about the invited panellists AND SPEAKERS

We are delighted to have with us eminent panellists and speakers from industry, academia and intergovernmental organizations - who are passionate about sustainability and the role which digital transformation can play in facilitating a smoother transition to renewables globally. The views of the invited panellists can truly help inspire, motivate and nuture the passion and interest in the AI community to further research in this highly promising, yet still underrepresented area.

INVITED PANELLISTS

dr. natalia efremova

Lecturer in Digital Economy, Queen Mary University of London and CTO At Deep Planet, UK

Dr. Natalia Efremova is a CTO in DeepPlanet and a lecturer in Queen Mary University, London. Natalia has an MBA from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Kyoto, where she was a recipient of a Japanese Government (MEXT) Postgraduate Scholarship.

Natalia has a background in both academia and industry research. Over the past 10 years, she has been working in the field of deep learning for image and video processing. Her work has been commended for successfully meeting challenges set for the global research community in these areas, and her research has been published in the top machine learning venues (ICLR, NeurIPS, IEEE, IJCNN, HRI).

Previously, Natalia was a Research Fellow in the University of Oxford, where she taught courses on AI and neural networks to MBA and executive students. Natalia’s research focuses on applications of machine learning for pursuing sustainable goals. This includes defining the areas where ML tools would be especially advantageous within targets related to climate change, gender equality, sustainable agriculture, water, and food scarcity, as well as monitoring progress towards market adoption of the new AI-based technologies for water-, agri- and waste- tech industries.


Clym stock-williams

Manager of Performance Analysis and Improvements at Vattenfall, Netherlands

Since obtaining a Masters degree in Physics from the University of Oxford in 2007, Clym has spent his entire career in the energy industry, with a particular focus on making complex science useful and accessible for those working in renewable energy. At E.ON, he fulfilled a number of roles in wave, tidal and then wind energy, became enthralled by statistics, and finally set up and ran a data science team. Moving into research took him in 2016 to the Netherlands and ECN (which became part of TNO) where he managed the programme on Installation and Operations & Maintenance of offshore wind farms, focusing on creating decision support tools using simulation-based optimisation. He also had some spare time to look into the application of Gaussian Processes to the reconstruction of wind fields from Lidar data. In 2021, he moved to Vattenfall, leading a team which nurtures a data-driven decision making culture in their offshore wind business.

dr. shruti kulkarni

Senior Data Scientist/ Consultant at Deloitte, Belgium

Shruti is a senior data scientist passionate about leveraging data science tools and techniques to accelerate the achievement of Sustainable Development Goals 2030. She has widely used causal modeling and forecasting techniques before, and she is strongly interested in corporate sector especially to reason better with environmental-social-governance (ESG) issues broadly focusing on solutions for sustainability, climate change & the energy transition of the future. She has a demonstrated experience in management and academia and has held positions the consumer and consultancy sectors. Prior to that she has finished her Ph.D. + MS in (Engineering) Management from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore under the guidance of Professor Balachandra Patil who is named in the top 2% of scientists world-wide in the Energy domain. She is passionate about diversity and inclusion & has been involved in technical women’s network activities across societies such as IEEE, Google WTM and WiML (Women in Machine Learning). She also had been appointed as a ‘Mentor of Change’ under Niti Aayog’s Atal Innovation Mission in India and she enjoys fostering the communities of AI professionals.


alexandra klang

Chairperson of the board, United Nations Association Malmö and Sustainability Consultant at Exceed, Sweden

Alexandra has an academic background in archaeology and human rights, and worked internationally on a number of different projects to ensure access to rights for minorities. She is now chairperson of UNA Malmö as well as working as a sustainability consultant. She is passionate about sustainability, empowerment and holistic thinking and works on embedding these values as keys to success.


Dr. ravi pandit

Lecturer in Instrumentation and AI at Cranfield University, UK

Dr Ravi Pandit is currently a Lecturer in Instrumentation and AI at the Centre for Life-cycle Engineering and Management within the School of Aerospace, Transport and Manufacturing, Cranfield University. Prior to that, he held several academic posts such as Research Fellow (the University of Exeter, 2020-2021), Research Associate (the University of Strathclyde, 2016-2020), Visiting Researcher (UCLM Spain, 2018), Visiting Researcher (Wood plc Scotland, 2016-2017), Assistant Professor(Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering, Jadavpur University. 2014-2016), Assistant Professor(School of Electrical Engineering, VIT Vellore, 2011-2014) respectively. During his professional career, he received a number of prestigious and highly competitive research awards/fellowships, for example, Travel Grant (US$3.5k), Marie Curie Fellowship (of value £224,325.00), Erasmus Mundas (of value € 129,000). As of now, has published numerous papers in highly ranked journals (mostly in Q1 & Q2) and has presented his research at several international conferences and workshops in these areas. Overall, he has more than 10 years of academic and research experience; with various reputed academics and industries through a number of interdisciplinary projects. In particular, his research on predictive maintenance and condition monitoring for wind turbines with Data analytics/ML has received significant interest in the wind energy sector.

INVITED SPEAKERS

Marcus Voß

AI Expert and Intelligence Architect at Birds on Mars, Germany and Community Lead for Buildings & Transport at Climate Change AI

Marcus is AI Expert and Intelligence Architect at Birds on Mars. Before he was a Research Associate at the DAI-Lab at TU Berlin, where he led the research group "Smart Energy Systems." He is a guest lecturer on AI and data science at TU Berlin and CODE University of Applied Sciences. He volunteers as Community Lead for Buildings & Transport at Climate Change AI, an international organization bringing together researchers and practitioners in machine learning for climate change mitigation and adaptation.