The Speakers

Shakir is a senior staff research scientist at DeepMind, London, having joined in 2013, working towards the goal of developing intelligent and general-purpose learning systems. He also leads a non-profit organisation called the Deep Learning Indaba, whose mission is to Strengthen African Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence. He is an Associate Fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge, and an Honorary Professor in the Department of Computer Science at University College London (UCL).

Shakir was a programme chair for DALI2019, a programme co-chair for ICLR2019, the Senior Programme Chair for ICLR2020 and the General Chair for ICLR2021. He is a member of the Royal Society’s Diversity Committee (2020-2023), and was elected to the Board of Directors of ICML andd ICLR in 2019.

Before moving to London, he held a Junior Research Fellowship from the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) as part of the programme on Neural Computation and Adaptive Perception. He was based in Vancouver at the University of British Columbia in the Laboratory for Computational Intelligence (LCI) with Nando de Freitas. He completed his PhD with Zoubin Ghahramani at the University of Cambridge, where he was a Commonwealth Scholar to the United Kingdom and a member of St John’s College. He is from South Africa, and completed the previous degrees in Electrical and Information Engineering at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.

Prof. Rebecca Hubbard is an American biostatistician whose research interests include observational studies and the use of electronic health record data in public health analysis and decision-making, accounting for the errors in this type of data. She is a professor of biostatistics in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

Prof. Hubbard’s research focuses on the development and application of methods to improve analyses using real world data sources including electronic health records (EHR) and claims data. The data science era demands novel analytic methods to transform the wealth of data created as a byproduct of our digital interactions into valid and generalizable knowledge. Dr. Hubbard’s research emphasizes statistical methods designed to meet this challenge by addressing the messiness and complexity of real world data including informative observation schemes, phenotyping error, and error and missingness in confounders. Her methods have been applied to support the advancement of a broad range of research areas through use of EHR and claims data including health services research, cancer epidemiology, aging and dementia, and pharmacoepidemiology.

Eugénie Lee Hunsicker is an American mathematician who works at Loughborough University in England as a senior lecturer in pure mathematics and as director of equality and diversity for the school of science. Her research in pure mathematics has concerned topics "at the intersection of analysis, geometry and topology"; she has also worked on more applied topics in data science and image classification.

Hunsicker grew up in Iowa City, and was inspired to do mathematics in part by a high school teacher who was married to a mathematics professor at the University of Iowa. She went to Haverford College, where she was mentored by mathematician Curtis Greene, including two summers of mathematical research with Greene. She also visited the University of Oxford as an exchange student, and earned an honorable mention for the 1992 Alice T. Schafer Prize for excellence in mathematics by an undergraduate woman, won that year by Zvezdelina Stankova. Hunsicker graduated from Haverford magna cum laude in 1992, and went on to graduate study at the University of Chicago, supported in part by a fellowship from the American Association of University Women. Her 1999 dissertation, L(2)-Cohomology and L(2)-Harmonic Forms for Complete Noncompact Kähler and Warped Product Metrics, was jointly supervised by Melvin G. Rothenberg and Kevin Corlette.

She went straight from her doctorate to a faculty position at Lawrence University, a liberal arts college focused primarily on undergraduate teaching, but five years later found herself missing the research life, and after earning tenure she went on the academic job market again. She applied to Loughborough "almost on a whim" after a honeymoon visit to England, and moved there in 2006.

Hunsicker won the Trevor Evans Award of the Mathematical Association of America in 2003 for her work with Laura Taalman on the mathematics of modular architecture. In 2018, as Chair of the London Mathematical Society Women in Maths Committee, Hunsicker worked with filmmaker Irina Linke to produce a short film on Faces of Women in Mathematics. Also in 2018, she won the Suffrage Science Award for Mathematics and Computing "for her achievements in science and for her work encouraging others to aim for leadership roles in the sector".