Principle PM for Microsoft Business AI where he works with research teams to build new AI based businesses at Microsoft. Alec is involved on a day to day basis with making this vision happen. Prior to this role, Alec was a senior director in the Microsoft Accelerator team, responsible for a diverse portfolio including scaling the Microsoft Accelerator Network through partnerships, and success managing high potential startups to their full potential using Microsoft resources .

With over 20 years of experience in artificial intelligence and speech recognition technology, Dr. Patricia Scanlon has spent the majority of her career working on the commercialisation of research innovations. Scanlon holds a Ph.D. in Speech Recognition technology and Machine Learning systems and has held positions with Columbia University in New York, IBM T.J. Watson Research Centre, Trinity College Dublin and Nokia Bell Labs. Currently founder and CEO of SoapBox Labs, building voice technology for kids, which has raised over €3 million in funding to date including a highly competitive EU H2020 Innovation grant.

Max Amordeluso is the Lead Evangelist for Amazon Alexa in Europe. His main mission is to introduce Alexa to European developers, and demonstrate how they can build natural and delightful voice experiences for customers. Max has held several technical leadership roles during a career spanning over 15 years—prior to his current role he led the teams that brought Alexa Skills Kit to United Kingdom and Germany, and spent the previous two years leading the Solutions Architects team for Amazon Web Services in Europe. Max is passionate about topics including Human Computer Interaction, the Internet of Things and the materialization of science fiction predictions.

Gillian works as part of the Cognitive Technologies team in the Emerging Business and Technology department in LIT. Her team is focussed on exploring and using innovative technology in interesting new ways to improve how our employees do their jobs. She has more than a decade’s worth of experience in many technologies across the full stack, but her passion is for where technology meets humans in the user interface and experience. She truly believes that technology should be used to make lives better, and loves being a software engineer as it allows her not just to think up big ideas, but also to make them a reality. An essential part of her team’s magic is a seven-foot-tall inflatable unicorn that is always happy to pose for selfies.

Stephen has around 20 years experience leading the design of major deployments in smart, data-driven voice user interfaces and multi-modal conversational interactions. He’s currently a design lead at Google where he leads designs of core features for the Google Assistant. Prior to joining Google, Stephen was Head of User Experience at an international agency delivering award winning voice, text, and multi-modal interactions into major brands, including Nike, Walgreens, United Health Group, and more. Stephen is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, Imperial College London, and Cambridge University.

Ad and Mark tech professional with over 12 overs experience in digital marketing. Currently working at Facebook helping bot platform’s and customer care solutions deliver real business value for Facebook’s customer base.

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Voysis is the complete voice AI platform to enable voice driven natural language instruction, search and discovery. Prior to joining Voysis John was Director of engineering for Logentries which was acquired by Rapid7. John was founder of Forkstream, an early stage startup developing Wi-Fi network selection technology that was acquired by Openet. There he was Director of Openet Labs with responsibilities for new product development, research and standardisation. Previously John was the recipient of a Marie Curie research fellowship and a postdoctoral fellow at University College Dublin and NEC Labs.

As a Trend Analyst, Clodagh draw out insight in order to cut through hype and pinpoint consumer motivation. She specialises in the Tourism, Mobility and Leisure sectors.

Brian is a Director and Principal Designer at Each&Other, an experience design agency that partners with large organisations to transform their businesses. He has lectured on content strategy and design thinking for DIT and UCD and his client list includes Google, Zurich International and Vodafone. Each&Other is an employee owned company that operates internationally from an old converted priory in Dublin and works across multiple sectors, including finance, enterprise, tech and both local and national government.

Mary-Jane, a software engineer by trade, works in a research and development team at Kainos where she tinkers with machine learning and chatbots to find their business value. She is particularly interested in the UX behind chatbots and teams up with user researchers to find the best approaches to designing conversational interfaces and spoke at the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) Conference on chatbots in June 2018. Mary-Jane also enjoys teaching the basics of chatbot development and within the past year has taught hundreds of kids and students, including speaking at universities, conferences, and classes at Kainos Code Camp, Kainos AI Camp and hackathon workshops.

Ultan has worked with SaaS and PaaS product development and sales teams in the US and EMEA for more years than it’s healthy. He wants to change hearts, minds, and wallets about using conversational computing by showing how a thoughtfully-designed user experience lets people augment what they love to do and automate what they hate. He believes no UI is the best UX, but until personal APIs happen will continue endurance running, embarrassing his kid from the touchline, and giving as much back to the conversational commerce community as he’s let.

EdgeTier provides analytics products to customer contact centres. EdgeTier's latest product is "Arthur" uses the latest technology in AL and NLP, developed in-house by the EdgeTier team. Prior to their work at EdgeTier, Shane and the team developed a consumer-facing price comparison application in Ireland, which has since been integrated with the website of the Commission for Communications Regulation. Previously, Shane worked as a data science consultant with Deloitte Analytics in Dublin, providing analytics solutions to clients across multiple sectors in Ireland.

