Anna is the Head of Data Science after joining HMRC in October 2019, within the Chief Digital Information Office. Anna leads a very talented team, around 60 colleagues, that focus on development of robust data science capability and data lead innovation to deliver value across HMRC, through having access to cutting edge technology and are using state of the art Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning techniques. Anna believes that the key ingredient to sustained data transformation is working collaboratively across business and technology teams and perseverance. Prior to this role Anna was in the private sector industry leading data science and analytical teams and driving data led transformation across retail and more recently broadcast. For multiple years Anna led Sky’s Data Science and Insight Innovation launching and delivering innovative capabilities across CSG, Retention and Content.

Adam is joint head of data science at DfT, and previously worked as an analyst on R&D policy and buildings efficiency at BEIS, and social care in local government. He's currently working on a new way of measuring how connected places are. Outside of work he's a keen runner and reads far far too much.

Data Scientist working in BEIS Advanced Analytics Team, which has a particular focus on real time data. Worked as a government analyst since 2016 (Home Office, BEIS). MSc in Data Science from City University. Research areas focussed around utilisation of real time labour market data. Research topics have included supply and demand of PhD’s, labour market shortages and Net Zero jobs.

In most recent research, Net Zero jobs are tracked against government policy objectives as identified in the Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution and more recently the Net Zero Strategy. Relevant jobs are identified using keyword searching and machine learning over job advertisement text. Reporting includes Net Zero job trends compared to policy targets and identification of job characteristics such as location, employer, wages and skills.

Alasdair is the Innovation Lead at the Geospatial Commission, an expert committee which is part of the Cabinet Office, that sets the UK’s geospatial strategy and promotes the best use of geospatial data. He leads the Commission's Location Data Innovation Programme which aims to maximise commercial opportunities for innovation and promote market wide adoption of emerging geospatial / location technologies. Prior to this, he held a range of roles at Airbus Defence & Space, delivering geospatial projects and solutions that utilised Earth Observation data.

Alasdair has a degree in Exploration & Resource Geology from Cardiff University and is a committee member for the Geological Remote Sensing Group.

As Director of the Data for Children Collaborative with UNICEF - a partnership between UNICEF, the Scottish Government and University of Edinburgh - I have responsibility to ensure that we deliver actionable insight to resolve children's issues through responsible and innovative use of data and data science methodologies. Achievements include; designing an scalable and repeated approach to building diverse collaborative teams from academia, public and private sectors; developing a ‘Responsible Innovation’ framework; creating a portfolio of projects answering challenge questions from UNICEF and other organisations. Alex won the 2021 Data IQ Award for ‘Data for Good Champion’.

Prior to this role, I draw on over 10 years of experience of working in Finance systems and in Change roles in RBS (now NatWest Group), including delivering a programme of work to embed Data Management best practice for the Finance function, particularly focussed on meeting regulatory compliance requirements.

Alison has over 20 years experience working in the public and private sectors. Leading on abroad range of Learning and Development and talent strategies, including the delivery of leadership and management programmes at all levels within organisations. For the past 5 years Alison’s focus has been on building data science capability across the public sector. She is leading the Data Science Campus Capability Team who are delivering on a number of initiatives, such as the Data Science Masterclass, Data Science Accelerator programme and the strengthening our university and private sector collaborations. A key passion for Alison is ensuring the public sector is bringing in new and emerging talent and so with her team has developed a Public Sector Data Science Graduate Programme as well as leading the Trailblazer Group in England to create the Data Science Degree Apprenticeship. Alison is currently leading a Cross Government Data Science Skills Working Group, who together are working on a Data Science Competency Framework that will underpin the Data Science Career Pathway

Amadeus is a Data/Technology Lead in the NHS AI Lab Skunkworks team, working on accelerating the safe adoption of AI in the health and care system through practical knowledge and capability building. Prior to joining the Lab, Amadeus was Global Head of Product and CTO at Decoded, a leading technology education company. Amadeus combines his experience in industry with a PhD in nanomedicine from the University of Oxford.

In the Skunkworks team Amadeus has worked on the development of AI proof of concepts including predicting length of stay, bed allocation and CT registration and lesion detection.

We’re part of the Advanced Analytics team in BEIS. We work on a variety of projects across the department and often utilise text data. As text becomes an ever-increasingly abundant and useful resource for data science, we have continued to evolve our approach to natural language processing (NLP) within the team to extract insights. Come along to our session to hear about why and how we improved our NLP capability over the last few years, and to see some of the exciting projects we work on in Advanced Analytics. It will be a great chance to hear about NLP techniques we have implemented and create discussion around similar or different NLP approaches in government.

Andreas is a police inspector in the MPS Strategic Insights Unit, where he leads on a broad range of data science and innovation projects. The SIU is a small multidisciplinary team that answers questions of strategic importance on behalf of MPS senior management, and combines advanced data analytics and social research skills with expertise in, and experience of, operational policing and the strategic landscape.

Prior to working in the SIU, Andreas worked in a variety of roles across front-line policing. He completed his MSc in Crime Science at UCL in 2018, where he is now working on a part-time PhD, focusing on statistical models of policing activity. In his spare time, he helps coordinate Police Rewired, a community bringing together volunteers from civic tech and policing practitioners to prototype new tools to fight crime.

