by increased confidence levels and productivity.
Master Classes
Lily shares a framework used at Facebook (Understand, Identify, Execute) that helps people figure out how to solve problems. It’s about first understanding the actual issue, then identifying the best possible solutions from an array of possibilities and, finally, crushing execution. This presentation can apply to product building/problem solving as well as more basic, human problems.
Tech Talks
During this presentation Anisha will share her own experience of working in technology and more specifically with Blockchain. What is Blockchain and what are the differences between Public and Private Blockchain? Anisha explores the technology used to build Private Blockchain, Hyperledger and explains why Private Blockchain is useful for enterprise applications. Anisha delves into why Blockchain should be on your radar, with a real time demo of a use case. Attendees will leave understanding why Blockchain is important for companies, why they should be aware of Blockchain and what is ahead of us in the near future.
The Aligned Enterprise
Those of us who work in Tech can assume we’re reflective of our customers’ needs because we’re brand users. But bridging the gap between us and our target users is essential. This session shows why Customer Obsession matters and explores techniques for bringing the customer to the centre of everything we do day to day.
We’ll consider how better and more strategic decisions can be made as a result and show that being able to talk the language of Customer can enhance your personal reputation as a more strategic, authoritative and valuable leader. Key Takeaways: Understand how and why your experience of your brand will be different to those of your users, learn techniques for getting closer to your users and your markets every day, be aware of how market and customer insights help you appear more of a strategic leader / thought partner to your senior leadership.
Deep Dive Tech Workshops
React Native has the reputation of being a write-once-deploy-anywhere solution with the aim of developing iOS and Android applications fast and accessible for web developers. The talk will follow the retrospective on what went well, what didn't, what I learnt and what still puzzles me after experimenting with react native
Who the workshop is aimed at: Web/iOS/Android developers or people who are curious about ReactNative or are thinking about using it
Prerequisite knowledge: None
Key takeaways: Overview of the state of React Native today for mobile development.
What are the benefits to using React Native and which apps are/not suited.
Tips and Tricks learnt from experience with ReactNative.
Workshop
Deep Dive Tech Workshops
How do you write the right number of tests, the right type of tests, at the right level, with the right feedback, that are run at the right time and give the best feedback? "Follow the test pyramid" is the pat answer, but in reality it is much trickier than this would have you believe. This is a hands-on workshop that aims to improve your testing skills by using a simple fake example and keeping things necessarily high level.
Who the workshop is aimed at:
Developers, business analysts, project managers, test analysts
Prerequisite knowledge:
Some coding or project management experience. Workshop participants will be split into teams, ideally with a range of roles / skills in each team.
Key takeaways:
An understanding of how to assess which tests are needed and why. An overview of how you might go about implementing some of these tests.
Workshop
Career & Personal Development
The culture of the fast-growing tech companies embraces meritocracy as well as mobility. The benefits of the limited hierarchy and the increased commercial understanding from working in different functions are obvious. Less obvious is the lack of clearly defined career paths and therefore a need on the part of the employee to take ownership of their careers in a new way. A discussion and exploration of tools and skills I have learned along the way to support my own career trajectory in this new world.
Career & Personal Development
Gender influences our body language. Research shows that while women have many communication strengths, they often do not project enough confidence through their body language. And this may undermine their credibility as leaders and team members in male-dominated environments. In my workshop, you will learn how to use your body language (stance, gestures, eye contact, pace, voice) to exude confidence and authority.
Workshop
Emerging Technologies
This is a discussion about the complexities of mental health and exploring how emerging digital technology can be utilised to build resilience and improve emotional wellbeing. If you are concerned about the increasing number of people suffering with anxiety, depression or stress, and wonder how we use emerging technology more effectively to improve emotional wellbeing, then this could be the talk for you.
Entrepreneurs & Female Founders
Jenny Stanley
Founder and MD @ Appetite Creative Solutions & FemmeNiche
This presentation details how and why some business plans change and why it is necessary to pivot based on what the market needs. Starting from scratch with no investment, trials and tribulations to suit a specific market, dealing with different cultures and staffing issues, Jenny outlines the large learning curve and mistakes along the way. A few anecdotal stories here and there which should make everyone laugh, from staff walking out in tears and resigning to only turn back to work on a Monday to clients who blew their top! Its hard.. with many challenging moments but so rewarding .. always believe in yourself and have a plan C.
