Mind the Data Gap Synthesized

In this episode of the Mind the Data Gap podcast, Nicolai Baldin (CEO) and Don Brown (Field CTO) of Synthesized welcome Dr. Shruti Kohli, Head of Data Science and Innovation at the Innovation Lab at The Department for Work & Pensions (DWP) in the UK, to talk about the new generation of analytics and building a Center of Excellence for DWP, the role that synthetic data plays in development and approval processes, as well as other data science initiatives within DWP and similar organizations.



Shruti Kohli
Head of Data Science, Innovation Lab, DWP

Dr. Shruti Kohli is the Lead Data Scientist currently leading the Innovation Lab in DWP Digital. This includes horizon scanning and identifying the data and technology in the external ecosystem that can help the department to innovate and improve its services. Shruti’s background is standing on a strong foundation of education credentials which includes a PhD in Computer Science, with over a decade of professional experience in both the private and public sectors encompassing a variety of roles. Shruti’s work experience spans across academia and industry, leading digital transformation, data innovation, leadership and culture change projects.

Nicolai Baldin
Founder & CEO, Synthesized

Nicolai leads Synthesized’s rapid growth, as a top provider of DataOps tools for software testing and data science applications, across the  UK, Europe and North America. Nicolai is responsible for the direction and product strategy of Synthesized. For over 8 years, Nicolai has designed and delivered complex ML solutions used by top financial and healthcare institutions. He holds a PhD in Machine Learning and Statistics from the University of Cambridge.

Don Brown
Field CTO, Synthesized

Don operates as Synthesized’s Field Chief Technology Officer. Based in Georgia, US, Don leads our customer-facing tech operations and supports our rapid growth in the EMEA and the Americas. He has worked with high-growth and innovative companies including Cloudera, Rocana (acquired by Splunk), Autonomic, Subspace, WibiData, and others.

In this episode of the Mind the Data Gap podcast, Marc Degenkolb (COO) and Don Brown (Field CTO) welcome the CTO of Katalon, Coty Rosenblath, to discuss topics such as the provisioning of test data for testing of APIs, bringing the DevOps mindset into QA and test operations, and the growing importance of synthetic data.



Coty Rosenblath
CTO, Katalon

As Chief Technology Officer, Coty leads Katalon's technology teams as they build and operate Katalon's unified quality platform. Prior to Katalon, Coty led data engineering and data science at Mailchimp. He has also served as CTO/VP of Engineering at a number of startup companies including HubLogix, RevenueMed, Vocalocity, and others.



Marc Degenkolb
COO, Synthesized

Marc Degenkolb is the Chief Operating Officer of Synthesized, leading our operations in North America. Marc has worked with high-growth and innovative companies including DataSynapse, CA Technologies, Rocana, Delphix, and Aternity, and most recently Molecula. Marc’s leadership combines unique experiences of building GTM functions and high-performing teams for startups, scale-ups, and enterprise-scale organizations.



Don Brown
Field CTO, Synthesized

Don operates as Synthesized’s Field Chief Technology Officer. Based in Georgia, US, Don leads our customer-facing tech operations and supports our rapid growth in the EMEA and the Americas. He has worked with high-growth and innovative companies including Cloudera, Rocana (acquired by Splunk), Autonomic, Subspace, WibiData, and others.

In this episode, Nicolai Baldin (CEO) and Simon Swan (Machine Learning Lead) of Synthesized are welcoming the founder of Data Science Central and MLTechniques.com Vincent Granville to discuss synthetic data generation, share secrets about Machine Learning on synthetic data, key challenges with synthetic data, and using generative models to solve issues related to fairness and bias. Tune in now!



Vincent Granville
Founder, MLTechniques.com

Vincent Granville is a pioneering data scientist and machine learning expert, co-founder of Data Science Central (acquired by TechTarget in 2020), former VC-funded executive, author and patent owner. Vincent’s past corporate experience includes Visa, Wells Fargo, eBay, NBC, Microsoft, CNET, InfoSpace. Vincent is also a former post-doc at Cambridge University, and the National Institute of Statistical Sciences (NISS).
Vincent published in Journal of Number Theory, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society (Series B), and IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence. He is also the author of multiple books. He lives in Washington state, and enjoys doing research on stochastic processes, dynamical systems, experimental math and probabilistic number theory.



