WAI Meet-up

Celebrating our third year in Ireland, and following nearly two years of online presence, Women in AI are re-launching in-person events in Ireland! Secure your place today for our upcoming event on the 9th of July at Platform X, Harbourmaster Place 2, D01 X5P3, KPMG, Dublin proudly sponsored by our long-time supporters KPMG Ireland and Insight SFI Centre for Data Analytics!

Join the community to actively change the role of women and minorities in AI. Hope to see as many as possible enthusiastic faces at this event! The event will cover confidence building, great stories from our keynote speakers about their individual journeys in how they built careers as women in the AI field, and also a panel discussion on women and AI. There will be plenty of opportunities for networking with some amazing people.

13:00 - 13:20 Networking, registration, tea coffee

13:20 - 13:40 WAI welcome talk by Begum Genc and Alessandra Sala

13:40 - 14:00 “Building confidence and resilience” by Naomh McElhatton

14:00 - 14:10 Tea/coffee break

14:10 - 14:30 Breda O’Callaghan & Bairbre Mullee on leadership

14:30 - 15:10 ”How to advance your career in AI?” a panel discussion with Derek Collins, Meadhbh Foster, Daphne Hosford

15:10 - 15:45 Closing, networking

SPEAKERS

Keynote speaker: Naomh McElhatton CEO at Stimul.ai & Entrepreneurial Lead at Women in AI Ireland

Naomh was named as one of Ireland’s Top Five Entrepreneurs to Watch by the Irish Times. With over 20 years experience working in the digital and creative industries, she most recently co-founded Stimul.ai, an AI driven strategic clinical design tool that was built to optimize and reduce Diagnostic Hospital Waiting Lists. In addition to this, Naomh is also the Entrepreneurial Lead at Women in AI Ireland, a guest lecturer at Ulster University, curator of the She Said Club (an online community for women), mentor, well known guest speaker and STEM Ambassador.

Keynote speaker: Breda O’Callaghan, Director KPMG Technology

Breda is a Director in KPMG’s Technology practice, helping deliver high value solutions to clients across multiple sectors. She has worked in numerous large-scale business and technology transformation programmes in Ireland and the UK in financial services, telecommunications and public sector. Her experience spans various technology solutions and capabilities that help organisations design and deliver solutions which best fit their environment, their challenges and their vision for the future. She started work as a developer and over the course of her career has worked in a wide variety of roles, including IT operating model design, solution architecture, delivery, programme and project management. Prior to joining KPMG, Breda worked in the Middle East for 5 years, helping the UAE establish their residential and enterprise telecommunications network and she loves consulting both for its diversity of role and opportunity as well as the ever-changing challenges it brings

Keynote speaker: Bairbre Mullee, Associate Director in Tech Consulting

Bairbre is an Associate Director in KPMG’s Technology practice, with a focus on tech enablement and IT project management. Before joining KPMG in 2021, she spent four years working in IT Project Management in the retail sector, including business and technology projects in Finance Transformation, Technology Implementations and Cyber Security. Prior to this, Bairbre spent 17 years working in development and planning for archaeology and built heritage including pre-development assessment for large scale Infrastructure projects, and in Regulatory Compliance for Occupational Safety requirements.

Panel speaker: Meadhbh Foster, Data Science Manager at Meta

Meadhbh has been at Meta for more than 6 years, joining as an IC before transitioning to management. In this time she has worked in different analytical teams across Business Integrity, Global Operations and Central Customer Support. Prior to Meta, she worked in Customer Experience, supporting a small team of analysts focused on Customer Support, Payments, and Fraud. She is based in Dublin, Ireland, and holds a PhD in Cognitive Science/Computer Science from University College Dublin as well as an MBA from Trinity College Dublin.

Panel speaker: Daphne Hosford, Business Development Manager at Insight SFI Research Centre for Data Analytics

Daphne holds a degree in International Marketing and Languages and a MSc. In International Food Marketing and Agricultural Policy. She took a circuitous route to working with AI over 25 years working in industry in marketing and category management, consumer and shopper behaviour and data analytics. She joined Insight in Dec 2019 and works to support academics in sourcing industry and other funding for collaborative research projects in AI, ML and data analytics.

Panel speaker: Derek Collins, Director of Industry Engagement & Collaboration Research, Huawei

Passionate senior manager with broad international experience gained with leading organisations in multinational technology sectors. A conscientious and positive thinking leader with business development attributes and seeks out Innovation. Spent many years working in Europe, Asia and the US. Today he is involved in driving collaborative research and innovation with leading universities and start-ups in future technologies, in AI, Machine Learning, Software and Cloud Services. Like the arts, movies, and whiskey.

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Begum Genc, Ireland Ambassador at Women in AI & Researcher and Lecturer at University College Cork

Dr. Begüm Genç is a researcher working in the research group led by Prof. Barry O'Sullivan in the Insight Centre for Data Analytics at University College Cork. She is also part-time lecturing in the same school. She contributes to various H2020 EU funded projects including BRAINE, HumaneAI, and StairwAI. Her research interests span discrete optimisation, stable matching problems, constraint satisfaction, and trustworthy algorithm design with a focus on explanation, fairness, and robustness notions. She is an advocate for inclusive AI.

Alessandra Sala, Global President at Women in AI & Sr. Director of AI at Shutterstock

Alessandra Sala is an Italian computer scientist specializing in distributed algorithms for graph theory, social network analysis, and data privacy. She works for Shutterstock in Ireland, as the director of AI and Data Science. Formerly, she worked for Bell Labs in Ireland, as head of Analytics Research. She is the global president of Women in AI, a non-profit organization working for gender inclusivity in artificial intelligence, and ambassador of Women in AI Ireland. She is a member of the advisory boards of Ireland's National Centre for Applied Data Analytics and Machine Intelligence (CeADAR) and of the World Ethical Data Forum.