Trustworthy AI: From Principles to Critical Applications

Professor Khaled Benkrid

Visiting Professor , Anglia Ruskin University (ARU)

Prof. Khaled Benkrid is Managing Director of Synthaize Ltd, an agentic AI startup he recently founded to support human decision making under extreme uncertainty. He is also Visiting Professor in Computer Science at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. 

Before setting up Synthaize, Prof. Benkrid was Senior Director of Education and Research at Arm Ltd for 13 years where he was responsible for directing the overall operations of a cross-cultural team of 20+ professionals from Cambridge, UK, China, India, and the USA with the focus of addressing the gap between computer engineering education & research and actual market practices. The programmes he set up at Arm enabled hundreds of thousands of students, academics, and engineers worldwide to learn and innovate with state-of-the-art technologies from the Arm ecosystem. 

Prior to joining Arm, Prof. Benkrid spent 13 years in Academia, as Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Queen's University Belfast, and then Associate Professor in Electronic Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests spanned software-hardware co-design, electronic design automation, and efficient embedded and high-performance computing. 

---

Professor Deeph Chana

Imperial College London

Prof. Deeph Chana, Imperial Business School, Imperial College London A physicist by training, Deeph Chana is Professor of Practice at Imperial College London Business School with more than twenty-five years’ experience spanning science, security, government and venture formation. He was the founding Managing Director of NATO's Defence Innovation Accelerator for the North Atlantic (DIANA) and the principal architect of both it and the €1 billion NATO Innovation Fund; the world’s first multi-sovereign venture capital fund. Both grew out of his work as inaugural chair of NATO's advisory group to the Secretary General on emerging and disruptive technologies. He previously served as a senior science and technology official in the UK government, overseeing major R&D portfolios, shaping national security policy, and advising ministers. At Imperial, he founded the Security Innovation Cluster and a national institute focused on industrial control systems security, and led the Institute for Security Science and Technology. His research focuses on machine learning for cybersecurity and the reliability of cyber-physical systems; he co-leads the EPSRC SPRITE+ network on security, privacy, identity, and trust, and contributes to the UKRI RITICS institute. Much of his work has concerned using science and innovation to reduce global risk — treating security and resilience alongside challenges such as health and climate. He is also an Advisor to Hiro Capital, supporting investment strategy across frontier technologies including AI, space-adjacent systems, and next-generation infrastructure.

---

Dr Alireza Ettefaghian

Centre of Expertise Health Innovation (The Hague University of Applied Science)

At Centre of Expertise Health Innovation, Alireza contributes to EU-funded research proposals applying digital therapeutics and wearables to the public health domain. His current work advances digital health solutions and AI within population health management.

He draws on more than ten years of senior data and analytics leadership roles across the UK's academic, private, and public healthcare sectors. He also brings an entrepreneurial background, having created an award-winning population health analytics platform deployed in the primary care segment. He successfully delivered two innovative projects funded by Innovate UK through Knowledge Transfer Partnerships, both awarded Certificates of Excellence and Outstanding Achievement.

He holds a PhD in Computer Science (2015), a Six Sigma Black Belt certification, and an Executive MBA with Distinction (2018). He is currently pursuing an MPH in Global Health (2026) at King's College London — all earned on full scholarships.

---

Pauline Harrison

Founder of KernEthik and AI Governance Professional

Pauline is an influential AI governance and digital assurance leader with 25 years of delivery experience, operating at the intersection of regulatory compliance, technical assurance and organisational change. One of a small number of practitioners in the UK holding concurrent ForHumanity Fellowship, IAPP AIGP and FIAAIS credentials, Pauline has hands-on delivery across five simultaneous governance frameworks spanning UK, EU and US jurisdictions.

An invited member of BSI ART/1, Pauline contributes to ISO/IEC SC 42 JWG 2 and CEN/CENELEC JTC 21 WG 4 in response to the EU AI Act. This standards work sits alongside a Professional Doctorate in progress: Beyond Process Conformance: Developing a Practitioner Framework for Technical Assurance of High-Risk AI Systems under the EU AI Act, which addresses the methodology gap that ISO/IEC 42001, 42005, 42006 and NIST TEVV leave open and is currently being presented to the ISO AI testing committee with a view to informing international standards.

Career highlights span senior roles at Sky, Planit Testing and SThree, where Pauline has built enterprise AI governance programmes, created compliance toolkits for large regulated financial services clients, and designed AI Impact Assessments to ISO/IEC 42005 standard. Clients have included the Ministry of Justice, the Bank of England, ARM Technology and Costa Coffee. As Founder of KernEthik Consulting, Pauline advises both SMEs and large organisations on responsible AI adoption aligned with the EU AI Act, GDPR and ISO/IEC 42001, preparing organisations for audits, certifications and buyer scrutiny.