Rowena is a litigation specialist with considerable experience in dealing with a broad range of complex disputes. Rowena has a particular interest in cyber risk and data breach incidents. She will be speaking about Privacy, Security and GDPR in the context of Chatbots and Conversational Interfaces. She has previously advised clients attending the Joint Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis in Ireland and Financial Services Ombudsman. Rowena is a committee member of the Dublin Solicitors Bar Association Litigation Committee and a former legal advisor to the Faculty of Health Science Ethics Committee, Trinity College Dublin

Kostya has lead a team of highly talented designers. “Together we work hard to create intuitive, simple and elegant products for millions.”

Passionate about data analysis, pattern recognition, automation and process efficiency she have worn many hats throughout her career, including a variety of roles across software and service engineering, AI research and Data Science. With 17+ years of industry experience she is an avid learner, Women in Tech supporter and she thrives on a good challenge. On her free time she is an opera singer and a portrait photographer.

Lisa Talia Moretti is an award-winning digital sociologist and strategist with 12 years experience based in London. For more than a decade, she's studied and written about the relationship between technology, information and society and deep-dived into tech ethics during the last six years. During this time, Lisa has also presented keynotes and run workshops to audiences from a wide range of business backgrounds on the impact, opportunities and challenges of emerging technologies

Metail is the revolutionary body shape and garment digitisation company. Erika’s team's mission is to use retailers' and Metail's rich data assets to help deliver the best possible online shopping experience and uncover new efficiencies. She believes data science is the future of shopping: through AI-led personalisation, deep learning-based computer vision, and rigorous experimental validation of game-changing ideas. Before turning her hand to solving the world's complex e-commerce problems, Erika was a research scientist based at the University of Oxford (DPhil 2012), where she used mass spectrometry analysis of ancient food to study a range of problems, from origins of the first cities, the collapse of the Roman Empire, to the Industrial Revolution.

Responsible for managing applied Data Science / AI capability build-up, delivery & product management and Innovation cycle management.

Meadhbh works with organisations to help define and articulate their strategic positioning, and develop and implement change programmes as part of large scale business transformation programmes. A former Head of Marketing for Virgin Media and for Meteor mobile she now works with clients in Financial Services, Insurance & Technology. Meadhbh is a fellow of the marketing institute, and a mentor with Enterprise Ireland.

With over 20 years' experience of leadership development and technology evangelism, Clare works with organisations to maximise opportunities presented by the latest trends in technology. Most recently, Clare was a member of the Microsoft Ireland Leadership Team, heading up the Developer Evangelism organisation. She has served on the boards of the National Digital Research Centre, the Irish Internet Association, the Irish Centre for Cloud Computing & Commerce and the Technology Ireland Innovation Forum.

Working where text, people and software meet . She researched and designed the core Data Loss Prevention rules and policies for RSA/EMC. She developed DLP Security Incident Analysis and Escalation rules and policies for Synopsys. She works at the level of what this legislation means for your data, combined with that software. Originally coming to the field from Librarianship, Charlotte has developed taxonomies, classification system, EDRMS, provided training in Advanced Information Management, worked with multinationals across verticals, and with government departments across the EU. With 20 years of data project experience, she’s highly experienced at spotting what will go wrong next.

Ignacio is part of the Global Black Belt organization covering Western Europe, he helps customer throughout the transformation journey in AI and Advanced Analytics. He is passionate about democratizing complex technologies like data processing and AI, thanks to the infinite power inside the cloud. He has previously held Product Management positions for Video Analytics and 10+ years as Solution Architect in the telco domain

Dr Graham Hill has more than 30 years’ experience working for blue-chip consultancies as an independent strategy consultant. More recently, he has been involved in projects implementing Decisioning-as-a-Service, Journey Orchestration and Conversational Commerce. Currently working as the Interim GDPR Programme Director for O2 responsible for all aspects of GDPR compliance, go-to-market strategy and data-driven innovation.

CEO of 'The Conversational Middleware Company' he is passionate about bringing conversational messaging and voice-first technology to the entreprise and enabling them to use the power of AI to automate conversations via autonomous smart chatbots or blended live agent engagement. Applying Machine Learning, NLP and Webio’s Propensity Indicator X to deliver optimal customer conversation outcomes. He brings to the table over 20 years’ management experience within the telecommunications, retail, financial services and travel sectors, particularly in implementing operational best practices and budget control systems.

A senior leader in the software industry with over 14 years’ experience delivering high quality innovative products in multi-national, SME and R&D environments. Eric currently leads the Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Research Lab in TSSG where his team are publishing ground-breaking research and delivering world class technology to clients around the world.

Experienced digital product leader in media, travel, finance and fast-moving, high growth organisations. Passionate about emerging technologies, a pioneer in voice, mobile, and streaming video development.