Agenda 2026
Check Out Our agenda
Find out more details as the speaker sessions are revealed for our 2026 agenda.
PLAN YOUR DAY, YOUR Way
Thursday, September 24th, 2026
Key:
Technical Talks =
Leadership Talks =
08:30 - 09:00
registration
Tea, coffee and breakfast rolls on arrival.
09:00 - 09:05
Welcome
CEO, ScotlandIS
09:05 - 09:55
Sponsor Welcome
09:55 - 10:55
Keynote - Trust Me, I’m an Algorithm: Why Professionalism Is the Only Thing Standing Between AI and Disaster
Emma Logan, Deputy President, BCS
AI is no longer a research project or a future trend — it’s already embedded in the systems that run our businesses, our public services, and increasingly, our lives. But as organisations rush to automate decisions, accelerate delivery and scale AI across their products, one uncomfortable truth is becoming impossible to ignore: the technology is moving faster than our professional standards.
In this keynote, Emma Logan — Deputy President of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, and long‑time advisor to government departments and global organisations — explores what happens when powerful systems collide with weak governance, patchy engineering discipline, and a culture that prizes speed over responsibility.
11:00 - 11:20
coffee break
Tea, coffee and biscuits will be provided, with the chance to network and browse the exhibition hall.
11:30 - 12:10
Legal Privilege in Managing Cyber Incidents
Nick Warrillow, Partner, Disputes & Regulatory, and Rebecca Roberts, Director, Disputes & Regulatory, at Burness Paull
Nick and Rebecca from the Disputes & Regulatory team at Burness Paull will discuss understanding around legal privilege involved in managing a cyber incident.
They'll cover in more detail how privilege is relevant to cyber incident, an overview of different forms of privilege, how to preserve privilege and how not to waive it, concluding with a summary of the key Do's and Don'ts.
This information is imperative for founders and senior leaders looking to inform themselves of the legal implications surrounding a cyber attack.
11:30 - 12:10
AI, Hack that for me
William Wright, CEO, Closed Door Security
AI-orchestrated attacks are already happening at scale. This is a technical walkthrough of how they work, automating an attack chain with no human input, what worked, what broke, and why.
11:30 - 12:10
Computing with Light: When Your AI Lives in Physics
Dr Giulia Marcucci, Co-Founder & CEO, LumiAIres Ltd
AI is hitting four hard walls — energy, memory, latency, cost — and they share one root cause: digital silicon computes every weight and activation, link by link, paying the bill whether the result matters or not. LumiAIres' photonic neuromorphic chips do something different. The neural network is not loaded onto the chip; it emerges from the nonlinear interference of light inside a photonic reservoir, and only the readout layer is trained.
This talk is a software stack tour of what changes when your AI lives in physics: how training pipelines simplify, how inference moves from cloud to edge, and why hardware–software co-design takes the four walls out of the equation.
12:20 - 13:00
Debugging the Org Chart: Influence and Hierarchy in a Hybrid World
Tim Clarke, Business and Improvement Analyst, Katoni Engineering
Most complex technology transformations don't fail because the strategy or technology was wrong. They fail because they were planned using a comfortable fallacy: the org chart. When organisations prepare for change, they map their processes. Rarely, if ever, do they map their people. Yet the informal networks of trust, influence, and communication within every organisation are precisely what determine whether change takes hold or quietly dies.
Organisational Network Analysis (ONA) makes those invisible structures visible. Using passive signals, calendar data; email metadata; project collaboration, alongside active surveying, ONA produces a data-driven picture of how work actually happens. Underpinned by graph databases, centrality algorithms, and community detection, ONA identifies informal influencers whose buy-in matters more than any leadership mandate, knowledge brokers who translate new ideas into practice, and bottlenecks where resistance will crystallise.
This argument becomes urgent when change involves integrating AI Agents into everyday workflows. Deploying autonomous systems without understanding an organisation's social topology won't aid transformation; it will exacerbate existing dysfunction.
This session covers passive versus active data collection, graph analytical techniques, and the practitioner tooling landscape. Attendees leave with a concrete framework for applying ONA to their own transformation challenges.
