Panel | DS and ML challenges and opportunities across Industries

Errol Koolmeister – Head of AI Engineering | H&M Group

With 10+ years of experience from a wide variety of industries Errol have been able to reach an expert level in working with and extracting value from data. Both hands on in the data and from a strategic perspective by creating data products and leading large teams. He does so by leveraging, in the majority of the cases, open source technologies such as Spark, R, Python and Tensorflow with BI tools such as Shiny, Tableau and Qlik.

Robert Luciani – Head of R&D | Foxrane

Robert is first and foremost a jazz fusion composer but has a deep background in formal logic and computer science. He has worked as a BSD kernel developer, a cloud specialist at Microsoft, and an entrepreneur. His company, Foxrane, develops AI and HPC solutions for the most challenging and data-intensive workloads.

Alicia Montoya – Head Research Commercialization | Swiss Re

Alicia Montoya heads Swiss Re Institute’s Research Commercialization unit, bringing high potential initiatives from ideation to commercialization. Her work focuses on developing technology, core IP, partnerships, and end-to-end resilience offerings.

Alicia joined Swiss Re in 2012, driving innovation, product development, and commercialization of solutions that address some of the world’s biggest risks, from climate change and natural catastrophes to sustainable energy, food security, infrastructure and transportation. She leads Swiss Re’s Quantum Cities™ initiative, using tech to foster sustainable economies and societies.

Alicia started her career in London as a financial journalist at Bloomberg, then worked at the European Commission before joining Swiss high-tech start-up, u-blox, in 2005. She then worked for Alstom, driving the company’s Clean Power campaign, promoting solutions to help utilities and governments transition to clean energy. 

Alicia holds a B.A. in Economics, MSc in Social Anthropology and MSc in Multimedia Systems. She is a member of the IUCN’s World Commission on Protected Areas (WCPA). Alicia is also a FinTech mentor, helping start-ups use new data, technology, and modeling to advance sustainability.

John Wordsworth – Chief Architect | Paradox Interactive

John is the Chief Architect at Paradox Interactive, where he works alongside several game studios, supporting them in their efforts to explore new and upcoming technology and improve their architectural decisions and processes. After completing a PhD in Applied Mathematics in the UK, he has acquired over 15 years of experience developing games and mobile applications using a variety of different technologies. 

John is particularly passionate about finding ways to do things differently and inspiring others to grow, learn and develop. Within game development, he sees a big part of this as exploring new ways that teams can build unique experiences for their players and finds the space between different disciplines and industries a particularly interesting area to search for innovation and inspiration. He has also been part of several initiatives which aim to broaden diversity within programming in game development by teaching game development courses in JavaScript and C++.

Anna Baecklund – Head of Data Science | ICA Sweden

Data Scientist Leader, multilingual, seeking to drive impact and build a world class data science team at ICA. A skilled communicator capable of explaining complex issues with clarity to diverse audiences. Interested in growing data talent while creating an inclusive environment and developing scalable processes to make data accessible across organizations, especially to non-technical stakeholders. Responsible for leading innovation using data science including the development of new insights, advanced modelling techniques, and AI capabilities.