AI NI 5: Women Who Code Belfast Collaboration!

Hey! AI NI 5 is a direct collaboration with Women Who Code Belfast (it is open for everyone to attend!) to showcase a varied set of speakers, who each will be viewing AI from multiple diverse lenses. The event will have representation from academia, industry and other backgrounds. Topics include investigating the cultural impacts on the AI tools we use today (that are ubiquitous in our day to day world) to projections of the future of AI and a set of domain specific applications of AI. The event will once again by hosted in the fantastic Ormeau Baths. Bountiful volumes of pizza and drinks will also be provided by Barclays, our sponsor for this event.

SPEAKERS:

Dr Jaine Blayney I studied mathematics at the University of Oxford, followed by computing, then bioinformatics, at Ulster University. I worked in the charitable sector as a fundraiser and IT trainer for 15 years before starting my PhD. My first academic post was at the Centre for Stratified Medicine, Ulster University, as a Lecturer in Computational Biology and am currently a Lecturer in Translational Bioinformatics at the Centre for Cancer Research and Cell Biology. I am the Programme Director for the MSc Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics and a professional member of the British Computer Society. My research work focuses on the re-analysis of publicly available patient datasets to understand why disease develops and why some patients respond to specific treatments. I am also interested in the repurposing of statistical/computational methods from other domains with the aim of discovering new biological and clinical insights. In this talk, I will describe how methods from geostatistics can be translated into the biomedical domain. In particular, I will look at how a compositional data approach can provide a soft strategy for the integration of independent datasets, allowing for the transfer of prior knowledge, i.e. class labels, across different cohorts without the need for cross-platform normalisation or rescaling.

Chloe McAteer - Hacking into my AI journey Throughout this talk, Chloe will share her experiences of initially being an absolute beginner, outlining how she got started in AI. Chloe will talk about the different tools / events she has used to enhance her knowledge - ranging from hackathons to projects and many more!

Meredith Telford - How can coding be incorporated into biomedical engineering? I am Meredith Telford. I have just completed a 15 month placement with axial3D. A medical 3D printing company that provide both service and software to medical professionals worldwide. I have recently returned to my studies and I am currently in Final Year at Ulster University studying Biomedical Engineering. I am in the process of beginning my final year project which will discuss the process of applying modern machine learning architectures for classification of CT vasculature images. I will be discussing my introduction to coding and the relevance I feel it has in the field of biomedical engineering today, as well as my reasons for wanting to learn code.

Claire McMullan Claire McMullan is a qualified Sports Therapist with over 10 years experience. Within her industry, she discovered an inherent burden to Healthcare Professionals and their patients and built a company to help solve this problem. She has learnt to code with elements of Artificial Intelligence to build the solution. She has spent the last 10 months working fully on her new business founding Health Gainz with help from Invest NIs Propel programme.

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Women Who Code Belfast throughout the year run a series of fantastic events! If you would like to see more of the events they produce, check out the link below: https://www.meetup.com/Women-Who-Code-Belfast/