Dr Hayaatun Sillem CBE, Academy CEO, chaired this discussion on the fast-moving developments in artificial intelligence and regulatory approaches that enable its safe and equitable use. Confirmed expert guest speakers include Professor Sana Khareghani, King's College London; Responsible AI UK, Dr Simon Baker, Versed AI; Enterprise Hub Fellow, and Deborah Raji, Mozilla Foundation Fellow.
The panel discussed the rapidly evolving challenges and opportunities the tech poses, the international policy dialogues that are taking place to harness it, and will explore how the UK is positioned relative to international comparators.
Critical Conversations series
Bringing together the thoughts of leading experts from across the Academy’s networks, our Critical Conversations explore issues of relevance to global professional engineering community and wider society. Fellows, awardees, and engineering partners gather to tackle topical issues of relevance to the global professional engineering community and wider society.
This is a final episode of our special five part series of Critical Conversations where each explored a critical technology, highlighted in the government's UK Science and Technology (S&T) Framework as quantum technologies, semiconductors, engineering biology, telecommunications and artificial intelligence.
Dr Hayaatun Sillem CBE
Hayaatun is CEO of the Royal Academy of Engineering and Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation. She co-chairs with the Science Minister the government’s Business Innovation Forum and co-chaired with Sir Lewis Hamilton his Commission on improving Black representation in motorsport. She is a trustee of various charities, member of the government’s Levelling Up Advisory Council and Digital Skills Council and NXD at construction company Laing O’Rourke. She has been named as one of the ‘Inspiring 50’ women in tech in Europe and one of the most influential women in both UK engineering and UK tech. She has a Masters in Biochemistry (MBiochem) from Oxford and a PhD from Cancer Research UK/UCL. She is a Fellow of the IET, Honorary Professor at UCL and Honorary Fellow at The Queen’s College, Oxford. She has received honorary doctorates from UCL, Imperial College London, Newcastle, Brunel, Huddersfield and Southampton, as well as a Science Suffrage Award and the Engineering Professor’s Council President’s Medal. She was a finalist for the Veuve Clicquot Bold Woman Award and was made a CBE for services to International Engineering in 2019. Prior to her current roles, she was Deputy CEO at the Academy and served as Committee Specialist and later Specialist Adviser to the House of Commons Science & Technology Committee.
Professor Sana Khareghani
Sana Khareghani is Professor of Practice in AI at King's College London and AI Policy lead for Responsible AI UK, a £31 million consortium focused on creating an ecosystem for responsible AI research and innovation in the UK and internationally. She has worked as a software engineer in big corporations and start-ups, as a management consultant advising senior officials throughout North America, Europe and the Middle East, and as the inaugural Head of the UK government’s Office for Artificial Intelligence, leading the team to publish the UK's National AI Strategy. Sana holds a BSc in computer science and an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and has over 20 years’ experience in technology and business across the private and public sectors.
Dr Simon Baker
Dr Simon Baker is the Co-founder and CTO of Versed AI, a Cambridge University spin-out that focuses on providing organisations with multi-tier supply chain visibility. Dr Simon Baker is also a Royal Academy of Engineering Enterprise Fellow, and a Borysiewicz Fellow at the University of Cambridge Language Technology Lab (LTL), he specialises in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and has over 40 publications. Versed AI’s technology uses cutting edge proprietary NLP and machine learning to enable organisations to discover and monitor their supply chains. Using a variety of data sources such as news, business reports, shipping data, company websites and social media, Versed AI is able to accurately extract multi-tier supply relationships, including products, and manufacturing locations.