Tim Brennan, Amadeus

Tim Brennan is a director of Amadeus IT Services UK Limited and is General Manger at their London offices at Heathrow Airport where over 500 staff are based.

Amadeus is a leading transaction processor for the global travel and tourism industry, providing advanced technology solutions to travel providers and travel agency customers worldwide. Amadeus acts as an international network providing comprehensive real-time search, pricing, booking, ticketing and other processing solutions to travel providers and travel agencies through their Distribution business area, and offering travel providers (today, principally airlines) an extensive portfolio of technology solutions which automate certain mission-critical business processes, such as reservations, inventory management, check-in and other operational processes, through their IT Solutions business area. Worldwide Amadeus employs over 5000 developers.

Tim joined Amadeus in 2000 and prior to that was working for British Airways. He has specialised in Airline IT working on a wide variety of functional areas. Currently Tim has responsibility of leading projects for Airlines migrating to Amadeus systems ensuring delivery of customised developments, data migration, rules definition and user training. Tim is a graduate of Warwick University.

Dr Bill Mitchell, British Computer Society

Dr Bill Mitchell is Director of the BCS Academy of Computing. With a twenty year career covering both academia and industry, including work with Motorola Research labs, Dr Mitchell joined BCS from Southampton University. His work has focu sed on producing pragmatic automated solutions to industrial problems based on his research into the foundations of computing and large scale industrial case studies.

Dr Mitchell's research has been published in a variety of internationally peer reviewed journals and conferences ranging from the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE) to the Journal of Symbolic Logic (JSL).

Raymond Mulligan, Credit Suisse

Raymond Mulligan is a Managing Director of Credit Suisse in the CFO Division, based in London. He is the Global Head of Trading Technology for the Investment Bank which is responsible for developing systems and technologies supporting all aspects of Trading. He is a member of the Investment Banking IT Management Committee. Prior to this role, Mr. Mulligan held a number of positions within the CIO Division, including CIO of EMEA Investment Banking IT, Global Head of Fixed Income IT, Global Head of FX IT and EMEA Head of Prime Services IT. Mr. Mulligan joined Credit Suisse from BZW when it was acquired in 1997. Prior to that, he worked at SBC O'Connor in Asia for 4 years where he lead Systems Engineering based in Tokyo. He started his career working in software R&D for Advantest, one of the world's largest Semiconductor Test equipment manufacturers based in Saitama Japan. Mr. Mulligan holds a BSc in Applied Computing from the Waterford Institute of Technology.

Alice Bentinck, Entrepreneur First

Alice Bentinck is the co-founder of EF (Entrepreneur First) and Code First: Girls. EF helps Europe's top technical talent to build their own startups. They focus exclusively on talent, often investing pre-team and pre-idea. Over the last 2 years they have built 20 companies now valued at more than $80m with investors including Y Combinator, Index Ventures and Imperial Innovations. Code First: Girls provides free coding classes to ambitious female students and helps them explore careers in tech and startups.

Prior to EF, Alice worked at McKinsey & Company and graduated from the University of Nottingham with a degree in Management.

Ioannis Papagiannis, Facebook

Ioannis Papagiannis leads Facebook's Infrastructure Security team in London focusing on proactive discovery of vulnerabilities and on hardening the company's products. Ioannis also has extensive experience working with Facebook's anti-abuse teams where he contributed to multiple detection and classification systems. Prior to joining Facebook, Ioannis obtained a PhD on web application security from the Department of Computing at Imperial College London. He holds an MEng from NTUA.

Holly Cummins, IBM

Holly is the technical lead of IBM’s London Bluemix Garage. Before that, she was Delivery Lead for the WebSphere Liberty Profile, IBM's flagship application server.  Holly has also held roles as Java Consumability Tooling lead, and a JVM performance engineer. Holly has been with IBM for 15 years. As part of the Bluemix Garage, Holly delivers technology-enabled innovation to clients across a range of industries, from banking to catering to retail to NGOs. 

She is an internationally recognised speaker and has spoken at JavaOne (for which she received a JavaOne RockStar award), Devoxx, JavaZone, JFokus, The ServerSide Java Symposium, JAX London, GeeCon, and the Great Indian Developer Summit, as well as a number of user groups. She is a co-author of Enterprise OSGi in Action (Manning). 

Before joining IBM, Holly completed a DPhil in Quantum Computation. Among her achievements were getting the cheerfully-named CORPSE, ROTTEN, and SCROFULOUS error correction techniques into the literature. 

Ms Wendy Tan-White MBE, BGF Ventures

Wendy is a partner at BGF Ventures -  the UK and Ireland's most active investor in growing businesses.

Before this she was general partner at Entrepreneur First and prior to this she co-founded and was the CEO of Moonfruit, the UK’s leading DIY website and online shop builder for SMB’s to publish on web, mobile and social platforms. Along with co-founders Joe White (COO) and Eirik Petterson (CTO), Wendy founded Moonfruit in 1999. In 2012, Moonfruit was acquired by hibu (formerly Yell Group) in a deal worth $37m. The acquisition was an important step in hibu’s transformation into a leading digital services provider and local eMarketplace. Following its launch in 1999, Moonfruit was bootstrapped post dot com crash. Through product innovation, $2.4mn in funding was raised from Stephens (US) and Silicon Valley-based 500 Startups in September 2010.

