Mike Hollier - Vice President of Technology Incubation, Dolby Labs

Dr Mike Hollier is an accomplished international executive with a strong track-record in corporate-venturing, start-up, founder-sales, multiple operational roles, and board-service. His experience embraces start-up, large company dynamics, and organizational scaling. He is driven and entrepreneurial and has led the creation of transformational new products and services supported by extensive new intellectual property. 

Mike’s passion is matching significant industry challenges with bleeding-edge innovation. Commercial success has resulted from building world class teams across multiple countries, disciplines, and business models.

Through the 1990’s Mike worked at BT Labs (UK) creating a new generation of perception-based performance management tools for communications over IP-networks. From 2000 he led Psytechnics, an international VC backed startup, through funding, pivots, and exit. From 2010 to 2019 he was based in Silicon Valley (USA) working for Dolby Labs on adjacent opportunities. He has also held advisory roles for AI and SDN start-ups in Silicon Valley. Mike currently leads Technology Incubation for Dolby.

Douglas Nunn - Course Leader and Senior Lecturer, Audio & Music Techology, Anglia Ruskin University

Douglas Nunn is an academic, composer and visual artist. His research interests include polyphonic music transcription, lossless compression, sound analysis and synthesis, live audiovisual performance and vector graphics.

Philippe Pasquier - Professor at School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT), Simon Fraser University

Philippe Pasquier is a professor at Simon Fraser University's School for Interactive Arts and Technology, where he directs the Metacreation Lab for Creative AI. Philippe leads a research-creation program around generative systems for creative tasks. As such, he is a scientist specialized in artificial intelligence, a multidisciplinary media artist, an educator, and a community builder. His contributions range from theoretical research on generative systems, computer-assisted creativity, multi-agent systems, machine learning, affective computing, and evaluation methodologies. This work is applied in the creative software industry as well as through artistic practice in computer music, interactive and generative art.

Philippe's artistic work has been shown in prominent venues on six continents, including at Ars Electronica (Austria), Centre Pompidou (France), Les Bains Numériques (France), Eastern Block (Canada), Earzoom festival (Slovenia), GMEA (France), IRCAM (France), ISEA2012 (Turkey), ISEA2014 (Dubai), ISEA2016 (Honk Kong), ISEA2017 (Columbia), Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal (Canada), Mutek Festival (Canada), Plus One Gallery (USA), Space One (Korea), Sydney Biennale (Australia), Vooruit (Belgium), ZKM (Germany), ICST (Switzerland), and Akbank (Turkey). The Metacreation Lab research is being applied widely by the likes of Teenage Engineering, Steinberg, Generate, Elias, Schocap, Spliqz, and Microsoft.

Along with the Metacreation Lab fellows, Philippe has co-authored over 180 peer-reviewed contributions presented in the most rigorous scientific venues. His MOOC class on Generative Art and Computational Creativity on the Kadenze platform has served thousands. To further advance the Creative AI community, Philippe instigated and chaired the International Workshop on Musical Metacreation (MUME) and the MUME concerts series, which led to the creation of the Joint Conference on AI Music Creativity. He also founded the International ACM Conference on Movement and Computation (MOCO), and was the director of the Vancouver edition of the International Symposium on Electronic Arts (ISEA2015). Philippe is a Senior Program Committee member of the Joint International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI). 

Philippe's projects are finding industrial applications in the creative industry at large and have gained support and recognition from more than 20 scientific or cultural institutions including the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), MITACS, the Canadian Council for the Arts (CCA), the Australian Research Council and the Australian Council for the Arts, the French Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, and the European Community.

Philip Sheppard - CEO & Co-Founder, LifeScore

Philip Sheppard is CEO of LifeScore. He is also an award-winning film, television and video game composer, producer, virtuoso cellist, and inventor.

LifeScore has been cited as the ‘world’s leading adaptive music company’ – and represents a completely original way to experience music. Its endlessly adaptive platform creates unique, real-time soundtracks for some of the world's leading brands. From the iconic Abbey Road Studios in London, they work with world-class musicians and composers to record and compose musical building blocks. That musical raw material is then processed by a proprietary AI platform to generate soundtracks that adapt to the listener’s environment and inputs, creating an authentic and interactive musical experience that is unique on every engagement.

LifeScore is unique in the quality of its musical building blocks, its methods for representing and applying compositional ideas, and its ability to adapt to the listener’s environment and inputs in real-time with music that sounds as if it were written for that purpose. The result is the best of human and machine contributions: human professionals create music that is of the highest quality recorded music, and the machine assembles it into endlessly varying renditions that can be unique on every listen and play for long durations without sounding repetitive or synthetic.

Philip has produced many large scale and high stakes projects including the 2008 Olympics Closing Ceremonies, all of the world’s national anthems for the 2012 Olympics, the Rugby World Cup, the Tour de France, The Commonwealth Games and the Montreal Grand Prix. He has composed more than 65 film, television, gaming and theatrical scores and has had 11 films premiere at The Sundance Film Festival in the last 10 years.

