Our guest for this session is Tom Rourke. Tom works in Kyndryl as Vice President for Design, Insights and Innovation. The first of 3 seminars organised by John Mooney as part of the Pepperdine Graziadio Business School MBA programme in collaboration with UCD’s MSc Digital Innovation programme.

Notes:

Tom Rourke – LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tom-rourke-1a8b70/

Tom gave a shoutout to Kevin Bethune - https://www.kevinbethune.com

Also, the MRI design story by Doug Dietz, Industrial Designer – (link)

Also, Tom co-hosts The Progress Report, with Sarah B. Nelson (Chief Design Officer at Kyndryl) on:

Apple Podcasts - https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-progress-report/id1627095388

Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/23hDHHDkOPSeFrrNsa9jcD?si=fa531ad1ec36459b

Finally, The Kyndryl Institute (download the app) - https://www.kyndryl.com/gb/en/institute/

Acknowledgements

Music 

Title: First Take

Artist: Debajyoti Biswas and Michael O'Neill

Source:  mis.aup3

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Cover Art 

Title: Unlocking Design (screenshot from Tom in Kyndryl leadership video)

Artist: Allen Higgins

Source: Pepperdine_Tom.pptx

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (Permission granted by Conor Fitzpatrick (personal letter))

Podcast License

Design Talk (dot IE) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 

The license can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0

By taking part you give permission for your voice to be recorded, for the recording to be edited, and for it to be posted and published as a podcast.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted by Brona Russell

We are delighted to have Siobhain Duggan, CEO of GS1 Ireland in to talk to the first year Economics & finance Organisation Behaviour class today. The interview/podcast is being hosted by UCD’s first year Economics and Finance class as part of the Professional and Academic Development module. Our focus is on the human aspects of organising in corporate settings, recognising the role of human behaviour in determining organisational effectiveness.

Welcome Siobhain. So, it would be great to hear first about GS1 and what the work that you do.  Then to understand your own career journey and how it has evolved over time:  

·        Your readiness to take opportunities as they presented themselves. 

·        Who were your mentors, and how did they help shape your career?

And regarding your current role:

·        What motivated you to step up and to take on the CEO role in GS1?

·        What are some of the biggest challenges you have faced, and how did you persevere through them?

·        How has your leadership style evolved since you took on the role?

·        What do you maintain a healthy work-life balance juggling work and travel and family?

And your thoughts in general on:

·        What are the most important qualities you look for in a future employee?

·        How important is diversity and inclusion to you as a CEO trying to encourage creativity and innovation?

·        How do you foster open communication and a positive work environment?

·        How do you foster a spirit of collaboration in your organisation?

Before we finish, is there anything further you'd like to add?

We’ll wrap it up there. Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your thoughts and experience with us today.

Notes, extra questions, and further reading, books, blogs, pods, articles?

Siobhain Duggan, CEO - GS1 Ireland - https://www.gs1ie.org/

Siobhain on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/siobhainduggan/

The UCD BSc Business and Economics programme (link)

Article: Keeping track of the COVID-19 vaccine (HSE, 2022: link)

Acknowledgements

Music 

Title: Impulse

Artist: Ben Prunty

Source:  https://www.benpruntymusic.com/

License: Non-transferable license. Permission granted by Ben Prunty (personal letter)

Cover Art 

Title: Pod-Cover

Artist: Allen Higgins (photo used with permission)

Source: Duggan_GS1.pptx

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Podcast License

Design Talk (dot IE) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 

The license can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0

By taking part, you give permission for your voice to be recorded, for the recording to be edited, and for it to be posted and published as a podcast.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our hosts are Diarmuid Murphy and Leo Cuddigan

Welcome to the UCD Economics and Finance class. 

We are delighted to have Peter Cripwell, CEO at RiskSystem, in to talk to us today about Risk Analytics and Risk Reporting and the value of knowing a bit about programming.

To start, Peter, can you tell us how you went from Nuclear Physicist to CEO of RiskSystem.

·       Can you give us a demo of what Risk Reporting as a service looks like

·       What technology do you use to design and build the product?

·       How do I get the most out of RiskSystem?

·       Do you think risk models are becoming too complex?

·       Where do you see AI fitting into the business?

·       With the time left we’d like to open it to questions from the audience…

Before we finish, is there anything further you'd like to add?

