Trustworthy AI: From Principles to Critical Applications

Khaled Benkrid

Anglia Ruskin University (ARU)

Dr Alireza Ettefaghian

AT Medics

Pauline Harrison

Founder of KernEthik and AI Governance Professional

Pauline is an influential AI governance and digital assurance leader with 25 years of delivery experience, operating at the intersection of regulatory compliance, technical assurance and organisational change. One of a small number of practitioners in the UK holding concurrent ForHumanity Fellowship, IAPP AIGP and FIAAIS credentials, Pauline has hands-on delivery across five simultaneous governance frameworks spanning UK, EU and US jurisdictions.

An invited member of BSI ART/1, Pauline contributes to ISO/IEC SC 42 JWG 2 and CEN/CENELEC JTC 21 WG 4 in response to the EU AI Act. This standards work sits alongside a Professional Doctorate in progress: Beyond Process Conformance: Developing a Practitioner Framework for Technical Assurance of High-Risk AI Systems under the EU AI Act, which addresses the methodology gap that ISO/IEC 42001, 42005, 42006 and NIST TEVV leave open and is currently being presented to the ISO AI testing committee with a view to informing international standards.

Career highlights span senior roles at Sky, Planit Testing and SThree, where Pauline has built enterprise AI governance programmes, created compliance toolkits for large regulated financial services clients, and designed AI Impact Assessments to ISO/IEC 42005 standard. Clients have included the Ministry of Justice, the Bank of England, ARM Technology and Costa Coffee. As Founder of KernEthik Consulting, Pauline advises both SMEs and large organisations on responsible AI adoption aligned with the EU AI Act, GDPR and ISO/IEC 42001, preparing organisations for audits, certifications and buyer scrutiny.

A ForHumanity Fellow contributing to the development of independent AI audit frameworks as ForHumanity pursues formal accreditation as a designated EU AI Act auditing body, Pauline is also a committed advocate for AI literacy and ethical leadership. Pauline holds a Certificate of Higher Education in both the Governance and Ethics of AI from the University of Oxford and a BSc in Information Science, and speaks on technical assurance, high-risk AI systems and the governance responsibilities that responsible deployment demands.

Professor Shareeful Islam

Professor of Cyber Security, Anglia Ruskin University (ARU)

Dr. Shareeful Islam is a Professor of Cybersecurity, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Anglia Ruskin University (ARU). He currently holds a visiting professorship LUT School of Engineering Sciences, Lappeenranta, Finland.  With over 22 years of experience, he has recently secured £800k in national and EU funding.  He has authored more than 115 papers in top tier journals and conferences with successfully supervised to timely completion 13 PhD and MPhils. His research expertise spans cybersecurity risk management, trustworthy AI, AI-enabled cyber security and regulatory compliance.

Catherine Menon

Principal Lecturer in AI Ethics, University of Hertfordshire

Dr Catherine Menon is a Principal Lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire, with research interests in the ethics and safety of AI and autonomous systems. Her work examines the intersection between ethics, safety and trust in public-facing technologies, particularly where these impact marginalised groups. She has worked in industry across both the nuclear and defence sector and is a member of the BSI AMT/10 and AMT/10/1 Committees on robotics and robot ethics. She also has an interest in the role played by creativity in constructing assurance arguments, and in the ways in which creative thinking can help mitigate ethical and safety hazards.

Felicia Omoediale-Samuel

Senior Cyber Security Risk Manager, Sky

Felicia Omoediale-Samuel is an internationally recognised cybersecurity and AI governance leader operating across Africa, Europe, North America and Asia. With more than two decades of experience, she advises organisations on integrating security into AI systems, strengthening enterprise cyber risk frameworks, and governing emerging technologies with executive-level discipline. A researcher–practitioner, she is pursuing a Professional Doctorate at Anglia Ruskin University, focusing on lifecycle-aware AI security and enterprise risk models for toolinvoking agentic systems. Her work bridges academic research and operational implementation, translating complex AI risk into structured governance controls. Her career spans senior roles across public and private sectors, including the Department for Work and Pensions, Next, FedEx and Sky. She is known for aligning cyber investment to business value and embedding risk visibility into AI-enabled transformation. Felicia serves as a Non-Executive Director at Sycom Integrated Solutions and contributes to higher education as an Industry Advisory Board member at the University of Essex and visiting lecturer across UK institutions. She writes for The Executive Magazine and is a member of the ForbesBLK and ForbesWoman communities. Alongside her executive work, she is a committed advocate for early-career professionals, women and young people entering cybersecurity and AI. She mentors emerging leaders, champions cognitive diversity, and promotes structured pathways into secure technology careers. Felicia holds an MSc in Software and Systems Security from the University of Oxford and a BSc in Industrial Mathematics from the University of Benin. She speaks globally on secure AI adoption and the governance responsibilities shaping the future of digital systems.

Linda Oraegbunam

UK Civil Service

Linda Oraegbunam is a machine learning engineer and AI governance researcher with years of experience spanning data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning across the UK Civil Service and regulated commercial sectors. Her work sits at the intersection of technical delivery and institutional accountability, combining the development of production AI systems with research into the governance frameworks required to deploy them responsibly. She is the creator of a growing suite of open-source tools that form an agentic AI governance toolkit published on PyPI, and her research focuses on the relationship between agentic AI systems and organisational accountability. Linda holds an MSc in Applied Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics from the University of Bradford and is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. Linda currently serves as a reviewer for the DLI Research in Africa Days (RIAD 2026) programme and is a doctoral researcher in development focused on agentic AI governance at Leeds Beckett University. She is also the founder of AI with Linda, a public platform dedicated to making artificial intelligence practical, accessible, and relevant across industries. Through her speaking and research, Linda explores the governance responsibilities organisations must adopt as autonomous and agentic systems move from experimentation into real-world deployment.

Toby Wilson Waterworth

Ambrose Healthcare