Philip regularly performs with Odesza, Pretty Lights and UNKLE and has been a guest artist for music legends such as, Scott Walker, Queens of the Stone Age, Grace Jones, Jimmy Page, Jeff Buckley, David Bowie, Sia, Suzanne Vega and Jarvis Cocker.

He regularly works as a creative consultant for large enterprises including, Google, EY, Deloitte, Kering, Kyu Collective, IDEO, and TTi Vanguard, specialising in innovative thinking and communication.

Philip is a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures (Oscars), and a member of the Emmys Academy. He was honoured with BBC’s Music Production of the Year and was recently named as one of Origin Magazine’s “Top 100 Creatives in the U.S.” He is also the recipient of a RAM Fellowship, a lifetime achievement award from the Royal Academy of Music for his services to music and education.

Nadia Aziz - Innovation Consultant, Unbounded Future Ltd

Nadia is an Evangelist of emerging technologies with an expertise in AR & VR and IoT technologies. She has advised C-level executives in Telecom and Media organisations for digital transformation and M&A projects over more than a decade. While being a SIG Champion of Future Devices and Technologies at Cambridge Wireless, she has recently co-founded Unbounded Future, a Deeptech consulting firm based in London. Previously Nadia led Emerging Technologies at NTT Data UK where she supervised R&D and innovation in Augmented (AR) & Virtual Reality (VR), AI, and IoT. Nadia is a supporter of Women in STEM initiatives and is a mentor at the University College London (UCL) IXN programme. She is an industry advisor to IoTerra, a USA-based B2B marketplace for IoT products and was a co-producer for the GIANT Health Event.

Muhammad Chughtai - Senior Research Specialist (Electronics & Electrical Engineering), Beko

I am a seasoned senior technology and engineering consultant with over a decade of multinational experience in AI & Robotics, MedTech, and thermodynamics. My career seamlessly blends corporate discipline with start-up agility, informed by a deep understanding of system dynamics and a holistic perspective. My expertise centres on empowering companies to gain a competitive edge through innovation, successful solution commercialization & partnerships, and strategic business development, all while upholding industry standards. In addition to my engineering expertise, I hold a PhD in the field, complemented by an MBAE. This dual qualification positions me uniquely at the intersection of advanced engineering and educational dynamics.

Zahid Ghadialy - Principal Analyst & Consultant, 3G4G

Zahid is a technologist with a deep understanding of architecting world-class mobile products and solutions. With over 20 years of experience in the telecom industry in various roles, he has been an evangelist for mobile and wireless technologies. Over the years he has accumulated a vast following on his blogs and social networks with simple explainer posts and videos.

His 3G4G blogs are widely read where he looks at different aspects of mobile technology and especially 5G and 6G nowadays, including the architecture, deployments, use cases, applications, etc. His YouTube channel is also very popular where he explains many new features expected as part of 5G in the future. While his style and content is unique, he also references many industry publications and provides slides that are very useful to view online.

He is also very active on Twitter under his @3G4GUK brand helping disseminate the benefits of 5G and why 5G will be needed in the long run. He covers a very wide portfolio of 5G related information that is hard to find otherwise.

Until recently, Zahid was a Senior Director looking at Technology & Innovation Strategy in Parallel Wireless. As a brand ambassador, he represented the company in various Open RAN discussions and also created tutorials on Open RAN and O-RAN which are being used as reference for new starters on the topic.

David Roberts - CTO - Special Projects, Cambridge Wireless, Founder, Jabooh Software

David is a technology leader with over 25 years experience working in the hi-tech arena. He has recently completed a successful project for ghd in conjunction with CW where he carried out the role of System Architect and facilitator.  Prior to this he worked in in the C-IoT space where he ran a multi-national R&D department that developed silicon and software designed for the burgeoning IoT market. He was also responsible for driving an agile transformation programme and assisting the organisation with their integration into a large Chinese multi-national telecoms company. Having started his career as a software developer working for BT and Acorn Computers, he went on to hold senior roles in a number of world-class organisations such as Symbian, Cambridge University and Citrix in the areas of Software Development, Project Management, Product Management, Research, Consultancy and Architecture. His background includes leading and developing teams involved in the creation of large-scale integrated hardware and software products, web-based services and CE devices. He is also highly experienced in large-scale agile development practices, agile coaching/transformation and creating and executing strategies for increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of organisations.

Charles Sturman - CEO, TechWorks

As CEO at TechWorks, Charles is driving collaboration between Deep Tech and Semiconductor companies, Academia and Government in order to promote the sector and grow business opportunities for UK companies.

Previously, Charles was responsible for International Business & Marketing at HiSilicon (Huawei’s chipset business) based in Cambridge UK, with responsibility for product strategy, go-to-market and business development in IoT, edge and smart devices fields. Prior to this he led u-blox’ activities in the fast moving consumer IoT segment (wearables, smart-home and entertainment) following the acquisition of the ARM Software Radio spin-out Cognovo, where we was founder and executive VP Sales & Marketing. Charles has held various positions in system design, business development and product marketing within Acorn Computers, TTPCom, Motorola and ARM.