We’ll wrap it up there. Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your thoughts and experience with us today.

Notes, extra questions, and further reading, books, blogs, pods, articles?

RiskSystem - https://www.risksystem.com

Peter on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-cripwell-a2258b6/

Highly recommended reading

- Sparklines History by Edward Tufte: 1324 to Now - https://www.edwardtufte.com/notebook/sparklines-history-by-tufte-1324-to-now/

Acknowledgements

Music 

Title: First Take

Artist: Debajyoti Biswas and Michael O'Neill

Source:  mis.aup3

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Cover Art 

Title: Class vignette

Artist: Allen Higgins

Source: RiskSystem_Peter.pptx

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Podcast License

Design Talk (dot IE) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 

The license can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0

By taking part you give permission for your voice to be recorded, for the recording to be edited, and for it to be posted and published as a podcast.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Economics and Finance class.

Our hosts are Daksh Wadhwa and Peter Barrett. 

Today, we are very pleased to welcome Denis McCarthy, Head of Financial Risk Model Development at AIB.

Thank you for coming in to speak to us today. Can you tell us a little about yourself and your journey into financial risk modelling?

·       What does a day in the week look like on your team? [for a finance/economist, quant analyst, programmer]

·       How can a large organisation manage end-user tools like Excel? [policy, practices, systems management…]

·       Much of the focus is on the technical characteristics and the actions of individuals but not so much on organisational cultural. How can we address the organisational culture angle? [for example, grow and protect a culture of dissent? What might that look like?]

·       What about review processes and how to avoid undue influence from one or other actors? [maybe relate to audit trails, version control]

·       Are our models becoming too complex? [to either understand fully or to apply in a timely manner? What kinds of new systemic risk do you think about?]

·       Is sentiment analysis applied much to risk measurement? [how to do it? gotchas and the dark art of automated textual analysis for gauging sentiment from company filings, conference call transcripts and other bulk sources]

Questions from the audience?

Before we finish, is there anything further you'd like to add?

Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your thoughts with us today.

Further reading: Articles, links etc.

LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/denis-mccarthy-69970b2b/

Acknowledgements

Music 

Title: Voltaic Fluctuations

Artist: Ben Prunty

Source:  https://www.benpruntymusic.com/

License: Non-transferable license. Permission granted by Ben Prunty

Cover Art 

Title: Complex collage

Artist: Allen Higgins

Source: vignette_version.pptx

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Podcast License

Design Talk (dot IE) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 

The license can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0

By taking part, you give permission for your voice to be recorded, for the recording to be edited, and for it to be posted and published as a podcast.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted by Christina Philips and Anabela Da Silva Filipe Soares.

Welcome to today’s seminar by David Sammon from UCC, Cork University Business School.

In this session David Sammon from University College Cork talks about his approach to unlocking the value of the 2x2 Matrix in the classroom. David is co-Founder of the Data Value Innovation Group, whose mission is helping organisations to deliver value from their data through data value mapping. The Data Value Map (http://datavaluemap.com) offers resources for visual discursive organisational analysis and facilitation to build shared understanding around data initiatives.

Further reading, sources, mentions and acknowledgements.

David’s homepage at UCC - https://www.cubsucc.com/faculty-directory/dr-david-sammon/

Acknowledgements

Music 

Title: Guitar House

Artist: josh pan (2020)

Source:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JL-LId8ZWBM

License: License CC BY 3.0

Cover Art 

Title: Complex collaboration for BAEF

Artist: Nuno Machado and Allen Higgins

Source: vignette_version.pptx

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Podcast License

Design Talk (dot IE) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 

The license can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0

By taking part you give permission for your voice to be recorded, for the recording to be edited, and for it to be posted and published as a podcast.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the CITO Podcast.

Séamas Kelly invites Hippolyte Lefebvre to present an overview of his research interests and direction. Hippolyte is a member of CITO and the Management Information Systems group in the UCD College of Business, Dublin, and previously at the Université de Lausanne, Switzerland.

Notes, extra questions, and further reading:

• Homepage at UCD - https://people.ucd.ie/hippolyte.lefebvre
• And Google scholar page link

Acknowledgements

Music 

Title: Justice Little League

Artist: Ema Grace

Source:  https://bit.ly/2tJ6Bnd

License:  CC BY 4.0

Artist notes: Ema Grace is an AI vocaloid produced by Ryoma MAEDA (@Ryoma_Maeda). Styled as virtual Singer&Idol 架空のバーチャルアイドル & シンガー、それがEma Grace.

