Speakers
Simon Fabri
Enrique Munoz de Cote
Ivan Kadić
Konstantinos Nikitopoulos
Sara Almahri
Breakout 1
This session showcases cutting-edge start-ups and early innovations developing breakthrough technologies with the potential to transform industries and society. Founders and technical leaders will present what they are building today: the products, platforms, and systems emerging from frontier science and engineering, and the real-world problems these innovations are designed to solve.
Through concrete examples and live innovation stories the session explores how novel technologies are being translated into practical, scalable solutions, and what makes these approaches genuinely distinctive. Designed to inspire, it highlights the role of start-up creativity and technical ambition in turning emerging ideas into impactful technologies for the connected world.
Simon Fabri is Product and Engineering Director at HMGCC (His Majesty’s Government Communications Centre), a post he has held since 2023. His role is part of the core leadership team at HMGCC, where he oversees hundreds of engineers, technologists and scientists carrying out vital work for national security. Based at the historic Hanslope Park, Milton Keynes, Simon’s time in leadership has positively transformed the way in which HMGCC delivers its engineering - creating vital tech to be used in national security work across the globe.
Simon has a strong background in academia and industry. After starting out as an engineering lecturer, his career took him across telecoms, energy and automotive industries and then to Amazon before joining HMGCC.
HMGCC creates tools and technologies for work within the national security community, creating, designing and testing them on site. This government organisation now increasingly works with outside innovators from academia and industry.
Enrique is a world leader in the field of multi-agent systems. He holds a MSc in distributed systems, a PhD in computer science with a specialty in machine learning and a post-doc on defense multi-agent robotic systems (as part of a BAE Systems, MBDA and Celex joint program). He has published over 80+ academic (peer-reviewed) papers in all the top AI journals, 2 books and 3 patents.
Enrique is co-founder and CTO of Mutable Tactics, a Cambridge based startup building the orchestration layer for autonomous robotics: turning solo robots into cohesive teams that are smarter, faster, and cheaper to operate. Mutable Tactic's tech builds on Enrique's contribution to ALADDIN, a £10m+ project on robot-human teamwork led by BAE Systems and MBDA. This experience shaped Enrique’s opinion on how to think about complex systems in the real world, leading to being a top-voice in the sub-domain of adversarial machine learning
Konstantinos Nikitopoulos is a Full Professor in Wireless Communications and Signal Processing at the 6G Innovation Centre, University of Surrey, and Director of the Wireless Systems Lab. He is also a founder and director of Noema Signal Labs Ltd, a recent University of Surrey spin-out commercialising the award-winning NL-COMM technology.
His research focuses on advanced signal processing, next-generation computing architectures, and system-level wireless design. He has deep expertise in non-orthogonal transmission techniques, including MIMO and NOMA, and is the lead inventor of the NL-COMM technology (www.nl-comm.com).
Professor Nikitopoulos was named 2024 Innovator of the Year by the University of Surrey’s School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering. He has also received the Tony Jeans Inspirational Teaching Prize and the School’s Teacher of the Year Award, and is a recipient of the prestigious EPSRC First Grant.
Sara AlMahri is the CEO of Mina AI, a Cambridge-based startup building AI-native workforce for enterprise operations. She recently completed her PhD in Engineering at the University of Cambridge, where she worked at the intersection of AI and supply chains, focusing on how large language models and agentic AI systems can improve visibility and decision-making in complex industrial environments. Prior to this, she worked across global industrial organisations including Boeing in the US, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan, and ADNOC in the UAE. Sara was awarded the 2026 People’s #21ToWatch and has also won multiple entrepreneurship prizes including the Cambridge Parmee Prize.
