PyData London 2025

Adam is the Interim Director of Data Science at ComplyAdvantage, where he leads a brilliant team tackling financial crime with advanced analytics, large-scale systems, and the latest in generative and agentic AI.

Before that, he spent eight years in the smart cities space at HAL24K, helping governments and infrastructure providers make better decisions with their data. Along the way, he built and led a team of ten data scientists, and helped launch four spin-out ventures—proving that good data science can move the dial in the real world.

A recovering astrophysicist, Adam spent a decade analysing data from space telescopes in search of new cosmic phenomena. He’s since redirected that curiosity toward Earth-based problems.

Adam is an active member of the PyData community, the founder of PyData Southampton, and a long-time volunteer with DataKind UK, supporting charities and NGOs with pro-bono data science.

A lead software engineer and data scientist. Has over 15 years’ experience in the development of software and AI/ML solutions. Pragmatic, analytic problem solver and builder of artificial intelligence solutions for business seeking efficiency and value. A passionate advocate of the development and use of ethical AI in products and services.

Ahmad is a data scientist with a Master from Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He worked on a study to accelerate clinical tasks using language models and founded MedWrite AI company.
Ahmad is an active contributor to GitHub and has published open-source projects adopted by thousands of developers. He also writes articles about machine learning in various outlets to bridge the gap between research and practical applications.

By day, Alex heads up the Machine Learning platform at Monzo, tackling exciting challenges in the fintech space. He also enjoys bringing people together as a host for the MLOps Community London, connecting peers and advancing the conversation around production ML.

Alex Owens has been working in a combination of Python and C++ for the past 8 years. For the last 3 and a half of those, he has been a senior engineer on the new open-source Dataframe database, ArcticDB, which is backed by long-time Python enthusiasts Man Group and Bloomberg

Anders is the Head of Investments Engineering at Nordea Asset Management and organizer of Pydata Copenhagen Meetup. He has a background as a ML Tech Lead and Python Enabler with an interest in data engineering, ML and ML Engineering. Hailing from Stavanger, Norway, he is currently located in Copenhagen, Denmark

A physicist by education and a lecturer of programming for data science and applied statistics for some Milano universities, I worked as a data scientist to provide data-based business solutions. For example, my specialities include numerical optimization, NLP, Time Series analysis, signal analysis, and modelling projects.

I co-founded Apply Quantum (https://applyquantum.ai), specialising in AI, quantum computing, and providing training.

I lead CUDA Python Product Management, working to make CUDA a Python native.

I received my Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 2010, where Ibuilt domain-specific languages to generate high-performance code for physics simulations with the PETSc and FEniCS projects. After spending a brief time as a research professor at the University of Texas and Texas Advanced Computing Center, I have been a serial startup executive, including a founding team member of Anaconda.

I am a leader in the Python open data science community (PyData). A contributor to Python's scientific computing stack since 2006, I am most notably a co-creator of the popular Dask distributed computing framework, the Conda package manager, and the SymPy symbolic computing library. I was a founder of the NumFOCUS foundation. At NumFOCUS, I served as the president and director, leading the development of programs supporting open-source codes such as Pandas, NumPy, and Jupyter.

After having a career as a Data Scientist and Developer Advocate, Cheuk dedicated her work to the open-source community. Currently, she is working as AI developer advocate for JetBrains. She has co-founded Humble Data, a beginner Python workshop that has been happening around the world. She has served the EuroPython Society board for two years and is now a fellow and director of the Python Software Foundation.

Chi Wang is founder of AutoGen (now AG2), the open-source AgentOS to support agentic AI, and its parent open-source project FLAML, a fast library for AutoML & tuning. Chi runs the AG2 community with 20K+ members. He has received multiple awards such as best paper of ICLR'24 LLM Agents Workshop, Open100, and SIGKDD Data Science/Data Mining PhD Dissertation Award. He has 15+ years of research experience in Computer Science from Google DeepMind, Microsoft Research, Meta, UIUC and Tsinghua.