Soft Skills
Kathryn Brett Goldman
CEO & Founder @ The Cybermaniacs
Assertiveness is a key skill for success in any workplace, especially those changing as fast as technology is today! From asking for a raise, defending a colleague, sticking to your own personal truth, or ensuring your voice is heard and respected- we’ll cover all the latest on this crucial interpersonal skill. Starting with the neurology of assertiveness, we’ll discuss the positive behavioural traits and hear inspirational stories of assertive women in technology. Whether you are new to assertiveness or an already proven leader, this session can help everyone tap into how we can assert ourselves in our roles today.
Master Classes
The Guardian uses a range of tools to produce content. This presents a challenge when gathering user behaviour metrics and spotting wider cross-system trends. The solution was to build a single metrics platform using AWS to bring together data from multiple sources and allow a unified overview of our tools
The Future of Technology
With advances in technology, many careers are changing and new skills are required but there are ‘human’ qualities that will always remain important to truly succeed.
The Future of Technology
The Future of Technology
“You can’t choose what happens to you in life, you only choose how you respond.” As a seasoned IT professional, Jody Davids’ outlook on leadership is deeply impactful and inspiring. In this keynote, she will share learnings gleaned from an extraordinary career at iconic global brands.
Career Advice Clinic
Sign up for your one-to-one with our guest speaker Benedicta Banga, Founder @ LeadHer Initiative.
This is a safe environment for you to seek professional advice for your short or long term career decisions.
The Future of Technology
Jen Grant has spent the last 10 years sitting on executive teams and even in the face of the most aggressive of colleagues she has continued to be successful growing companies from 10m to 100m. So what’s the answer? Lean in and be thought of as bossy? Lead from the background? Jen will share her own personal rallying cry for how to get past all of the labels and win together.
The Aligned Enterprise
Renee Hawkins
Head of Capability @ ThoughtWorks
It is our responsibility as technologists to understand the societal implications of emerging tech including how we can combat algorithm bias, collect data more responsibility, and building inclusive AI. Renee will discuss how whole organisations can be aligned to minimise the negative impacts of these on society; and maximise the opportunity to use technology to address injustices: past, present and future.
The Aligned Enterprise
Development of products, systems, or services sits at the intersection of applied science (approximately: the how) and economics (approximately: the why). Assuming, that is, that we wish to be paid to make. Most of us work for, or at least in, companies. Companies are creatures of law and convention, as well as fashion and mythology.
Workshop
Career & Personal Development
An interactive neuroscience-based talk on how technology changes our behaviour and affects our health, thinking, decision-making and creativity if we don’t manage it properly. Anastasia will share practical tips on how to take charge of technology, and not allow it drive your agenda or thinking.
Emerging Technologies
We will take you on a journey of how the Oracle Innovation team connected a Supersonic car to the Oracle Cloud Platform.
Key Takeaways: We must stand on the shoulders of giants – 1000mph doesn’t just happen, its built on progress from others, believing that the impossible boundaries can be broken, understanding the importance of STEAM and inspiring the next generation.
Entrepreneurs & Female Founders
Miss Laura K. Inamedinova
Founder @ LKI Consulting
During her talk, Laura K. Inamedinova will tackle the ins and outs of having a tech marketing agency. She will expose the truth what it is like to work with crypto clients and how to find the balance between what clients want and...what is actually possible to achieve.
Soft Skills
Effective teamwork is crucial to getting things done, and making these teams as impactful as possible amplifies what you can achieve. There are many aspects to successful teams - from hiring good people, facilitating communication and fostering a healthy culture. In this talk we’ll explore the logistics of building and growing great teams, based on experience from working in a fast paced startup and seeing it grow over 18 months from 50 to 320 people.
The Future of Technology
Tech Talks
I am aware that Agile has become a bit of a 'dirty' word. Let’s take things back to basics, leave agile at the door and talk about survival of the fittest in the tech industry. How can we adapt and evolve to stay alive and where does diversity come in?
The Aligned Enterprise
Many businesses have data science and business intelligence teams producing ad-hoc insights to drive business decisions. But what happens when you want to productionise those insights? In this workshop, I will provide an overview of Apache Spark and how it has transformed the world of Big Data development. I’ll walk through some use cases of Spark and get hands-on with some simple examples. I’ll also show you how to think more like a Data Engineer, from debugging performance using the Spark UI, to writing unit tests. Finally, I’ll talk about a tool we have developed that sits over Spark to make it easier for Data Science and BI teams to write production-ready code.
