Anneke Edmonds, Founder

Anneke is an enthusiastic and experienced business leader and academic with a background in strategic marketing and entrepreneurship across the creative industries, STEM, and media sectors. She has held CMO roles in several family-run Al SaaS businesses.
She assisted in shaping and directing the early-stage development of two Higher Education Fund Council for England (HEFCE) and European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) funded university incubator programs; Launchpad at Falmouth University, and Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University. Her teaching focuses on experiential learning, coaching and mentoring new venture teams from Start-Up to incorporation.
Her PhD in Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Strategy (Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University) is due for completion in August 2024.

Dr Elisa Forestan-Barnes, specialist in EdTech

Elisa has a passion for education. She has a DPhil in Sociology from the University of Oxford specialising in inequalities of education opportunities and education policy. Having been a founder and director of her own pre-school, this led her to pursue an MA in Education and Technology at University College London. She has been involved in different projects focusing on digital transformation and the use of learning analytics in education, in particular to improve student engagement.

Dr Andy Edmonds, specialist in ethical AI

Andy’s career started in electronics: in marine control systems, missile guidance and computer architecture design. From the latter he developed an interest in programming, creating a Neural network development system as a project. Some lucky publicity resulted in investment and the creation of Europe and the UK’s first AI company, NCS.
A further interest in time series prediction attracted attention from Reuters, and resulted in the company Science in Finance, of which he was CEO. A product Andy designed that created financial trading systems using simulated evolution attracted the attention of a large-volume futures trading organization, that purchased the company. Around this time Andy completed a PhD in time series prediction and Chaos Theory. Subsequently Andy was CEO of a US publicly traded AI company, Scientio inc, and, after this was bought out, involved in a series of startups culminating in ThinkBase LLC. Andy’s principal interest is in creating AI and ML software that is transparent and explainable, and therefore intrinsically compliant with the flood of new regulations. He has authored several papers in this area.