A ForHumanity Fellow contributing to the development of independent AI audit frameworks as ForHumanity pursues formal accreditation as a designated EU AI Act auditing body, Pauline is also a committed advocate for AI literacy and ethical leadership. Pauline holds a Certificate of Higher Education in both the Governance and Ethics of AI from the University of Oxford and a BSc in Information Science, and speaks on technical assurance, high-risk AI systems and the governance responsibilities that responsible deployment demands.

---

Professor Shareeful Islam

Professor of Cyber Security, Anglia Ruskin University (ARU)

Dr. Shareeful Islam is a Professor of Cybersecurity, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Anglia Ruskin University (ARU). He currently holds a visiting professorship LUT School of Engineering Sciences, Lappeenranta, Finland.  With over 22 years of experience, he has recently secured £800k in national and EU funding.  He has authored more than 115 papers in top tier journals and conferences with successfully supervised to timely completion 13 PhD and MPhils. His research expertise spans cybersecurity risk management, trustworthy AI, AI-enabled cyber security and regulatory compliance.

---

Catherine Menon

Principal Lecturer in AI Ethics, University of Hertfordshire

Dr Catherine Menon is a Principal Lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire, with research interests in the ethics and safety of AI and autonomous systems. Her work examines the intersection between ethics, safety and trust in public-facing technologies, particularly where these impact marginalised groups. She has worked in industry across both the nuclear and defence sector and is a member of the BSI AMT/10 and AMT/10/1 Committees on robotics and robot ethics. She also has an interest in the role played by creativity in constructing assurance arguments, and in the ways in which creative thinking can help mitigate ethical and safety hazards.

---

Felicia Omoediale-Samuel

Senior Cyber Security Risk Manager, Sky

Felicia Omoediale-Samuel is an internationally recognised cybersecurity and AI governance leader operating across Africa, Europe, North America and Asia. With more than two decades of experience, she advises organisations on integrating security into AI systems, strengthening enterprise cyber risk frameworks, and governing emerging technologies with executive-level discipline. A researcher–practitioner, she is pursuing a Professional Doctorate at Anglia Ruskin University, focusing on lifecycle-aware AI security and enterprise risk models for toolinvoking agentic systems. Her work bridges academic research and operational implementation, translating complex AI risk into structured governance controls. Her career spans senior roles across public and private sectors, including the Department for Work and Pensions, Next, FedEx and Sky. She is known for aligning cyber investment to business value and embedding risk visibility into AI-enabled transformation. Felicia serves as a Non-Executive Director at Sycom Integrated Solutions and contributes to higher education as an Industry Advisory Board member at the University of Essex and visiting lecturer across UK institutions. She writes for The Executive Magazine and is a member of the ForbesBLK and ForbesWoman communities. Alongside her executive work, she is a committed advocate for early-career professionals, women and young people entering cybersecurity and AI. She mentors emerging leaders, champions cognitive diversity, and promotes structured pathways into secure technology careers. Felicia holds an MSc in Software and Systems Security from the University of Oxford and a BSc in Industrial Mathematics from the University of Benin. She speaks globally on secure AI adoption and the governance responsibilities shaping the future of digital systems.

---

Linda Oraegbunam

UK Civil Service

Linda Oraegbunam is a machine learning engineer and AI governance researcher with years of experience spanning data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning across the UK Civil Service and regulated commercial sectors. Her work sits at the intersection of technical delivery and institutional accountability, combining the development of production AI systems with research into the governance frameworks required to deploy them responsibly. She is the creator of a growing suite of open-source tools that form an agentic AI governance toolkit published on PyPI, and her research focuses on the relationship between agentic AI systems and organisational accountability. Linda holds an MSc in Applied Artificial Intelligence and Data Analytics from the University of Bradford and is a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society. Linda currently serves as a reviewer for the DLI Research in Africa Days (RIAD 2026) programme and is a doctoral researcher in development focused on agentic AI governance at Leeds Beckett University. She is also the founder of AI with Linda, a public platform dedicated to making artificial intelligence practical, accessible, and relevant across industries. Through her speaking and research, Linda explores the governance responsibilities organisations must adopt as autonomous and agentic systems move from experimentation into real-world deployment.

---

Toby Wilson Waterworth

Ambrose Healthcare

Toby Wilson Waterworth is an internationally versatile life science entrepreneur, senior executive, and Board member, who over 30 years has founded and developed companies, raising £200m, and delivering £1bn in shareholder value. In 2017 he was made a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales, and the Royal Society of Medicine.

---