Workshop
Deep Dive Tech Workshops
Chatbots are changing how companies interface with their customers. With chatbots, you can easily fulfill the needs of your customers in an automated way using natural, human-like chat interfaces. What if you could build chatbots with sophisticated natural language processing and almost no operational overhead? Come learn how you can build a chatbot using Amazon Lex which is a fully managed service for building conversational interfaces into any application using voice and text.
Workshop
Deep Dive Tech Workshops
Carolina Pizatto
Service Designer @ MoJ
Ignacia Orellana
Service Designer @ GDS
Clara Teoh
Designer and Training Lead @ GDS
Introduction to Service Design through a mix of government case studies and hands-on sessions. We’ll show you how we deliver complex service design and set strategic direction by focusing on user needs first. See the advantages of moving from a product and tech focused approach to a user focused one.
Who the workshop is aimed at: People who want to know more about service design.
People who want to understand how tech decisions are made in Government.
People interested in user centred design.
Prerequisite knowledge: None
Key takeaways:
Workshop
Diversity & Inclusion Workshops
Fast paced, future- forward organisations are often restructuring their recruitment and onboarding process because if you are rapidly increasing headcount, there's a chance you can lose your culture very quickly.
In this interactive workshop, we will learn to create a recruitment process that is aimed at getting your candidates or potential new hires invested from the day they are alerted of your 'Job Advert' as we use this framework to work your culture into the recruitment process.
We will also explore how to develop better onboarding processes and candidate experience by using a framework that is aimed at breaking the patterns of “rigid and unproductive” orientation as we reverse engineer this to get new starters deeply engaged, committed and inspired with passion. This is called a bespoked “day in life.”
This Workshop is aimed at:
HR teams, People operations teams, CEOs and senior leadership who understands the key to retaining talent goes beyond rewarding employees.
Key takeaways: You will learn that while there is no doubt that quickly and efficiently bringing in new employees affects your productivity factor, first impressions of your company counts more. You will be equipped to create an attraction and selection process that ensures your new hire is making a fantastic career choice.
Workshop
Diversity & Inclusion Workshops
Lauren McCallum
Global Head @ Mill Film
Audrey Ferrara
DFX Supervisor @ MPC
Key takeaways: Meet women in VFX pioneering Oscar winning VFX, understand how more women in VFX contribute to diversity in creativity, understand your responsibility in lifting your fellow women up.
Workshop
Career & Personal Development
Working in Technology can be daunting, but not if you have the skills in your arsenal to be confident in any scenario. The Telegraph’s Cat Wildman and Carol Johnson, teach you how to to identify your strengths and use them to get more from the workplace, whether you are a quietly dominant introvert, or an extrovert able to take charge and focus a group.
Career & Personal Development
Why have you come to this conference? Maybe it's because you are thinking about a career in tech and are wondering how to do that, or you're thinking about up-skilling and moving into a different skill area so you've come to be inspired. Maybe, you have a few years experience within the sector and are wanting to give something back, so are looking for networks you can do that within. During this session with the help of the InnovateHer team & industry mentors we're going to be using a future map to strategically plan and work on your path once the conference has ended.
This workshop is aimed at; Students, graduates, juniors, anyone wanting to transfer careers or take the next step, people who want to give back to the community.
Prerequisite knowledge: None
Key takeaways: Each attendee will receive their own future map to take home with them, which will contain their next steps for future careers, promotions or giving back to the community.
Workshop
Entrepreneurs & Female Founders
Pip Wilson explores the current effect of the ‘VC mentality’ - short term gains, lack of diversity, and rigid working practices - on wider business culture. Pip argues that in order to create thriving, sustainable businesses the focus of investors and founders alike should be on creating products and services with social purpose, and recruiting to reflect a diverse world view.
Soft Skills
Technical depth is an obvious requirement when it comes to building a successful career in tech. But that isn’t everything. In this talk, Fernanda will go over some of her observations from her over 10 years of management on what are the traits and behaviours of successful engineers she has worked with. It turns out a lot of such traits and behaviour aren’t as much related as how those engineers relate and interact with technology, but how they interact with the challenges they face and the people around them.
Master Classes
Solutions Engineer @ Sonatype
Stephanie Chaplin
In March 2017 Equifax had over 140 million personal records stolen due to using a vulnerable software component. This is language agnostic, similar things occur all languages such as Java, JavaScript, Python, .NET etc. Learn about the modern software supply chain and how to prevent your software being exploited!