12:20 - 13:00
Marketing Workshop
12:20 - 13:00
Skills, Agents, and the New Shape of Work: Designing for AI That Works Alongside You
Dr Marcel Lukas, Senior Lecturer in Banking and Finance, and Vice-Dean of Executive Education, University of St Andrews Business School
Something has shifted in how software gets built. The interesting unit is no longer the prompt or even the model, but the skill: a small, composable instruction set that lets an AI agent do real work inside a real workflow.
In this 40 minute session, Marcel shares what he has learned building and deploying skills in his own practice, from executive education to research, and what it means for how software teams should think about product design, tooling, and team structure in 2026.
Expect concrete examples, a live look at a working skill, and a frank take on where agents genuinely help, where they create new failure modes, and what the next twelve months are likely to bring. You will leave with a clearer mental model of skills and agents, and a short list of questions to take back to your own roadmap.
13:00 - 13:50
Lunch
14:00 - 14:40
Fireside Chat - digitalisation journey across the energy industry
Laure Mora, Business Growth & Transformation Manager, Offshore Energies UK (OEUK)
Laure is an energy industry professional, with more than 20 years experience. Her career started as an engineer in the Oil and Gas industry, in mainly operations engineering and commercial roles. She expanded her career to waste heat recovery and geothermal in 2019 and subsequently worked in green hydrogen. Using her cross-energy knowledge, she led an energy start-up programme at the Net Zero Technology Centre before joining Offshore Energies UK in 2024 as Business Growth & Transformation Manager. In this role, she heads the various OEUK data and digital groups and organises the yearly OEUK Data and Digital Conference. She is passionate about the proper implementation and use of digital tools across the whole energy industry to improve project delivery.
14:00 - 14:40
Can We Trust Data Anymore? How Blockchain Restores Trust
Rajesh Kumar Plamthottathil, Founder & CEO, TrackGenesis
In a world of AI-generated content, deepfakes, and growing concerns about misinformation, it’s becoming harder to know what data we can rely on. This talk explores how blockchain can help bring trust back into digital systems in a simple and practical way.
Rather than focusing on complex technical details, we will look at real-world examples show how blockchain is already being used today. The session will explain key ideas in plain language and highlight when blockchain is genuinely useful, and when it isn’t.
By the end, you will have a clear understanding of how blockchain can help solve real problems around trust, and where it fits in an increasingly digital world.
14:00 - 14:40
Cyber Recovery Wargame
Chris Butler, Business Resilience Director, Databarracks
In this highly interactive Cyber Recovery Wargame, attendees will take on the role of senior leaders managing a live ransomware attack complicated by deepfake content and AI-driven disinformation.
With disinformation and misinformation topping the 2025 World Economic Forum Global Risk Report, this scenario brings the threat to your doorstep. Can your leadership withstand the pressure?
Using live Slido polling, both in-person and virtual attendees will shape the outcome. This session offers a powerful, hands-on experience in cyber crisis leadership and practical insights to improve organisational resilience against the rising threat of AI-driven misinformation and cyber threats.
14:00 - 14:40
Behind The Veil - A Glimpse into the Murky World of Cybercrime
Jon Hope, Senior Technology Evangelist, Sophos
The headlines are full of stories of cyber attacks, but have you ever wondered who are behind these attacks?
Who are the cybercriminals, where do they come from and what tactics do they employ?
More importantly still what can we learn from the history of ransomware so that we can be better prepared and more resilient in the future?
14:50 - 15:30
Your Software Isn't Dead. Your UI Is.
Nick Finch, Chief Technology Officer, inmydata
Software companies have spent decades building complex UIs on top of valuable business logic and data. Agentic AI is collapsing that model right now. When an AI agent can talk directly to your system's API, your carefully crafted interface becomes optional. That's not a threat. It's an opportunity.
The companies that thrive in this shift won't be the ones racing to bolt AI features onto their existing products. They'll be the ones that recognise what they actually have, deep domain logic, proprietary data, years of encoded expertise, and package it for a world where agents are the new interface.The companies that thrive in this shift won't be the ones racing to bolt AI features onto their existing products. They'll be the ones that recognise what they actually have, deep domain logic, proprietary data, years of encoded expertise, and package it for a world where agents are the new interface.