Chris is a Principal Quantitative Analyst at PyMC Labs and an Adjoint Associate Professor at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, with 20 years of experience as a data scientist in academia, industry, and government. He is interested in computational statistics, machine learning, Bayesian methods, and applied decision analysis. He hails from Vancouver, Canada and received his Ph.D. from the University of Georgia.​​

Chris Laffra is a seasoned professional with extensive experience in leadership, communication, and technology. Having worked at leading tech companies like Google and Uber, as well as major financial institutions such as Bank of America and JP Morgan, Chris has built a career focused on fostering effective communication and leadership within engineering teams.

Chris is also an accomplished author, with books on communication that cater specifically to engineers, aiming to make them more effective, productive, impactful, and happy in their roles. Additionally, Chris has taught numerous day-long masterclasses that delve into these topics, empowering engineers to excel both individually and as part of a team.

Elizabeth Osanyinro is a data analyst passionate about AI ethics, fairness, and inclusive technology. Currently a Business Analyst at Carbonnote AI, Elizabeth is completing an MSc in Applied Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics at the University of Bradford. With experience as a digital marketing and business analyst, she has worked on diverse projects, including retail analytics, credit card fraud detection, and blockchain-based digital verification.

Elizabeth is proficient in tools such as Microsoft Excel, SAS, Python, R, Power BI, and Looker. As the founder of PyData Bradford, she actively fosters community-driven learning in AI and data science

Emeli Dral is a Co-founder and CTO at Evidently AI, a startup developing open-source tools to evaluate, test, and monitor the performance of AI systems.

Earlier, she co-founded an industrial AI startup and served as the Chief Data Scientist at Yandex Data Factory. She led over 50 applied ML projects for various industries - from banking to manufacturing. Emeli is a data science lecturer at Harbour.Space University, and a co-author of the Machine Learning and Data Analysis curriculum at Coursera with over 100,000 students.

I'm a data scientist / machine learning engineer with a background in computational / quantum physics. I write loads of python and typescript, and a little bit of everything else.

I like working on hard R&D problems involving computer vision, natural language processing, graph theory, representation learning, recommendation systems, and information retrieval.

I love turning those research projects into end-to-end pipelines and services which help people in the real world.

Hi, I'm Hugh.

I'm an experienced developer advocate and community manager with a particular interest in data and AI. I have been working in IT for over 5 years, working on large scale software projects and cloud infrastructure.

Out of office hours I organise AI and Deep Learning for Enterprise (aidle.uk) , a Meetup group which hosts talks on real world applications of AI.

I'm a former apprentice and an advocate for vocational learning as a pathway into an IT career.

Ian is a Chief Data Scientist, founder of the RebelAI leadership community, has co-founded and built the annual PyDataLondon conference raising $100k+ annually for the open source movement along with the associated 14,000+ member monthly meetup. Using data science he's helped clients find $2M in recoverable fraud, created the core IP which opened funding rounds for automated recruitment start-ups and diagnosed how major media companies can better supply recommendations to viewers. He gives conference talks internationally often as keynote speaker and is the author of the bestselling O'Reilly book High Performance Python (3rd edition). He has over 26 years of experience as a senior data science leader, trainer and team coach. For fun he's walked by his high-energy Springer Spaniel, surfs the Cornish coast and drinks fine coffee. Past talks and articles can be found at:

• https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianozsvald/
• https://ianozsvald.com/
• https://notanumber.email/
• https://github.com/ianozsvald/
• https://twitter.com/ianozsvald

Ines Montani is a developer specializing in tools for AI and NLP technology. She’s the co-founder and CEO of Explosion and a core developer of spaCy, a popular open-source library for Natural Language Processing in Python, and Prodigy, a modern annotation tool for creating training data for machine learning models.

My focus is on making AI systems usable, scalable, and maintainable. I'm currently a Staff Data Scientist at Zendesk, working on LLM-powered features that see millions of conversations a day.

Previously at Clarifai, I helped build and maintain multimodal retrieval systems in production. My background is in Aerospace Engineering and Machine Learning and I hold undergraduate (B.A.Sc in EngSci) and graduate (M.A.Sc) degrees from the University of Toronto.

