Invited Speakers

Professor Keith Butler, University College London
Professor Kyle Cranmer, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA
Dr James Dracott, Deputy Director AI, UK Research and Innovation, UK
Professor Pierre Gentine, Columbia University, USA
Professor David Jones, University College London, UK
Professor Jay Lee, University of Maryland, USA
Professor Rajkumar Roy, Loughborough University, UK
Professor Anna Scaife, University of Manchester & Turing AI Fellow, UK
Professor Jimeng Sun, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA

More details to follow

Keith Butler

Professor Keith Butler is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chemistry at University College London. He obtained his undergraduate degree in Chemistry from Trinity College Dublin in 2004 and completed a PhD in Computational Chemistry at UCL in 2009 under the supervision of Dewi Lewis, studying the nucleation and growth of zeolites. Following postdoctoral research at the Universities of Sheffield and Bath, working on atomistic simulations of interfaces in photovoltaic materials, developed a strong interest in applying machine learning to materials discovery.

In 2018, Keith moved to the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, where he helped establish the Scientific Machine Learning (SciML) group. He joined Queen Mary University of London as Senior Lecturer in Green Energy Materials in 2022, before returning to UCL Chemistry in 2023.

Keith’s research combines data-driven methods, such as deep learning and Bayesian statistics, with quantum mechanical simulations to accelerate materials design and experimental characterisation. He was part of the team awarded the Sir George Stokes Award for developments in X-ray diffraction tomography and is a founder member of the Institute of Physics Machine Learning and Neuromorphic Computing Group. He is Deputy Editor of npj Computational Materials and an editorial board member of Machine Learning: Science and Technology.

Kyle Cranmer

Professor Kyle Cranmer is the David R. Anderson Director of the UW-Madison Data Science Institute and a Professor of Physics with courtesy appointments in Statistics and Computer Science. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Machine Learning Science and Technology. He obtained his Ph.D. in Physics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005 and was a Professor of Physics and Data Science at NYU from 2007 – 2022. He was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Science and Engineering in 2007, the National Science Foundation's Career Award in 2009, became a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2021, and received the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2025 for his work at the Large Hadron Collider. Professor Cranmer developed a framework that enables collaborative statistical modeling, which was used extensively for the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. His current interests are at the intersection of physics, statistics, and machine learning. In 2025, he received the inaugural Pritzker Prize for AI in Science.

Pierre Gentine

Professor Pierre Gentine is the Maurice Ewing and J. Lamar Worzel professor of geophysics in the departments of Earth and Environmental Engineering and Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University. He studies the terrestrial water and carbon cycles and their changes with climate change. Pierre Gentine is the recipient of the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA and Department of energy (DOE) early career awards, as well as the American Geophysical Union Global Environmental Changes Early Career, Macelwane medal and American Meteorological Society Meisinger award. He is the director of the NSF Science and Technology Center (STC) for Learning the Earth with Artificial intelligence and Physics (LEAP), the largest funding mechanism of the NSF.

James Dracott

Dr James Dracott is a Deputy Director in UK Research and Innovation’s AI Priority Programme. He works with government, universities and industry to shape investment in AI research, skills, infrastructure and adoption, helping translate research strengths into economic growth and public benefit across the UK. He previously led EPSRC’s AI and robotics and ICT portfolios and helped establish UKRI’s Future Leaders Fellowships. James holds a PhD in Materials Science from the University of Manchester.

David Jones

Professor David T. Jones FRS is Professor of Bioinformatics at University College London and a pioneer of computational structural biology. Over more than three decades, he has developed influential methods for protein structure and function prediction, including THREADER, PSIPRED, DISOPRED, PSICOV, MetaPSICOV, DMPfold and Merizo. A lot of his work involves machine learning, and he was the principal protein bioinformatics and structure-prediction domain expert involved in the formative development of DeepMind’s AlphaFold project from 2017 to 2019. More recently, he led the development of the Encyclopedia of Domains (TED), a comprehensive atlas of protein domains across the AlphaFold structure database. He has published more than 170 papers and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2023.

Jay Lee

Professor Jay Lee is Clark Distinguished Professor and Founding Director of Industrial AI Center of University of Maryland College Park. Previously, he was Founding Director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Industry/University Cooperative Research Center on Intelligent Maintenance Systems during 2001-2019. He has mentored his students developed a number of spin-off companies including Predictronics through NSF iCorps. His teams have won first place in the PHM Society Data Challenge competition seven times since 2008. In addition, he is chair of ASTM F50 Standards Committee on AI in Manufacturing Systems. His book Industrial AI was published by Springer in 2020. Previously, he served as vice chairman and board member of Foxconn, Director of United Technologies Research Center, and Program Director of National Science Foundation.

Anna Scaife

Professor Anna Scaife is Professor of Radio Astronomy at the University of Manchester and an external expert advisor to the UK Government Department for Business, Innovation, Science & Trade, specialising in AI for Science. Her research focuses on the use of artificial intelligence for discovery in data-intensive astrophysics and in 2019 she was appointed as one of the five inaugural AI Fellows of the UK’s Alan Turing Institute. She is currently UK President of the International Union of Radio Sciences.

In addition to her scientific work, Anna has run two training programs that provide bursaries for students from Southern Africa and Latin America to pursue graduate degrees in the UK focusing on big data and data intensive science. In 2014, Anna was honoured by the World Economic Forum as one of thirty scientists under the age of 40 selected for their contributions to advancing the frontiers of science, engineering or technology in areas of high societal impact. In 2017 she was awarded the Blaauw Chair in Astrophysics (prize chair) at the University of Groningen in The Netherlands for excellence in research, broad knowledge of astronomy and an outstanding international status in astronomy. In 2019, Anna received the Jackson-Gwilt Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, awarded for outstanding invention, improvement, or development of astronomical instrumentation or techniques.

Rajkumar Roy

Professor Rajkumar Roy is the Dean of the Wolfson School of Mechanical, Electrical and Manufacturing Engineering at Loughborough University. He is recognised internationally for developing the scientific basis of through-life engineering services (TES) and cost engineering over a period of more than 27 years. He led research and education for TES in the UK through the national EPSRC Through-life Engineering Services Centre and collaborated closely with industry to develop a cross-sector, publicly available specification on TES. His cost engineering research has changed fundamental understanding about the engineering effort required to design, make and support complex engineering systems. As chair of the Social Value Leadership Group at the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists, he supports engineering for economic and social value generation.

Jimeng Sun

Professor Jimeng Sun is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Co-Founder & CEO of Keiji Al. His research focuses on Al and machine learning for clinical research and drug development, with publications in Nature Communications, NPJ Digital Medicine, NeurlPS and other leading venues. He works closely with biopharma and healthcare organizations to translate Al research into real-world clinical trial systems.