Category: 2017 Speaker

Abid Hussain

Councillor Abid Hussain became an elected member for the Keighley Central ward in 2010 and is currently Chair of the Education Appeals Panel. He is also Deputy Chair of the Keighley and Shipley Area Planning Panel, a member of the Regulatory & Appeals Committee and the Joint Health and Social Care & Children’s Services Overview and Scrutiny Committee.

Councillor Hussain is greatly interested in helping to improve Council services and boosting the district’s profile and has a keen interest in educational matters.

Professor Klaus Zeppenfeld

Professor Zeppenfeld was born in Werl/Germany. After having passed the Abitur (higher education entrance qualification in Germany), he studied computer sciences with mathematics as a minor subject at the University of Paderborn. Afterwards, he was employed as scientific assistant at Osnabrück University, where he also earned his doctorate. Subsequently working as a senior consultant for Capgemini (formerly: sd&m – software design & management AG), Professor Zeppenfeld was in various projects responsible for the holistic development of individual software solutions for key account customers.
In 1997, he accepted the position as a professor of computer sciences at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Dortmund/Germany, where he was appointed vice dean of the department in 1999, before being dean from 2005 to 2009. In this function, he helped to determine the orientation of the computer science department. In 2009, the Ministry of Science in North Rhine-Westphalia appointed Professor Zeppenfeld as founding president of Hamm-Lippstadt University of Applied Sciences. His second term as university president lasts until 2021. Since 2021 he is back as a teaching and research professor in the fields of practical computer science and software engineering at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Dortmund/Germany.
Besides his activities as a university professor, he also acted as a scientific director and as a chairman of the supervisory board in different companies and has written several scientific textbooks. He is also a member of an international jury panel for the annual Hamdan Bin Mohammad Award for Smart Government in Dubai since 2014.
Since October 2021, Professor Zeppenfeld was awarded as a Lifetime Fellow in the WTUN (World Technology Universities Network).

Professor Jacqui Taylor

Jacqui is recognised as one of the 100 most powerful UK entrepreneurs. After implementing a banking regulatory change programme with Web 3.0 tools she co-founded FlyingBinary a web science company which changes the world with data, one of the original 250 Tech City companies. She is a high profile mentor in the world’s number one digital hub, Tech City.

Her company FlyingBinary has been recognised with an Internet of things (IoT) international techtrailblazer award. She is personally recognised as one of the 34 IoT Influencers on twitter and one of the 20 global entrepreneurs to watch as part of #GEW2016.

Jacqui collaborated with data-journalism thought leaders to produce her fourth publication, a new PhD primer for journalism using her web science work which connects 34 million citizens across the web. She has articulated the global future of the data journalism industry, she co-founded. As a Visiting Professor at LSBU she is articulating the contribution of the Internet of Things to the New and Convergent Media domains.

Her company has been successfully awarded all nine frameworks under H. M. Government’s industry leading cloud initiative, G-Cloud. FlyingBinary’s latest innovations are underpinning Secured European Cloud Services for Big Data and IoT, which implement GDPR and have no reliance on Privacy Shield arrangements.

She is an expert lead for the British Standards Institute (BSI) team with international colleagues on the top level ISO technical Committee and is the editor for two ISO Smart City standards. As the technical author for the latest British Standards Institute Smart City standard she has articulated the future role of IoT data and services and their value in the domain.

Mr Ian Sharp

Ian Sharp CEO DHEZ Ltd & Head of Digital Catapult Centre Yorkshire. Ian Joined DHEZ Ltd in January 2015. Prior to this he ran a small Business Management Consultancy specialising in helping Tech start ups to bring new products to market. Prior to this Ian was President EMEA/APAC for Pace plc where he ran a group of 160+ engineers designing bespoke products for the tier 1 & 2 Broadcasters around the world. An Electronics Engineer by background Ian spent his formative years in a high growth startup that developed electronic products for high volume manufacture internationally. Working with many of the blue chip brand names in consumer electronics and spearheading several new technologies. Ian also sits various boards and advisory panels including the Leeds City Region Innovation and Growth Panel and leads on Innovation Strategy, the University of Bradford’s School of Computing Industrial Advisory Board and the Venturefest Yorkshire steering panel.

