Pick up your lanyard, have a browse of our bookshop and exhibition area, and grab a coffee before we kick off!

The Data Lab CEO Brian Hills will welcome everyone to the conference and introduce our host, Maggie Philbin

Maggie has led projects making anything from land mine detectors to satellite sub-systems that measure variables like wind speed to improve our knowledge of climate change. In presentations the Sky At Night expert talks about exploring space with missions like Rosetta, and how we live in a galaxy with 200 billion stars. Maggie believes that with 100 billion galaxies in the universe, there must be life out there – simply as a matter of probability.

Stephanie Hare is a researcher, broadcaster and author focused on technology, politics and history. Stephanie will be talking about her book - Technology Is Not Neutral, named by the Financial Times as one of the best tech books of 2022 - and discussing the importance of having ethics at the heart of any technological innovation/

Devi Sridhar is a Professor at the University of Edinburgh Medical School and holds a Personal Chair in Global Public Health. Professor Sridhar will talk about the history of international cooperation in health and controlling outbreaks, the emergence and management of the COVID-19 pandemic and what this means in terms of stopping the next pandemic.

Join Professor Devi Sridhar, Paul McGinness (Lenus Health) and Roger Halliday (Research Data Scotland) as they discuss the future of global healthcare - the challenges we face and the opportunities that arise from technological innovation that might make the world a healthier and safer place.

Tamara Lohan is the co-founder of Mr & Mrs Smith. The company was founded by Tamara and her husband James initially as a guide to high-quality short-break hotels and has since grown into a successful online brand and booking site. Tamara will be talking about the importance of remembering the individual when dealing with data -

DataFest's science podcast - The Last Question - asks its guests to speculate wildly about the future in relation to their field of interest. Join Stephanie Hare (technology ethicist), Laura Tripaldi (nanotechnologist), Caitlin McDonald (Creative Informatics), and podcast co-host Lily Higham (BBC World Service) for a speculative discussion about what technologies will most impact people's lives in the short and medium term future.

We have a very special guest joining us at Data Summit, but we can't tell you who they are just yet. Anyone who has been to previous Data Summits can probably hazard an educated guess...

Since 2010 Dr Giardino has been contributing to the development of the James Webb Space Telescope, working in particular on the NIRSpec instrument: the innovative European Spectrograph designed to capture the spectral signature of primordial galaxies and enable detailed studies of the atmosphere of exoplanets. Astronomy is one of the most ancient, data-driven sciences, and advances in the knowledge and understanding of the universe have come from improvements, through the centuries, in instrumentation and the quality of the data collected. At the pinnacle of this progress, at the moment, is the James Webb mission. Launched on Christmas day, last year, the space telescope has already delivered stunning new views of the cosmos. After explaining how the telescope works and why it is so powerful and innovative, we will embark in a brief journey through these new results, from our Solar System to very far galaxies.

Kevin Murphy is the Chief Science Data Officer for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Kevin will be discussing how he works across five divisions to advance the state of the art in cloud computing, machine learning, and other data management and analysis platforms for NASA’s scientific data. He'll also be talking about the programs responsible for the production and distribution of data from NASA’s fleet of over 20 Earth-observing satellites and instruments to users around the world, the purchase and evaluation of commercial data, and advocates for open science for all of NASA.

How will space technologies affect the everyday lives of people on Earth? What kind of innovations can we expect from the cutting edge projects our panellists work on? Giovanna Giardino (ESA), Kevin Murphy (NASA), Hina Khan (Spire), Angela Mathis (Think Tank Maths), and Kristina Tamane (University of Edinburgh/Space Scotland) will be discussing all of this and much more.

Hannah lectures in the mathematics of cities. and is also a science broadcaster, bringing numbers and data to life on TV and radio in programmes. Data has an unearned aura of objectivity. Statistics certainly has the power to illuminate, but when collected without care, it can also exclude and discriminate. Our insatiable appetite to turn the world into something that can be counted can force a gap between what matters and what can be measured. In this talk, with wit and warmth, Hannah will look at some of the ways that bias has become such a profound modern issue, how it can be amplified, the ways in which it causes genuine harm and what we can do about it. She'll look carefully at the issue of fairness – how it can be defined and whether it can be achieved. And she'll build a persuasive picture of why who can and cannot be counted is one of the defining issues of our days.