Dr. Annalisa Arcella is a Senior Data Scientist at the Department for Transport. She has a wide range of expertise from biomedical research, IoT, to financial service and transport. She is a public speaker and ambassador of Google Women Techmakers to promote diversity and inclusion in the technology sector. In this session she will talk about an NLP-based tool that automates the analysis of thousands of responses to a policy consultation. The tool helps to summarise responses in topics and understand people's emotional reactions. It is deployed in Google Cloud Platform and in addition to sharing the tool's architecture, the challenges of a small team will be discussed.

My presentation is all about process mining and how we recently used this approach within the NAO to gain new insights about the operation of the Windrush Compensation Scheme. This was part of a wider NAO investigation, and process mining really helped enable the study team to better understand the scheme’s operation and to draw out new data-driven insights from its underpinning case management systems. The presentation will provide an introduction to process mining and some of the pre-requisites in terms of data, before describing how we conducted our analysis using the bupaR suite of packages in R. I will also discuss some of the insights that were made possible through the work and will give a live demo of one of the most interesting and insightful outputs we produced. Come along if you want to know more about process mining and how you might apply this to your work.

My name is Ben Wolff and I am a Data Scientist in HMRC. In this talk, I will discuss an ongoing project creating a dashboard to support risking of agent activity within Corporation Tax. The number of R&D Tax Relief claims in Corporation Tax is rising rapidly every year, presenting many opportunities for fraud. My analysis has taken a novel approach, by focussing on R&D claims through an agent lens, to uncover new data around third party agents and their activity in this tax relief. This project began with utilising text analytics methods to explore unstructured data and has progressed into bringing multiple data sources together as part of a RShiny Dashboard. I will share my experiences learning to code in R through this project, and the cutting edge platforms and techniques used to create the dashboard.

I'm a data scientist in the BEIS Advanced Analytics Team. The team works on cross-cutting projects ranging from the impact COVID has had on UK businesses/labour markets to understanding how the UK can grow a green economy and tackle climate control. The team provides analysis via the use of real time indicators, interactive dashboard apps and using machine learning techniques. I graduated in Mathematics from the University of Southampton and joined the civil service in 2016. I have experience in working on statistical publications within DWP and BEIS before pursuing a role in data science. Some of my recent work involves training a model to identify jobs linked to Clean Growth from a database of web-scraped job vacancies. This was high priority analysis that helped understand role types, locations, wages and skill demand in this area and track progress in areas addressed in the Ten Point Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution.

Dominic Cushnan joined the NHS in 2014 and is currently Head of AI Imaging for the NHS AI Lab.

Dominic previously founded a technology company specialising in computer vision and human interface technologies.

Since his appointment in the NHS AI Lab, January 2020, he has developed an AI Buyers’ Guide for healthcare and developed the National Covid-19 Chest Imaging Database for the training and testing of AI models.

I joined Defra just over a year ago as a Project Officer in the new Data Analytics and Science Hub team, led by Dr Marie Longnecker. Before this I completed a PhD in biophysics and then took part in the Science to Data Science (S2DS) training program. As part of the development of Defra's new data analytics platform for Defra we have been collaborating with teams across Defra to undertake an initial pilot project analysing land, land use and land ownership over a large sample area. The goal was to explore how to make best use of large geospatial datasets when working in a cloud Databricks environment, helping inform the ongoing platform development. We hope to share some of what we have learned and developed through this process.

The National Audit Office has been exploring ways to share deeper insights from the data we collect during our audits of government bodies. A recent example of this is an interactive map we developed using R Shiny to visualise data from the Environment Agency during our report on managing flood risk. This tool had two aims, first it would help support our audit team's understanding of the regional differences in the key datasets on the topic. Secondly, we aimed to use the tool to increase public transparency around spending on flood defence by publishing the visualisation and discussing with the Environment Agency how they could incorporate parts of it in their own public visualisations. This talk will cover our approach to developing the tool and how we used it to get greater impact for our report from both the Environment Agency and Parliament.

As a member of the newly formed Data Analytics Specialism at the Government Internal Audit Agency, Lauren Petrie (Data Analytics Specialist) has been working to raise awareness of data analytics within the Agency, upskill auditors and embed the use of data analytics in audits across government with several initiatives to increase colleagues’ understanding and confidence in using data. She will be talking about the work to enable auditors to use advance analytics methods including text summarisation and automatic detection of latent themes in unstructured text data. She has built a pipeline to process the text within internal audit reports and a tool to help analyse the resulting output: the "Insights Engine", which will be demonstrated at this session.

Matthew is a senior data scientist in the NHS AI Lab Skunkworks Team in NHS AI Lab.

He has a background in financial regulation and consultancy, and studied Aerospace Engineering at university.

In his role, he helps teams across the NHS to develop AI-driven applications by providing expertise in data science and machine learning.

Sofi Nickson, Harmonisation Principal Research Officer, Neurodivergent My brain works differently to yours… and that isn’t a bad thing! This isn’t a boast that my brain is the best, but rather that there is nothing wrong with us being different; that is what neurodiversity is. It is great to be different - the famous quote illustrating this is that ‘neurodiversity may be every bit as crucial for the human race as biodiversity is for life in general’.

Stephen Simpkin’s skills sit in Social Science and Statistics. This is quite the tongue-twister, but luckily for you Stephen loves to talk about all things data and analytics. Stephen has 15 years experience across public sector research and analysis teams and has recently been focussing on transforming local intelligence teams into modern analytics teams in his role as Data Science Fellow. With considerable experience of applied statistical analysis to public sector challenges, Stephen is always happy to talk about the work of Essex County Council’s Data & Analytics team. He will not rest until the entire local public sector is making the best possible use of their data and won the inaugural 2021 Sir Ian Diamond Award for Excellence in Government Analytics.