In my spare time, I am a maintainer for MTEB, I like to see the world, and do a bit of running and hiking.

Jacob Tomlinson is a senior Python software engineer at NVIDIA with a focus on deployment tooling for distributed systems. His work involves maintaining open source projects including RAPIDS and Dask. RAPIDS is a suite of GPU accelerated open source Python tools which mimic APIs from the PyData stack including those of Numpy, Pandas and SciKit-Learn. Dask provides advanced parallelism for analytics with out-of-core computation, lazy evaluation and distributed execution of the PyData stack. He also tinkers with the open source Kubernetes Python framework kr8s in his spare time. Jacob volunteers with the local tech community group Tech Exeter and lives in Exeter, UK.

Jay Alammar is co-author of Hands-On Large Language Models, published by O'Reilly Media. and Director and Engineering Fellow at Cohere (a pioneering creator of large language models).

Through his popular AI/ML blog, Jay has helped millions of researchers and engineers visually understand machine learning tools and concepts (e.g., The Illustrated Transformers, BERT, DeepSeek-R1, and others).

Jeremy talks to people who talk to computers about talking to computers.

Jeroen Janssens, PhD, is a Senior Developer Relations Engineer at Posit, PBC. His expertise lies in visualizing data, implementing machine learning models, and building solutions using Python, R, JavaScript, and Bash. He’s passionate about open source and sharing knowledge. He’s the author of Python Polars: The Definitive Guide (O’Reilly, 2025) and Data Science at the Command Line (O’Reilly, 2021). Jeroen holds a PhD in machine learning from Tilburg University and an MSc in artificial intelligence from Maastricht University. He lives with his wife and two kids in Rotterdam, the Netherlands.

John is an Independent Machine Learning & AI Product Consultant based in Manchester. He helps organisations get past the hype and deliver valuable data, and AI products.

John is also chair of the PyData London conference, and an organiser at PyDataMCR

John Sandall is the CEO and Principal Data Scientist at Coefficient.

His experience in data science and software engineering spans multiple industries and applications, and his passion for the power of data extends far beyond his work for Coefficient’s clients. In April 2017 he created SixFifty in order to predict the UK General Election using open data and advanced modelling techniques. Previous experience includes Lead Data Scientist at YPlan, business analytics at Apple, genomics research at Imperial College London, building an ed-tech startup at Knodium, developing strategy & technological infrastructure for international non-profit startup STIR Education, and losing sleep to many hackathons along the way.

John is also a co-organiser of PyData London, co-founded Humble Data in 2019 to promote diversity in data science through a programme of free bootcamps, and in 2020 was a Committee Chair for the PyData Global Conference. He is currently a Fellow of Newspeak House with interests in open data, AI ethics and promoting diversity in tech.

I'm Joris Bekkers, a self-employed football analytics consultant with over 8 years of experience, specializing in research, development and implementation of cutting-edge tools, models and data visualizations. I'm a co-founder of PySport, a non-profit that aims to grow open-source sports analytics. You can find more information about me at www.unravelsports.github.io

Jyoti is an Applied Cyber Security Data Scientist at Microsoft, UK. Jyoti has a total of 8 years of experience in top notch technologies like blockchain, cybersecurity and finance industry. Jyoti has primarily worked on the LLM, fine-tuning and agent AI systems.

Dr. Katrina Riehl is a Principal Technical Product Manager at NVIDIA supporting CUDA and Python. For over two decades, Katrina has worked extensively in the fields of scientific computing, machine learning, data science, and visualization. Most notably, she has helped lead initiatives at the University of Texas Austin Applied Research Laboratory, Anaconda, Apple, Expedia Group, Cloudflare, and Snowflake. She is an active volunteer in the Python open-source scientific software community and currently serves on the Advisory Council for NumFOCUS.

