Industrial Panel Discussion

• The role of Databases in the Age of AI

Dr. Mac Misiura is a Software Engineer at Red Hat, working on the OpenShift AI TrustyAI team. His current focus lies in the evaluation and safeguarding of Generative AI applications. Prior to joining Red Hat, Mac was a Data Scientist at the UK’s National Innovation Centre for Data, where he collaborated with industry partners to develop proof-of-concept solutions using both Generative AI and traditional machine learning approaches.

Dr. Anna Ollerenshaw is a Solutions Architect at NVIDIA delivering AI/deep learning solutions across diverse industries and partners. She specializes in retrieval augmented generation systems and multimodal knowledge processing. Previously, she has over a decade of experience in manufacturing, defense, and heavy engineering, and received her PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Sheffield.

Louise Braithwaite is a Data Scientist at the UK's National Innovation Centre for Data (NICD) where she works on a wide variety of data science projects with companies of all sizes across a wide range of sectors. Her interests include natural language processing, generative ai, data analytics and data science project scoping. With a background in operations management, Louise changed careers in 2020 when she gained her Data Science MSc from Newcastle University before moving to NICD.

Paul Watson FREng FBCS is Director of the UK's National Innovation Centre for Data and Professor of Computer Science at Newcastle University. He began his career at Manchester University before moving to industry to design parallel database servers. In 1995 he joined Newcastle University where his research and teaching has focussed on scalable data engineering. Professor Watson is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the British Computer Society, and a Chartered Engineer. He received the 2014 Microsoft Jim Gray eScience Award.