Tech Talks
Jane Wang
Research Scientist, Neuroscience Team @ Deepmind
The brain is the only working example of a truly intelligent machine, so it makes sense that artificial intelligence researchers look to it for inspiration. But how far can ideas from neuroscience inform AI research? Could advances in AI point to new understanding about the brain? Jane Wang will discuss the intertwined history of AI and neuroscience and what that means for research in both domains today.
Intended audience: Those with an interest in neuroscience and AI, no prerequisite knowledge.
Key Takeaways: How ideas from neuroscience are being ported to artificial intelligence research, How advances in AI point to new lines of research and understanding in neuroscience, how someone with a Physics background can end up doing research in either.
Emerging Technologies
Akshi Federici
Executive Director, Strategic Projects @ ConsenSys
In the future, everyone should be empowered to interface with a blockchain, regardless of occupation or programming skills. Most industries will be transformed – finance, supply chain, music, journalism, real estate, education, etc. Blockchain will enable new business models that we haven’t even imagined yet. Join us to learn more.
Entrepreneurs & Female Founders
It’s not a matter of if but when you will be a victim of cyber attack. Hardly a day goes by without yet another cyber attack story in the news. All organisations are at risk regardless of their size. Large organisations may have more data to steal, but small businesses typically have less secure systems and thus make attractive targets for hackers. But how do you protect your business with limited time and resources? What if you can’t yet afford a CISO? What can you do to protect your customer and employee information? This seminar will provide some actionable steps you can take to help secure your business.
A cyber attack can be the difference between success and failure for a start-up. Be prepared.
Soft Skills
In order to create more opportunities for Women in Tech, we need to look for key talent from a young age. Join Amanda's session to hear HOW and WHAT you can do, as a technical professional, for the future women. Learn practical tactics on how as a techie, you can set up those open evenings, internships, mentorships and so much more.
Taster Classes
The use of Docker Containers as a deployment model for applications have gone mainstream. Many companies are turning to Containers as an alternative to using virtual machines due to the speed and ease of deployment while also being efficiently light weight when compared to virtual machines. This session is a skill up hands on lab who will take beginners through all they need to know!
The Aligned Enterprise
In a highly competitive environment, with a collective desire to build diverse and inclusive teams that are set up for success, how can we use insights to make better decisions and build our future workforces.
Diversity & Inclusion Workshops
Bethan Davies
Co-founder, Facilitator and Executive Coach @ The Bravest Path
Gareth Davies
Co-founder, Facilitator and Executive Coach @ The Bravest Path
So often, it is fear that holds us back from having the brave conversation that could make all the difference. This workshop focuses on moving through our often unfounded fears of uncertainty, failure, conflict, and rejection, to a place where we can communicate effectively without blame or judgement. Whether it’s a promotion, pay rise, change in role, development opportunity, or giving difficult feedback – this workshop will enable you to quickly learn the skills and approach to make a powerful case for change, and strengthen relationships as you do so.
This interactive session covers:
This workshop is aimed at: Anyone who wants to be braver and ask for what they want or need, taking positive steps in their personal and professional lives and making change happen.
Pre-work: Regarding the brave conversation you would like to have, consider these three questions:
Key Takeaways: Through attending this workshop, you will:
Workshop
Career & Personal Development
In this interactive session we will look at speaking frameworks you can use during meetings, interviews and Q&A sessions. We'll also explore hedging techniques that will help you deal with difficult questions. You will learn practical strategies to get yourself out of a tight spot. This session is for everyone who would like to be more confident during high pressure situations.
Career & Personal Development
Dr. Sybil Wong
Chief Operating Officer @ Sparrho
AI no longer belongs to the realm of scifi: its maturation is the prelude to an unforeseen change in humankind's ability to innovate. Yet companies’ utilisation of AI is seen to be helping introduce a ""post-truth era”. If AI struggles to discern facts from fiction, could it be that human intelligence is still a necessary component for successful AI integration? Beyond tagging and user feedback, human expertise is vital to sanity-check AI in its infancy. Only by blending AI's ability to process data with humans’ ability to understand nuance and context can we ensure facts remain facts in today’s world.
Entrepreneurs & Female Founders
Soft Skills
Public speaking can be a daunting prospect. Do I know enough, can I engage an audience? However, if you can take a leap outside your comfort zone and break down those barriers, presenting can open up new networks and opportunities. I’d like to share my journey from Jr. Developer through to Head of Data Science in just 8 years, and how the world looks a lot different now.