Lawrence Mitchell works and thinks as part of the RAPIDS team at NVIDIA. His focus is on high-productivity, high-performance libraries for data analytics. He leads the technical design and implementation of the RAPIDS-accelerated Polars GPU engine. Prior to joining NVIDIA he was a lecturer in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics at the University of Durham with research interests in high performance simulation of continuum mechanics, structure-preserving numerical methods, and preconditioning techniques for coupled multiphysics problems. He was a founding co-lead and technical architect of the open source Firedrake project for finite element simulation.

Leanne is Director of Data Science & AI at the Financial Times and is a passionate, experienced data leader having built and developed empowered data science and analytics teams for a variety of businesses; from startups to large organisations. Leanne is in her element when developing and implementing strategic, technical and cultural solutions to getting data & AI capabilities into the operational ecosystem. She is an active part of the data and technology community, sharing innovation and insights to encourage best practice, and has held various roles as an Advisory Panel Board Member for MSc & PhD Data Science & AI Programmes. Outside of all things data you can generally find Leanne chasing after her toddler and/or her dog, enjoying the latest sci-fi & fantasy books, and engaging in her latest crafting project.

Lena Shakurova is the founder of ParsLabs (https://parslabs.org), a Conversational AI agency, and Chatbotly (https://chatbotly.co), a no-code platform for building AI assistants trained on custom data.

At ParsLabs, she leads a team blending AI, user research and conversation science to design and develop high quality AI Conversations that sound human. She has background in NLP and Artificial intelligence and 7+ years of experience and 80+ successful projects building production-ready chatbots and voice assistants.

Lena focuses on ethical, user-first AI, leveraging her expertise in Linguistics & AI to create responsible, high-quality AI solutions. She shares insights on AI innovation and human-centered design through her blog (https://shakurova.io/blog) and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/lena-shakurova/).

Lilinoe Harbottle an Indigenous (Kānaka Maoli) Data Scientist passionate about revolutionizing healthcare with technology. At a startup based in San Francisco, she leads AI initiatives, developing cutting-edge models for autonomous systems and natural language processing. Her expertise in Python, SQL, and advanced analytics transforms data into actionable insights. Previously at Johnson & Johnson, she enhanced medical robotic systems, including real-time telemetry for bronchoscopy and urology procedures, improving efficiency. A champion for STEM inclusion, she is active in Google's Women Techmakers and the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES).

ML Engineer and open source maintainer

Marco is the author of Narwhals, core contributor to pandas and Polars, and works at Quansight Labs as Senior Software Engineer. He also consults and trains clients professionally on Polars. He has also written the first Polars Plugins Tutorial and has taught Polars Plugins to clients.

He has a background in Mathematics and holds an MSc from the University of Oxford, and was one of the prize winners in the M6 Forecasting Competition (2nd place overall Q1).

Programmer, and CTO at Fuzy Labs. I enjoy AI, MLOps, bio-inspired computing and functional programming.

Dr. Matthew Upson is Co-Founder of Mantis NLP, an AI consultancy specializing in delivering impact through natural language processing and generative AI. With over a decade of experience in data science and software development, he has worked across academia, government, and industry to build innovative AI solutions.

At the UK Government Digital Service (GDS), Matt contributed to some of the first applications of AI for GOV.UK, and developed an approach to automating workflows "Reproducible Analytical Pipelines" which is now widely used across government. Matt is a founding member of the Data Science Section of the Royal Statistical Society, and a fellow of the Software Sustainability Institute.

Matt lives in Valencia, Spain and is a dedicated (very) amateur triathlete and former bushcraft instructor who enjoys connecting with nature. His talks combine technical expertise with personal stories, in a humorous and informal way.

During his work at NVIDIA, Michał gained vast experience in Deep Learning Software Development. He tackled challenges in training and inference, ranging from small-scale to large-scale applications, as well as user-facing tasks and highly-optimized benchmarks like MLPerf. Michał also possesses a deep understanding of data loading problems, having worked as a developer on NVIDIA DALI, the Data Loading Library.

Mihail Douhaniaris is a Senior Data Scientist at GetYourGuide, where he specializes in improving the marketplace ranking algorithms to improve search relevance. His work helps travelers find experiences that match their preferences more effectively. Beyond his role, Mihail is deeply interested in responsible AI, ML observability, and the challenges of deploying machine learning at scale.

