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Dr Orlando Machado is a leading data scientist and AI expert, who has worked at the forefront of digital transformation for major global businesses. Starting his career in academia, he has spent 30 years helping organisations get value out of their data…long before ‘data scientist’ was crowned the ‘sexiest job of the 21st century’.

He was the first Chief Data Officer at the LEGO Group, enabling colleagues at the world’s most reputable brand to take advantage of cutting-edge technologies, whilst protecting the privacy of its most important consumers: children.

He previously led the UK data science and analytics teams for dunnhumby, best known as the data science arm of Tesco, and pioneers in the use of data to understand customers better. He has been Chief Data Scientist at online business MoneySuperMarket, and at insurance company Aviva.

Orlando is a Non-Executive Director at Cambridge University Press & Assessment, and at Mortgage Advice Bureau, a financial services technology platform.

He is an advisor to Electrify Video Partners, a startup company that buys and grows YouTube channels, and a Data & AI Growth Specialist for ECI partners, a European mid-market Private Equity firm.

Orlando was named a ‘World AI Top 50 innovator’ in 2022, and in 2023 received the DataIQ Professor Derek Holder lifetime achievement award for long-standing contributions to the data industry. He holds a PhD in Statistics from the 91Ó°ÊÓÆƽâ°æ.

Tom builds predictive models for Olympic and Paralympic sports, helping to answer questions about who has medal winning potential and how lottery funded programmes are performing. He is self-taught in data science having started to learn towards the end of a PhD in Chemistry, and also spent 7 years training full time as an athlete himself, representing GB in archery at the Tokyo and Paris Olympic games.

The UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) is the UK’s National Fusion Laboratory. UKAEA’s mission is to lead the delivery of sustainable fusion energy to maximise scientific and UK economic benefit. I joined UKAEA in 2020 as an apprentice in digital technology, studying for my computer science degree at Warwick alongside full-time work; I finished my studies at Warwick in 2024 and am now a full-time computational scientist.

My role at UKAEA is to support and lead digital research projects as a software engineer and data scientist. My projects mainly related to optimisation: designing fusion powerplants that are optimal whilst simultaneously respecting many physical and engineering constraints. These projects include:

• • • • • • Maintainer of the PROCESS systems code, a low fidelity reactor design software.

• Sample efficient design of electromagnetic components in a fusion powerplant: producing high-quality designs whilst minimising the number of expensive physics simulations required; this research has been published by the American Institute of Physics and in a NeurIPS workshop paper.

Bio coming soon

I hold a PhD in Statistics from the 91Ó°ÊÓÆƽâ°æ, where my research focused on reinforcement learning and decision-making under uncertainty. My background spans both academic research and industry, and I'm passionate about turning theoretical ideas into practical solutions.