Nicolai Baldin
Founder & CEO, Synthesized

Nicolai leads Synthesized’s rapid growth, as a top provider of DataOps tools for software testing and data science applications, across the UK, Europe and North America. Nicolai is responsible for the direction and product strategy of Synthesized. For over 8 years, Nicolai has designed and delivered complex ML solutions used by top financial and healthcare institutions. He holds a PhD in Machine Learning and Statistics from the University of Cambridge.



Simon Swan
Machine Learning Lead, Synthesized

Simon contributes to the core technology of Synthesized and is responsible for some of the development processes of the ML team. Prior to joining Synthesized in 2019, he worked in the legal and medical industries as a NLP & Machine Learning engineer. He has an academic background in Statistical Thermodynamics and Computational Linguistics from the University of Cambridge.

In this episode, Nicolai Baldin (CEO), Denis Borovikov (CTO) and Marc Degenkolb (COO) of Synthesized are joined by Speedscale co-founders Ken Ahrens (CEO) and Matt LeRay (CTO) to share learnings and challenges of addressing pain points in the markets right now, such as stress testing of APIs, usability of production data, automating QA processes, and more.

Ken Ahrens - CEO, Speedscale

Much of Ken’s career has been focused on helping companies develop and manage complex web applications. He previously ran North America teams for New Relic and CA/Broadcom. Previous startups included Pentaho (acquired by Hitachi), ITKO (acquired by CA/Broadcom) and ILC (acquired by General Dynamics).

Matt LeRay - CTO, Speedscale

Matt LeRay has invested the past 20 years improving the performance of applications across multiple generations of technology. Previously, he was head of product at Observe, SVP at CA Technologies (acquired by Broadcom) and engineering leader at ILC (acquired by General Dynamics).

Nicolai Baldin, CEO at Synthesized, & Denis Borovikov, CTO at Synthesized, are joined by Sergei Egorov, CEO of AtomicJar for a deep dive discussion on the importance of testcontainers, the current trends in software testing, and the challenges that large companies face shipping their products faster.

Sergei Egorov is a lifetime developer and Java Champion, Reactive Foundation TOC, Oracle Groundbreakers Ambassador, OSS enthusiast, testcontainers co-maintainer, docker-java maintainer and The Apache Groovy committer. Sergei co-founded a startup focused on test containers, which was the foundation for AtomicJar. This is an open-source project making integration tests easy by using Docker and wrapping Docker with API.

Ansgar Koene, global AI and ethics regulatory leader at Ernst & Young, joins us on the latest edition of the "Mind the Data Gap" podcast to discuss AI and business risks, and how to define, measure and mitigate such AI related risks. He shared his view on how data plays into this risk and what organizations do to manage this risk. Koene believes we should rethink legislation relating to data collection on gender, for instance, in order to avoid unintentional data bias.

A former research scientist, Mr Koene works with policymakers, regulators and industry leaders among others, to support the trustworthy use of AI for the benefit of people, society and organizations.

Speakers:

Nicolai Baldin, CEO and Founder of Synthesized

Nicolai leads Synthesized’s rapid growth, as a leading provider of DataOps tools for software testing and data science applications, across the UK, Europe and North America. Nicolai is responsible for the direction and product strategy of Synthesized. For over 8 years, Nicolai has designed and delivered complex ML solutions used by top financial and healthcare institutions. He holds a PhD in Machine Learning and Statistics from the University of Cambridge.

Ansgar Koene, Global AI Ethics and Regulatory Leader, Ernst & Young

His current work focuses on the development of design and regulatory tools to maximize the beneficial use of information technologies and minimize negative consequences on people and society.

He has a multi-disciplinary research background, having worked and published on topics ranging from Policy and Governance of Algorithmic Systems (AI), data-privacy, AI Ethics, AI Standards, bio-inspired Robotics, AI and Computational Neuroscience to experimental Human Behavior/Perception studies. He holds an MSc in Electrical Engineering and a PhD in Computational Neuroscience.