Cover Art 

Title: Inspired by selfie and AI

Artist: Allen Higgins

Source: CITO-podcast-DataPractices.pptx

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Podcast License

Design Talk (dot IE) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 

The license can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0

By taking part you give permission for your voice to be recorded, for the recording to be edited, and for it to be posted and published as a podcast.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hosted by Alex and Conor. 

Welcome to the UCD 2nd year Economics and Finance class. 

Today, we are pleased to welcome Donal Rafferty, Director Product Development in Open Finance at Mastercard, Dublin.

Thank you for coming in to speak to us today, can you share a little of your own story?

·       So, we’d like to start one of the ideas behind this series of talks. Do you think a finance professional’s working life will involve more or less interaction with dedicated development teams, IT or software engineers?

·       Can you make a case for the value of knowing a bit about programming (e.g. python) for working in Finance.

·       We are extremely interested in what you’ve learnt from experimenting with advanced aspects of LLMs, Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, agentic knowledge graphs, and process automation. What do you imagine is going to be the impact on the Finance industry?

·       On your website you used the phrase “embedded finance” a couple of times, can you explain the concept?

·       About your website, you said it was VIBE coded. What motivated you and what did you learn about the process? 

With the time left we’d like to open it to questions from the audience…

Any recommendations for books, podcasts, blogs??

(questions from audience)

Before we finish, is there anything further you'd like to add?

Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your thoughts with us today.

Notes and further reading: Key books, articles, blogs, podcasts, channels

• https://www.donalrafferty.com
• Explore Kaggle for inspiring examples of data analysis - https://www.kaggle.com
• Learn Python and Pandas! There are many resources available, for example, DataCamp - https://www.datacamp.com
• The Unicorn Project and The Phoenix Project. Two books by Gene Kim about tech projects and working in tech.
• Andrew Ng’s AI education platform - https://www.deeplearning.ai/ Register for a free account to get access to Andrew’s videos. (in fact Andrew Ng  coined the term “Agentic AI”, to describe a trend in how people were building applications)

Acknowledgements

Music 

Title: First Take

Artist: Debajyoti Biswas and Michael O'Neill

Source:  mis.aup3

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Cover Art 

Title: Complex collage

Artist: Allen Higgins

Source: DonalRafferty_Mastercard.pptx

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Podcast License

Design Talk (dot IE) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 

The license can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0

By taking part you give permission for your voice to be recorded, for the recording to be edited, and for it to be posted and published as a podcast.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the CITO Podcast.

This episode is a seminar by Quinn DuPont titled “Making New Money: How autonomous communities produce and govern cryptocurrencies.” 

Paul Dylan-Ennis opens the session with a brief introduction after which Quinn presents an overview of his project, and Donncha Kavanagh makes some observations and invites reactions.

Decentralized cryptocurrencies are upending the foundations of economic power, challenging centuries of state and bank control over money. This research critically examines the rise of digital wildcat banking and its profound implications for economic sovereignty. Leveraging digital forensics, data science, and OSINT, this work reveals who actually produces and governs cryptocurrencies—and how their collective labor reshapes value and risk. It explores the forces behind decentralized money, the vulnerabilities these systems introduce, and the future role of state-issued currencies in an era of rapid monetary transformation.

Reflecting on the project Quinn notes:

"I've been working on this for well over a year now, and while it is still in development, the basic outline is complete. I make some pretty provocative claims, like arguing that global forces first emerging in the 1970s lead us inexorably to this point where the labour required to produce and govern new money has become involuted[1]. It’s a unique project that reveals how new money is made and details the implications for banks, nation states, and society. I also have some fun stories to share, like my effort to vampire attack Trump's WLFI token or my reverse engineering of the FBI's Operation Token Mirrors."

[1] Involution; the theory from Clifford Geertz where, in the original context, rice production becomes internally competitive and the processes require more labour without an increase in output - analogous to this story of technological development and precarious technological labour. I argue that the operational infrastructure of crypto expands to require more labour, despite no correlated increase in output. Thus, crypto overtakes national currencies not by meeting a market demand, but by accommodating excess labour supply.