This talk draws on real systems built in production over the past four years. An expert buying system that synthesises ERP data, commodity markets, weather patterns and crop forecasts to help coffee buyers make better decisions. An intelligent knowledge capture platform that interviews subject matter experts and turns tacit expertise into queryable intelligence. Both built by a four-person team using AI-first engineering practices.
You'll leave with a clear framework for identifying what's valuable in your own software, what's about to become irrelevant, and what to do about it.
14:50 - 15:30
From Silicon to Superconductors: Manufacturing and Integration for Scalable Quantum Systems
Martin Weides, Director of James Watt Nanofabrication Centre (JWNC), University of Glasgow
Quantum technologies are now moving beyond laboratory demonstrations toward scalable, manufacturable systems. This talk focuses on the critical role of advanced nanofabrication and system integration in enabling that transition.
Drawing on developments at the James Watt Nanofabrication Centre (JWNC) and the emerging ecosystem around Quantcore and Kelvin Quantum, the session will explore how superconducting circuits, semiconductor platforms, and photonic systems are being engineered—and crucially, interfaced—to build practical quantum hardware. Key challenges such as fabrication yield, materials control, and reproducibility will be discussed, alongside approaches to hybrid integration, chiplet architectures, and high-density interconnects.
The talk will further highlight how initiatives such the Scotland Critical Technologies Supercluster and the Critical Technologies Accelerator are strengthening the link between design, fabrication, and packaging, enabling more reliable and scalable quantum devices.
14:50 - 15:30
Breaking Borders: Navigating EU AI and Data Rules for Tech Growth
Lisa-Marie Schuchardt, Attorney-at-law, NEON
Expanding into the EU market offers significant opportunities for tech companies, but also comes with complex regulatory challenges.
This talk provides a practical overview of key EU frameworks such as the AI Act, General Data Protection Regulation and the EU Data Act, focusing on what they mean for AI-driven products and data use in practice. It highlights common pitfalls, compliance strategies, and how to integrate legal considerations early in product development to support scalable and sustainable growth.
In addition, it draws on lessons from venture capital financing rounds and exits, showing how regulatory readiness can impact valuations, due diligence processes, and successful scaling or exit strategies.
14:50 - 15:30
Defending Against Adversarial AI
Kostandino Kustas, Senior Cybersecurity Consultant, N-able Technologies
AI promises speed, scale, and efficiency for organisations across business and operational functions. This new dawn of efficiency is extremely prominent in the InfoSec space, where AI is taking on a truly invaluable defensive capability. However, as is evidenced in the threat landscape of 2026, AI is no longer just a driver of efficiency and defensive capability, but instead AI is mapping out an ever-growing attack surface.
From AI‑generated social engineering to full-scale automated attacker tradecraft, adversarial AI is truly reshaping the threat landscape, posing real risk to the organisation and business resilience strategies of yester-year.
Join us as we focus on how the double-edged nature of AI in cybersecurity – how threat actors are weaponising AI, and how modern defence must evolve! Leaving the AI hype at the door, we’ll discuss the principles of what good AI‑assisted security looks like, cover the ever more important human-in-the-loop judgement factor.
15:35 - 15:55
coffee break
Tea, coffee and biscuits will be provided, with the chance to network and browse the exhibition hall.
16:00 - 17:00
keynote 2
17:00 - 17:15
conference close
CEO, ScotlandIS
Young Software Engineer awards dinner
18:15 - 18:45
champagne reception
We’ll kick off the evening with our champagne reception and networking.
18:45 - 21:25
Dinner
Welcome and housekeeping, before three-course dinner and wine.
21:25 - 22:00
young software engineer of the year awards
For over 30 years, we’ve been celebrating the young software engineers of tomorrow from each of our Scottish universities; many have gone on to perform some incredible roles and achievements around the globe. We will award the 1st place, 2nd place, 3rd place, and Best Engineering Prize to students on the night, with prizes kindly sponsored by Sopra Steria, BCS, Resillion and Leidos respectively.
22:15 - 23:00
after dinner entertainment
A brief welcome from After Dinner Entertainment sponsor, Lloyds Banking Group, will be followed by a set from our musical act.
23:00
official event close
23:55
coach to glasgow leaves
01.00
bar closes
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