Paul Watson FREng FBCS CEng PhD is Professor of Computer Science at Newcastle University, UK and was Director of the UK’s National Innovation Centre for Data from 2022 to September 2026. He began his career at Manchester University before moving to industry to design parallel database servers. He then joined Newcastle University where his research and teaching has focussed on scalable data engineering and AI. Professor Watson is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the British Computer Society, and a Chartered Engineer. He received the 2014 Microsoft Jim Gray eScience Award.
The title of Paul’s talk is The UK National Innovation Centre for Data – Lessons from enabling 170 companies to exploit AI.