Wendy also acts as a mentor with 500 startups and is part of the WIE (Women: Inspiration & Enterprise) Power 50 network. Wendy has also held the role of Marketing Director at Gandi Group and helped launch Zopa.com, Europe’s first peer-to-peer lending site and Egg.com, the UK’s first internet bank. She trained at Arthur Andersen, after gaining a BEng in Computer Science from Imperial College London, where her studies were sponsored by Ford. Wendy was awarded a MBE in 2016.

Sarah Wilkinson, NHS Digital

Sarah Wilkinson is the CEO at NHS Digital - the national information and technology partner to the health and social care system.

Prior to this Sarah Chief was the Technology Officer at The Home Office, with responsibility for the delivery of technology change and live services for all Directorates. Before that Sarah spent 23 years in Financial Services. Her most recent role was as CIO for Corporate Services at Credit Suisse, where she was also Head of Diversity for EMEA. Prior to that, she was CIO for Risk, Compliance and Records Management at UBS, where she also served as UK CIO for the bank. Earlier roles included CIO Legal, Risk & Compliance at Deutsche Bank, Head of IT Strategy for HSBC and various roles ranging from C++ programmer to IT COO to CIO for Asset Management over a twelve year period at Lehman Brothers. 
Sarah is also a Non-Executive Director of the Police ICT Company and a board advisor to Technology Start-Ups within Telefonica’s WAYRA Portfolio.  

Sarah read Mathematics at Imperial College, holds an MBA from London Business School and a Financial Times Non-Executive Director Diploma, and is a CEDR-certified mediator.  
She lives in Wimbledon with her husband and two teenage sons. 

Dr. Alexandros Papaspyridis, Microsoft

Dr. Alexandros Papaspyridis is the Higher Education Industry Group Director for the Asia Pacific Japan timezone of Microsoft, which covers India, Greater China Region, Asia Pacific, Australia and Japan. His focus is the Digital Transformation of Tertiary Education so to be able to lead in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Dr. Papaspyridis holds a PhD in Electronics Engineering, a Masters in Management and a Bachelor in Electrical Engineering from Imperial College in London. He has been with Microsoft since 2008 holding various positions in business development and sales across Central and Eastern Europe, Middle-East & Africa and in Asia Pacific Japan. Prior to Microsoft he has worked in Information Technology and telecom companies and has founded two startups.

He is a member of the Industrial Liaison Boards at the Dept of Computing and Dept of Electrical Engineering at Imperial College and he is conducting research on innovation ecosystems where he has co-authored two articles and a book chapter.

Anna Shipman, Government Digital Service

Anna Shipman is Open Source Lead at the Government Digital Service, with responsibility for policy, strategy, and delivery on open source across all of government. In her first year in this newly created role she has supported open sourcing of the code for high profile government services including GOV.UK Verify, GOV.UK Pay and Register to Vote, engaged internationally sharing our code, experience and learning with governments including USA, Canada, Australia, and built a cross-government open source community with around 100 active members.

Anna is a technical architect. She joined GDS in 2012, and prior to her Open Source role, she led delivery of GOV.UK PaaS, an infrastructure platform for hosting digital services for government. Prior to the PaaS, responsibilities included technical oversight of six product teams and an infrastructure team delivering the GOV.UK website. She has over a decade’s experience in technical architecture and software development.

She is an international speaker and writer, and wrote one of the chapters in the book Build Quality In. 70% of royalties from this book go to Code Club. 

Anna has an MA in Philosophy from the University of Edinburgh and an MSc in IT (Software Systems) from Heriot-Watt University.

Dr. Pinar Emirdag, State Street Corporation

Pinar is a senior executive at State Street Corporation which is a global financial services institution. She leads the digital product development and innovation team with the objective of enabling the next generation in financial services. Pinar has worked on a number of industry changing initiatives, building new marketplaces and capital markets offerings throughout her career at London Stock Exchange, ICAP, Liquidnet, Citigroup and Lava Trading which was a successful financial technology firm which was acquired by Citigroup. In the recent years, she has been working on emerging business models and technologies such as peer to peer financial services. She has worked on entrepreneurial initiatives as an executive, founder, advisor and board member. These include Clearmatics, Senahill Partners, R3, Hyperledger, Quantave, UK Digital Currency Association, Complymatic and Mathmoneyfx (now Symbiont). Pinarstarted her business career at management consultancy, Oliver Wyman. Pinar holds Ph.D and M.Sc. degrees in Physics and a M.Sc.degree in Electrical Engineering from Brown University. Pinar’s research field was development of new numerical techniques in theoretical particle physics. She continues to have academic collaborations and regularly presents at events, conferences, workshops on regulation, technologies and market structures. Most recently, she has been expanding her interest in quantum computing.