Dr Perry Share

Dr Perry Share is the Project Manager for the Connacht Ulster Alliance [CUA]. The CUA is an alliance of three Institutes of Technology located on the Atlantic coast of Ireland: Galway-Mayo, Sligo and Letterkenny, that have amongst them 16,000+ students from apprentice to doctoral level across engineering, science, business, social and health professions and the creative arts and humanities. Dr Share is a widely-published sociologist with interests in the sociology of food and eating; language; and the social professions. His current focus is on the intersection of social robotics, social care and the work of social professionals. Dr Share has over 20 years experience of management within higher education, and is also the Chair of Ireland’s Social Work Registration Board.

Mrs Caroline Pullich

Caroline heads up Barclays Business Banking, covering the Yorkshire region, looking after the SME market for businesses with debt up to £10million. She heads up a team that serves the diverse needs of circa 8,500 business customers, providing banking and support services delivered by over 50 business managers across the region. Caroline has over 25 years banking experience across Retail and Business Banking, including risk management, portfolio planning, operations management, sales management and strategy planning. Caroline has spent her time working across the UK in both national and regional roles and she is now back to her roots, working in Yorkshire. Caroline is passionate about making Barclays the bank for SMEs across the region and linking in with like minded companies to work together to achieve this goal. Caroline is a Y30 partner with Welcome to Yorkshire, an IOD Ambassador, sits on the leadership group for Chamber of Commerce, a board member of Producer City Innovation & Skills in Bradford, a Bradford Breakthrough member and heavily involved with Diversity & Inclusion for Barclays. Caroline lives in Oakworth with husband Sam where they have a freehold and keep hens, geese and guinea fowl. She also enjoys running, cooking and travel.

Rashik Parmar

Rashik Parmar MBE is the leader of IBM’s European technical community, an IBM Distinguished Engineer and previously President of IBM’s Academy of Technology.

He currently advising clients on their cloud innovation roadmap from a technology and business perspective drawing on thirty-three years of practical experience in IBM. He has worked for financial, retail and manufacturing clients on IT transformation projects of all sizes.

Rashik was appointed to the Leeds City Region Enterprise Partnership (LEP) Board in 2013. He chairs the LEP’s Business Communications Group, supporting business growth across the City Region by coordinating effective and inspiring communications between the LEP and City Region businesses.

He was awarded an MBE (Member of the Order of the British Empire) as part of HRH Queen Elizabeth’s 90th birthday honours for his contribution to business and innovation.

Professor Daniel Neagu

Daniel Neagu was appointed Professor of Computing in 2011: he joined the Department of Computer Science as Lecturer in 2002, and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2005. He has previously served as Associate Professor at the Department of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Galati, Romania (1993-2001).

Daniel received his PhD Cum Laude in Computer Science (2000) at the University of Galati after he obtained a 5-year MEng degree (1990) in Automation and Computer Engineering from Technical University of Iasi and a BSc (Hons) degree (1995) in Information Technology from University of Galati. He spent a research period (1999) at University of Patras, Greece, with Human Computer Interaction Group led by Professor Nikolaos Avouris. After successfully defending his Ph.D. thesis entitled “Using Artificial Neural Networks in Fuzzy Reasoning”, Daniel was appointed Research Fellow at Dipartimento di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Italy (2001-2002), where he joined the FP5 European Research Network IMAGETOX (Intelligent Modelling Algorithms for General Evaluation of TOXicities) working with Professor Giuseppina Gini.

His research focuses on Artificial Intelligence techniques applied in Toxicology, Software Engineering, Online Social Networks, Data Quality, Big Data, Healthcare. Daniel’s research has been motivated by his desire to advance the AI field by studying systems from rigorous computational perspectives. The main theme throughout his academic work is to develop models of multidisciplinary information systems by the fusion of experts knowledge and digital information. He strongly believes Computer Science is now a media for knowledge representation, exchange and retrieval to serve multidisciplinary objectives and purposes. Mining information to identify key attributes and making unknown, hidden, distributed information accessible to people plays a vital role in the progress of science and technology, thus Daniel’s work addresses applications as diverse as health, security and entertainment.

Daniel leads the Artificial Intelligence Research Group (AIRe). He is member of IEEE Computer Society and Computational Intelligence Society, ACM Association for Computing Machinery, British Computer Society (BCS The Chartered Institute for IT), and committee member of the BCS SGAI (Specialist Group on Artificial Intelligence) 2011-2013. Daniel Neagu served as the General Chair of UKCI2014 the 14th Annual Workshop on Computational Intelligence, Deputy Technical Programme Chair for BCS SGAI AI Conference in 2011, 2012 and 2013 (Cambridge, UK), and invited editor for the Expert Systems journal special issues in 2011 and 2012, Springer Neural Computing and Applications journal special issue on Predictive Analytics Using Machine Learning in 2014/15, and Springer Soft Computing journal special issue on Computational Intelligence in 2015. He served as external examiner for PhDs, MPhil and MRes for Universities of Aberystwyth, Coventry, Huddersfield, Hull, Liverpool, Ulster, Sunderland, Sheffield, Liverpool John Moores and East Anglia.

