Academia and Industry Days always feature some of the most engaging and cutting-edge keynote speakers from both academia and industry. Read more about this year’s speakers below.
The list will be updated continuously as additional keynote speakers are confirmed.
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.
Professor Sylvia Schwaag Serger has spent 20 years designing, implementing and studying science and technology policy in Europe and China.
She has been commissioned as expert by the OECD, was chair of the board of the Swedish Foundation for Internationalization of Higher Education and Research (STINT), member of the Swedish Prime Minister’s Innovation Council and one of the lead authors of the Heitor Report. She chairs the Scientific Council of the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (Formas) and is deputy chair of the Austrian Council for Science, Technology and Innovation. Sylvia has an MA from Johns Hopkins SAIS and a PhD from the LSE.
From 2018-2020 she was Deputy President of Lund University. Since 2024, she is President of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences (IVA).