Currently I work at European Spallation Source making sure the data munging pipelines reduce the experiment data. I am also on the board of NumFOCUS, and I have been involved with various projects like Scientific Python, NetworkX, Econ-ARK. I am broadly interested in the development and maintenance of the open source data & science software ecosystem and I try to help around wherever possible!

Data Science and Machine Learning Specialist with six years of experience. Previously focused on Computer Vision, Audio Machine Learning, and the implementation of Large Language Models (LLMs). Now, in KraftCode I'm dedicated to helping marketing teams optimise budgets and strategies through Media Mix Modelling.

Olena is a Staff Developer Advocate at Confluent and a recognized expert in data streaming and analytics. With two decades of experience in software engineering, she has built mission-critical applications, led high-performing teams, and driven large-scale technology adoption at industry leaders like Nokia, HERE Technologies, AWS, and Aiven.

A passionate advocate for real-time data processing and AI-driven applications, Olena empowers developers and organizations to use the power of streaming data. She is an AWS Community Builder, a dedicated mentor, and a volunteer instructor at a nonprofit tech school, helping to shape the next generation of engineers.

As an international speaker and thought leader, Olena regularly presents at top global conferences, sharing deep technical insights and hands-on expertise. Whether through her talks, workshops, or content, she is committed to making complex technologies accessible and inspiring innovation in the developer community.

Onyekachukwu Ojumah is an AI Engineer with a strong background in data analytics, cloud computing, and machine learning. She holds an MSc in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Huddersfield and a BSc in Computer Science from McPherson University, where she graduated as the Best Graduating Student.
Currently, Onyekachukwu works as an AI Engineer at Victorian Plumbing, where she designs and implements AI-driven solutions to optimize operational processes and drive business innovation. She has co-authored research papers on AI applications across various industries, exploring how AI can transform workflows and decision-making.
As the organizer of PyData Huddersfield, she leads a vibrant community of data professionals and enthusiasts, fostering collaboration and knowledge-sharing around AI and machine learning. Onyekachukwu has also spoken at notable events, including DataFest Africa and MLOps Lagos, where she shared insights on AI-driven data engineering, model optimization, and data strategies.

Radion Bikmukhamedov is a Machine Learning Engineer in ANNA Money's Financial Crime Prevention unit, specializing in operationalizing fraud detection systems that safeguard millions of monthly transactions and save thousands of hours of manual labour by automating fraud analysts's tasks. Over 6 years, he's architected NLP and ensemble model pipelines using Python's ML stack paired with MLOps tools (MLflow, DVC, KServe, Feast) to automate financial crime detection at scale.

Salman Khan is the Director of Data Science at Afiniti, where he drives innovative solutions to complex business challenges through data science. With a specialization in machine learning, statistical modelling, and a strong focus on generative AI, Salman leads multiple teams of data scientists and engineers in the development and deployment of cutting-edge AI-driven applications. Salman has led AI projects delivering measurable business value, including real-time prediction systems, advanced language models, semantic search platforms, and generative AI applications. Salman’s expertise spans deep learning, probabilistic modelling, and a broad range of data science techniques, with advanced proficiency in Python, R, and SQL.

I am currently the lead AI developer at Qualis Flow, a company that is using the latest AI tech to help decarbonise the construction industry. Previously I was the CTO of NeuroGrid Ltd., a software consultancy firm providing data science and software engineering services. Before that I was a CoFounder of AgileVentures, where as the CTO we supported multiple open source international charity projects. Further back I was Head of Education and Engineering at the Makers Academy bootcamp, following many years as Associate Professor in Computer Science at Hawaii Pacific University, where I taught courses on AI, mobile, games and software engineering. It all started with a Ph.D. in Machine Learning from the University of Edinburgh.