Daniel has been accepted on the Higher Education Academy register of practitioners in 2006 and is Fellow of Higher Education Academy since 2007. He contributed to the UKCGE (UK Council for Graduate Education) Postgraduate Funding and Resourcing Working Group (2014-2015).

Daniel teaches Data Mining, Data Structures and Algorithms, and leads the Computer Science undergraduate (BSc Hons) and postgraduate (MSc) programmes. He has coordinated Software Development (at UG and PGT level), Group Project, Data Fusion, Artificial Intelligence with Applications, and Computer Architecture and Systems academic modules. He has also delivered modules, presentations and invited training sessions to BBC Academy, NATO training courses, EC FPs consortia schools, and coordinated data hackathons and research seminars series.

Professor Rwekaza Sympho Mukandala

Professor Rwekaza Sympho Mukandala was born in Bukoba on 30th September 1953. He received his primary education in Bukoba and secondary education at Tabora School and Musoma Secondary School. Thereafter, he joined the University of Dar es Salaam in the year 1973 – 1976, where he obtained Bachelor of Arts (Hons.); (International Relations and Administration). In 1977 he was awarded a Master degree in Development Management at the University of Dar es Salaam. In 1988 he obtained a PhD. in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Certificate in New Institutional Economics. He was awarded Peter Odegard Prize as the Most Distinguished Candidate for the Doctorate at the same University. Upon completion of his PhD studies, he returned to the University of Dar es Salaam in 1988 as a Senior lecturer in Political Science and Public Administration. Since then, he has held various academic posts to the current status, a Professor of Political Science and Public Administration. He teaches organization theory, public administration, democracy and elections. He is Chair of many institutions including: Research and Education for Democracy in Tanzania (REDET); Tanzania Election Monitoring Committee (TEMCO); and until early this year the Economic and Social research Foundation (ESRF); East Africa Uongozi Institute (EAFUI). He has also been President of the African Association of Political Science (AAPS), Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and Head of Department political Science and Public Administration. He was Chair of the Organizing Committee for the XIX World congress of the International Political Science Association (IPSA) Durban South Africa 2003. He has also served on the administrative council of the International Institute of Administrative Sciences. He has carried out research on Politics, aid and donors, and governance in many African countries. He has also consulted widely on these and other related issues for the Government of Tanzania, International Organizations and donors. He has published fifteen books and more than sixty articles in International and Local Journals. His latest books are Politics and Tactics in Public Sector Reforms: the Dynamics of Public Service Pay in Africa (Dar es Salaam University Press, Dar es Salaam 2005) with K. Kiragu and (co-ed) Justice, Rights and Worship: Religion and Politics in Tanzania (E & D Publishers, 2006). He is been the Vice Chancellor of the University of Dar es Salaam since 2006 to date.

Dr Seung Hyeon Moon

Dr. Seung Hyeon Moon is the President of the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), which is located in the Republic of Korea. GIST was established in 1993 by the Korean government as a graduate-level research institute and GIST

College (Korea’s very first liberal arts oriented science college) was established in 2010. In 2015, Dr. Moon became the 7th President of GIST.

Under President Moon’s tenure, GIST has continued to make remarkable strides in becoming a globally recognized educational and research institution that is focused on developing advanced science and technology as indicated by, among other factors, GIST’s position in the 2016/2017 QS World University Ranking® as No. 2 in the world for citations per faculty.

Having earned his bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in chemical engineering from Seoul National University, President Moon went on to earn his Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology. Afterwards, he worked for the Argonne National Laboratory as a postdoctoral appointee and assistant biochemical engineer in their Energy Systems Division from 1991 to 1994. He then joined the faculty of GIST in 1994 and has served in various academic and leadership positions, including Director of the International Environmental Research Center, Dean of Academic and Student Affairs, and Director of the Research Institute for Solar and Sustainable Energies.

President Moon’s professional background and numerous research accomplishments have always been focused on solving the problems confronting humanity, and he is proud to support the vision of the World Technology University Congress.

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