Inspiring Women in Data

International Women’s Day is around the corner. For the occasion, we are inviting a group of talented women working in the data field to share about fantastic projects they've been working on recently. Scroll down for more info!

Virtual attendees will need to sign up here => https://dataengineeringineurope-iwd.splashthat.com/

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AGENDA (BST)
18:30 In-person attendees arrival (drinks + snacks served)
19:00 Using multimodal data to establish the best predictors of Alzheimer’s progression - Valentina Giunchiglia & Hajer Karoui
19:20 Q&A
19:30 Data engineering techniques to protect PII data - Kavya Nagarajan
19:50 Q&A
20:00 Drinks & Pizza (for in-person attendees)

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SPEAKER 1
Valentina Giunchiglia is currently a research technician at Imperial College London in the field of computational neuroscience, and recently graduated from the MRes in Biomedical Research – Data Science at Imperial College London, after completing a MA in Health Humanities at UCL and a BSc in Molecular Biotechnology – Bioinformatics at University of Heidelberg (Germany).

She has a highly interdisciplinary background, as a result of previous work in different fields spanning from computational neuroscience, psychobiology, bioinformatics and computational pathology. She has a keen interest in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to understand the connection between mind, brain and body and is deeply passionate in achieving the concrete application of AI results and discoveries in clinical practice.

SPEAKER 2
Hajer Karoui is currently a data manager and research assistant at the Parkinson’s and Multiple Sclerosis Tissue bank in Imperial College London. She obtained a Master of Research in Experimental Neuroscience at Imperial College London, and a BSc in Computer Science with a minor in Neuroscience from Drexel University in Philadelphia, USA. She has years of experience in industry as a developer and IT security specialist. She worked for Ernst and Young as a security consultant in their NYC headquarters, before deciding to get more involved in academia and research.

Hajer takes special interest in the application of machine learning on neuroscience to better understand biological systems and advance personalised treatment and healthcare. She has worked on several projects using different data modalities including genetic, imaging, and clinical trial and research data.

Talk summary:
Valentina and Hajer will explore the use of multimodal data in machine learning research with the aim to reply to different biomedical research questions, and then focus on a project that consisted on the use of multimodal data to find the best predictors of Alzheimer’s progression. They will also use the project as an example to talk about the potential and limitations of AI, and of its applicability in clinical practice.

SPEAKER 3
Kavya Nagarajan is a Senior Data Engineer at QuantumBlack, a McKinsey Company in London. She works predominantly in building end-to-end data engineering pipelines for clients in the banking and insurance sectors. Her specialisation includes large scale data processing using Spark alongside solution architecture on cloud platforms such as Azure and AWS. Prior to QuantumBlack, she worked at IBM and Rolls-Royce for 4 years driving digital-first culture and data governance standards while implementing robust engineering best practices.

Talk summary:
“Data engineering techniques to protect PII data“ by Kavya Nagarajan
Kavya will be presenting her views on how data engineers play a crucial role in handling datasets with Personally identifiable information (PII) for analytics purposes, while preserving confidentiality. She’ll also cover some predominantly used anonymisation techniques that redact information to make individual subjects unidentifiable, thereby making datasets more suitable for analytics or aggregated reporting, while adhering to strict data privacy standards.

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SPONSOR
This event is sponsored by QuantumBlack
QuantumBlack is the Machine Learning and AI centre of innovation and excellence of McKinsey & Company. We operate at the intersection of strategy, technology and design to improve performance outcomes for companies and we bring together the brightest data scientists, engineers and designers to take on the biggest problems facing organisations.

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