Samiul Huque is a senior software engineer at Bloomberg, where he works on the company’s Instant Bloomberg (IB for short) chat tool. He works across the stack, building full-stack products where he primarily uses a combination of JavaScript/TypeScript and Python. Outside of work, Samiul plays tennis, competes in MMA, and eats his steak medium rare. Samiul earned his bachelor’s degree in economics and mathematics from the University of Richmond.

Sofia is a data scientist at Nesta, working with the sustainable future mission team on decarbonising UK homes. During her time at Nesta, Sofia worked with energy performance certificates, social media and smart meter data to: estimate the cost of low carbon heating technologies, identify issues faced by homeowners in their low carbon heating path, understand how people consume energy in their homes.

Prior to joining Nesta, Sofia worked as a data scientist at Imperial College London, assessing the accuracy of crowdsourced data for road traffic collision and injury surveillance. Before this she worked as a research fellow at the Social Physics and Complexity research group, LIP Portugal, on health related projects such as identifying antibiotic over-prescription and factors influencing it.

Sofia holds a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics and Master’s degree in Data Science and Advanced Analytics.

Suyash Joshi is an accomplished engineer and developer advocate at InfluxData, with previous roles at Oracle and RingCentral. Holding a B.S. in Computer Science and an M.A. in Game Design, he merges technical expertise with creativity. He is dedicated to community building, delivering talks & workshops globally while sharing his knowledge and connecting with others.

Tatiana is a Staff Software Engineer at Astronomer and builds open-source tools to improve Apache Airflow.

Since graduating in Computer Engineering at Unicamp, Brazil, she has worked on multiple projects and contributed to various open-source projects. Before working at Astronomer, she worked for the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology, Globo, Education First, and BBC.

Theo is a Principal Program Manager in the Azure Cosmos DB Engineering Team at Microsoft, currently focused on AI, programmability, and developer experience for Azure Cosmos DB. Over the years he has driven several programs of work in the team, including Apache Cassandra offerings, Java & Python developer ecosystems, high availability, multi-tenancy, and Generative AI developer advocacy. He also loves helping customers and partners be successful with the best AI database service on earth!

Theodore Meynard is a data science manager at GetYourGuide.He leads the evolution of their ranking algorithm, helping customers to find the best activities to book and locations to explore. Beyond work, he is one of the co-organizers of the Pydata Berlin meetup and the conference.
When he is not programming, he loves riding his bike, looking for the best bakery-patisserie in town.

Thijs Nieuwdorp is the Lead Data Scientist at Xomnia in Amsterdam. His interest in the interaction between human and computer led him to an education in artificial intelligence at the Radboud University, after which he dove straight into the field of data science. At Xomnia he witnessed the birth of Polars as Ritchie Vink started working on it during his employment there and has been using it in his projects ever since. He enjoys figuring out complex data problems, optimizing existing solutions, and putting them to good use by implementing them into business processes. Outside work, Thijs enjoys exploring our world through hiking and traveling and exploring other worlds through books, games, and movies. He lives in Amsterdam with his partner, Paula.

Tim is a Quantitative Developer at Cubist Systematic Strategies and an adjunct professor in the Computer Science Department at Columbia University.

I'm leading Graphcore’s Cloud Solutions ecosystem helping AI & ML software development teams build AI products and deploy ML capabilities in production. I've gained experience taking AI applications from the research lab to large scale deployments. Also a Deeplearning.ai ambassador and founder of AI Hive community, startup advisor and visiting fellow at zinc.vc.

Tony Mears is a director in the UK National Health Service (NHS) specialising in strategy and innovation.
He is the author of ‘Innovation is Dead: dispatches from the front’ which seeks to deploy cross sector innovation for public sector good. He has previously been deputy director of innovation for a new hospital programme – and led the technology strategy, EU Exit negotiation, and launch policy at the UK Space Agency, including as a delegate to the UN and European Space Agency.
He has sat on the advisory board of wearable company WHOOP, has an MA in Political Communications, a BA in Archaeology, and resides in the South of England with his wife and two children.

Lex Avstreikh is the Head of Strategy at Hopsworks; a Swedish startup at the forefront of machine learning infrastructure. He focuses on identifying pivotal market trends and product initiatives.