Master Classes
We believe that Azure Cosmos DB will fundamentally transform the way developers will build cloud-based apps: Join this session to be introduced to a globally distributed, multi-model database that can elastically and independently scale across geographic regions – yes it’s possible! Audience: Level 300 – Developers – i.e. App Developers, DB Developers
Tech Talks
The Internet has revolutionised how people communicate and work together. It has ushered in a new era of free information for everyone, transforming life in ways that were hard to imagine in its early stages. The next wave of the Internet is not about people; it’s about intelligent, connected devices and in order to interact successfully with the real world, these devices must work together with speeds, scales, and capabilities. This presentation will identify the variety of IoT communication protocols and standards designed to simplify IoT designs and increase the ability of vendors to innovate quickly. We will explore the popular choices as well as an indication of their security state.
The Aligned Enterprise
Intergenerational differences exist, but conflict is avoidable. This keynote discusses the impacts of this ‘unconscious’ problem in organisations.
The audience will be given tools for:
The Aligned Enterprise
Building digital products is a complex process and requires an effective project Liftoff with Agile Chartering to provide everyone with a common understanding and co-ownership from the outset. If a team doesn’t have a common understanding about the purpose of what they are about to spend however many months on creating, or alignment on how you will be working together, or the context of where the product fits in the bigger scheme of things, then you are going to waste time building stuff that won’t be right and use retrospectives to repair misunderstandings. Effective team chartering can avert all this from the start and set the team on the right path for a successful outcome. This hands-on workshop covers the three dimensions of Agile Chartering that were introduced in the book Liftoff by Diana Larson and Ainsey Neis; Purpose for inspiration, Alignment for team collaboration and Context for the project dynamics.
Workshop
Career & Personal Development
Susan Dawson
Chief People Officer @ Silverchair Information Systems
We all face adversity and setbacks in our personal and professional lives and how we handle them can be decisive in our career progression. In this session we will explore the neuroscience behind our thinking patterns and how we can train our brains to see adversity as opportunity.
Emerging Technologies
With our brain consisting of billions of neurons and infinite possibilities, everyone has a talent. The issue? Our brains our sub-optimal. Riham Satti, neuroscientist and entrepreneur, gives a tour into how technology and augmented intelligence (IA) will enhance human intelligence to unlock human potential, without replacing us.
Entrepreneurs & Female Founders
Amanda Gutterman
Chief Marketing Officer @ ConsenSys
Surveys indicate the vast majority of crypto holders are men, but because of how the technology actually works, women are in a unique position to leverage blockchain to launch businesses, build rich reputations, and gain access to capital and power. ConsenSys CMO and ConsenSys Catalyst Founder Amanda Gutterman explains why this is true. The space is nascent, and the jury is still out on who the big winners in blockchain and crypto will be (or whether that is the correct framework to apply). Learn how to build blockchain brands and become one of them.
Master Classes
Priya Saxena
Software Engineer @ Cloudhouse Technologies
Hear about Microsoft’s vision on how application portability will be solved in the future. You’ll learn how to overcome the main challenges of separate versions of applications which are written for specific operating system. See a future operating system that will have an effective portability layer inbuilt; so the same app runs across all operating systems.
The Aligned Enterprise
Caroline Denoon-Slater
UK Security Lead @ Oracle
The regulation comes into effect on 25th May 2018 and yet only 5% of companies in a recent survey said that they were ready for it! This discussion will cover; who is responsible for data: (specifically in the cloud), how Oracle have interpreted this regulation from a vendor perspective around how we are building our cloud strategy and the capabilities that we are providing our customers and how the market is interpreting the regulation.
Career & Personal Development
Kathryn Brett Goldman
CEO & Founder @ The Cybermaniacs
Assertiveness is a key skill for success in any workplace, especially those changing as fast as technology is today! From asking for a raise, defending a colleague, sticking to your own personal truth, or ensuring your voice is heard and respected- we’ll cover all the latest on this crucial interpersonal skill. Starting with the neurology of assertiveness, we’ll discuss the positive behavioural traits and hear inspirational stories of assertive women in technology. Whether you are new to assertiveness or an already proven leader, this session can help everyone tap into how we can assert ourselves in our roles today.
Entrepreneurs & Female Founders
Priya Guha
UK Ecosystem General Manger @ RocketSpace
This session will highlight why UK scale-ups need to embrace a global mindset and incorporate an international perspective to achieve further growth. Priya Guha, RocketSpace General Manager, will outline how British firms can make the most of their potential and will be joined in conversation by a RocketSpace member to discuss their growth journey.
© 2018 Women of Silicon Roundabout 2018
