Panel discussion:
Diversity in OR/Analytics
7 June 2022 12:30 - 1:30pm Online
This year we hosted and important panel session on diversity in OR and analytics and we bought together academics and OR professionals with experts in tackling issues of workplace diversity and inclusion.
Our panellists shared what diversity in OR and Analytics means to them and offered ideas on how we can improve practices to ensure all voices in the profession are valued.
Audience participation in the discussion was encouraged, and questions for the panel had been submitted prior to and during the event.
This free online event took place over one hour and had a short but full schedule.
AGENDA
12:30-12:40pm: Welcome and Event Introduction
12:40-1pm: Short introduction presentations from each of the panellists
1pm-1:25pm: Q&A session with questions mixed between pre-organised questions
(collected from registration) and questions from the audience.
1:25pm-1:30pm: Closing remarks
Meet our speakers
Nadia Abouayoub
Lecturer/ Module Leader and Strategist in innovation in Investment Banking
Nadia Abouayoub is a strategist and specialist on Innovation for the financial sector. She is a member of the British Computer Society’s (BCS) Artificial Intelligence Specialist Group Committee (S.G.A.I) and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA). She has two MScs from the University of Dijon and from Royal Holloway, University of London.
Nadia is a member of a United Nations focus group on AI in smart cities and is also the organiser of the International Machine Intelligence Competition, run by the S.G.A.I.; and has organised several workshops and lectures focused on educating the public about Artificial Intelligence.
Beginning with JP Morgan, she has over 15 years’ experience in investment banking and is currently a lecturer on a newly-created MSc in Data of Science.
Vidhyalakshmi Karthikeyan, PhD
Head of Data and Insights at YouView
Vidhya leads the Data and Insight function at YouView TV. She is responsible for ensuring that YouView’s data is fit for purpose and creates value for a wide variety of stakeholders. This includes delivering timely and rigorous evidence from viewer behaviour data for better decision-making and viewer experiences.
She started her career as a data scientist in 2009, did a PhD part-time and progressed to leading large customer experience-centric data programmes. She is an inventor on 24 patents and applications and has won several national awards for her achievements and STEM community outreach activities. Vidhya is passionate about figuring out data solutions to business problems, working towards driving organisational culture change in data adoption across all parts of its lifecycle, from creation to exploitation.
Bernadette Kisaalu
Lawyer for BT and Chair of the BT’s Ethnic Diversity Network
Bernadette is a principal lawyer in the BT Customer Experience Legal Team. She is responsible for advising BT’s consumer businesses (BT, EE and Plusnet) about how they sell products and services (e.g. mobile, broadband, TV and sport) to UK consumers to make sure the sales of those products and services are sold in compliance with both UK Consumer Law and Ofcom regulations. Bernadette has worked as a lawyer in the telecoms sector for the past eight years. Prior to that, she worked as a lawyer for Avon Cosmetics and Impellam Group.
Bernadette is also Chair of BT’s Ethnic Diversity Network and is responsible for amplifying and empowering the voices of BT’s racially diverse colleagues and helping to improve diversity and inclusion throughout the organisation.
Alain Zemkoho
Associate Professor in Operational Research at University of Southampton
Alain Zemkoho is an Associate Professor at the School of Mathematical Sciences within the University of Southampton, where he is affiliated to the Operational Research Group and CORMSIS. Prior to joining the University of Southampton, he was a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham and had previously worked as a Research Associate at the Technical University of Freiberg (Germany). He is a Fellow of the Alan Turing Institute for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics & Its Applications and a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy. His research interests are around the theory and methods for nonconvex, nonsmooth, and bilevel optimisation, as well as their applications, including in machine learning, transportation, healthcare and medicine.
Equality, Diversity and Inclusion at The OR Society
The OR Society is committed to continuous improvement in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI). Read our statement on EDI here.