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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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).

Nicolai Baldin

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

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.

Join us for a special session of our “Mind the Data Gap” podcast with Nicolai Baldin, founder and CEO of Synthesized, and Gillian Docherty OBE, CEO of The Data Lab and Chair of Scotland’s AI Alliance, as they discuss the results of Synthesized’s YouGov poll on trust in AI and data in Scotland. With nearly two-thirds of people living in Scotland concerned that AI use and development could lead to discrimination against them and others within society, Nicolai and Gillian discuss how to mitigate AI concerns and what can be done to build society’s trust in AI. Tune in now!

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.

Gillian Docherty OBE, CEO of The Data Lab and Chair of Scotland’s AI Alliance

Gillian Docherty is Chief Executive of The Data Lab, an innovation centre with a mission to help Scotland maximise value from data and lead the world to a data-powered future. Gillian is passionate about the opportunities for using data to drive economic and social benefits. Gillian was awarded an OBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours 2019 for Services to Information Technology and Business. In 2021, Gillian was appointed the inaugural chair of the Scottish AI Alliance.Gillian has a degree in Computing Science from the University of Glasgow, and an Honorary Doctorate from Aberdeen’s Robert Gordon University.

Our resident testing experts, Seva, Denis and Ivan, dive deep into how to build the right software testing process to meet the needs of your organization. f In this episode we’ll discuss building Quality Gates and why they should be an integral part of every testing process.

We answer burning questions such as:

What’s the difference between DataOps and DevOps? What are the most important skills engineers need to have in order to implement such approaches? Listen to this episode to get an overview of the best DataOps and DevOps tools and get an answer to the question: “Is DataOps today’s biggest transformation?”

Welcome to Synthesized’s Mind the Data Gap podcast! In our first episode, we’re happy to be joined by Pavel (Pasha) Finkelstein, Developer Advocate at JetBrains to discuss all things Data Quality. We’ll chat about what data quality means and discuss various data generation tools. Last but not least, we’ll get into SQL query analysis and how it helps improve the quality of testing data.

Synthesized is the development framework helping companies create optimized and safe to share datasets for use in machine learning, software testing and development and analytics.