Notes, extra questions, and further reading:

• Quinn’s homepage - https://iqdupont.com
• China’s “Involuted” Generation by Yi-Ling Lu | The New Yorker Published MAY 14
• The president and the billion-dollar crypto businesses – How the Trump companies made $1bn from crypto by Joe Miller and Alex Rogers in Washington, Paul Caruana Galizia, Nikou Asgari, Eade Hemingway, Oliver Hawkins and Chris Cook in London | FT.com Published OCT 16 2025
• "Overcapacity" or "involution"? How China's manufacturing suffers from over-competition Tracing the roots and perils by Elena Wang and Nina Chen | Baiguan.news Published APR 18 2024

Acknowledgements

Music 

Title: CrazyMix

Artist: Sandbox Korg Ableton

Source:  CrazyMix.aif

License: : CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Cover Art 

Title: Inspired by Wordpress Defaults

Artist: Allen Higgins

Source: CITO-podcast-STS.pptx

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Podcast License

Design Talk (dot IE) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 

The license can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0

By taking part you give permission for your voice to be recorded, for the recording to be edited, and for it to be posted and published as a podcast.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our hosts for this episode are William Mugan and Grace Gunne from the BSc UCD Economics and Finance class.

Today, we are very pleased to welcome Jane Antova from IBM Consulting and colleagues Angela Stakelum and Bernadette Keating.

First, Jane, can you share a little of your own story and starting out in IBM?

So, what does a day in the life look like? 

These days, do you find yourself needing more, or less interaction with technology specialists to get the job done? 

Can you talk about typical sources of information and scale or size of datasets?

Can you talk about the tools used for modelling, economic simulations, machine learning, and use of AI?

Do you think that programming skills necessary or nice-to-have?

We have some time for questions from the audience…

Before we finish, is there anything further you'd like to add? (favourite pods, blogs, channels, books)

Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your thoughts with us today.

Notes, extra questions, and further reading:

IBM Skills Build - https://skillsbuild.org (free learning courses and resources)

PL/I – Programming Language One

Acknowledgements

Music 

Title: First Take

Artist: Debajyoti Biswas and Michael O'Neill

Source:  mis.aup3

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Cover Art 

Title: Complex collage

Artist: Allen Higgins

Source: JaneAntova-IBM.pptx

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Podcast License

Design Talk (dot IE) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 

The license can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0

By taking part you give permission for your voice to be recorded, for the recording to be edited, and for it to be posted and published as a podcast.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our hosts are Tara O’Reilly and Jack Kavanagh. 

Welcome to the Economics and Finance class.

Today, we are very pleased to welcome Raul Afonso, Chartered Financial Analyst and Chief Economist at MFW (Multi Family Wealth). MFW is an investment firm providing investment services on managed accounts and investment funds. 

Thank you for coming in to speak to us Raul. Can you share a little of your own story, how you came to Ireland and talk about the tools you use in your role as Economist and Financial Analyst?

[Raul opens with self-introduction and present some slides e.g. asset allocation, fund management, showcase doing analysis on output from Bloomberg]

I have a question; would you say that programming skills are necessary or just nice-to-have? 

Could you share some key information sources you think we as Economics and Finance students should know about and follow?

With the time left we’d like to open it to questions from the audience…

(question from audience)

(question from audience)

Before we finish, is there anything further you'd like to add?

Well, this has been an informative talk. Thank you so much for your time and for sharing your thoughts and experience with us today.

Notes, extra questions, and further reading:

Key books mentioned?

Key pods, articles mentioned?

Other links…

Multi Family Wealth – the investment management company - https://mfw.ie

https://yardeni.com/charts/feds-stock-valuation-model/

https://www.ft.com/alphaville

https://www.zerohedge.com – the most famous blog in finance.

https://www.cfasociety.org/portugal/home

Acknowledgements

Music 

Title: First Take

Artist: Debajyoti Biswas and Michael O'Neill

Source:  mis.aup3

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Cover Art 

Title: Class vignette

Artist: Allen Higgins

Source: RaulAfonso.pptx

License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Podcast License

Design Talk (dot IE) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 

The license can be viewed at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0

By taking part you give permission for your voice to be recorded, for the recording to be edited, and for it to be posted and published as a podcast.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.