Opening Address
CmdR ScotSoft2020
Kate Forbes (MSP)
Cabinet Secretary for Finance
Click play above to watch Ms Forbes opening address to our delegates.
Kate Forbes was appointed as Cabinet Secretary for Finance in February 2020.
She is from Dingwall, although has spent part of her upbringing in Glasgow and India. Until she was elected as MSP for Skye, Lochaber and Badenoch, Kate was employed as an accountant in the banking industry. Prior to that she studied History at the Universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh with a focus on human migration.
As a backbencher, she has served on the Scottish Parliament’s Environment, Climate Change and Land Reform Committee, the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee, the Health and Sport Committee and the Rural Economy and Connectivity Committee.
She also served as Parliamentary Liaison Officer for Finance and the Constitution.
As well as leading a campaign to ban plastic straws, Kate has participated in several cross party groups at Holyrood including Crofting, Gaelic, Human Trafficking, Palliative Care and Rural Policy. A fluent Gaelic speaker, Kate made history earlier this year by becoming the first female MSP to give a plenary speech entirely in Gaelic in the current Scottish Parliament chamber.
Watch Again - CmdR ScotSoft2020
Click the link to play
9.00
9.15
Welcome from Cabinet Secretary for Finance
Opening Keynotes
Rik Ferguson, Global VP, Security Research, Trend Micro
Colin Cook, Digital Director, Scottish Government
Kate Forbes MSP
10.05
Session 1
Open source tools to find security vulnerabilities within applications
Building an Enterprise Data Marketplace to Shop for Data as a Service
Organisation Refactoring and Culture Hacking – Lessons from Software
Skills Development Scotland Report Launch: Neurodiversity in Digital Tech
Mark Goodwin
Mike Fergusson
Andrew Harmel Law
Bev Harrow, Lee Hutchinson and Chris Hughes
11.00
Session 2
In the Midst of Fire – The Chaos of Ransomware Attacks
Towards Application Driven Infrastructure
How inclusion can drive economic growth?
Restart and Prosper: Tech trends emerging from the pandemic
Chris Yule
Kief Morris
Janet Onyia
Richard Marshall
11.50
Session 3
AI for Good Mapping land cover to support Natural Capital Asset Index tracking in Scotland
Collaborating across clusters
Look! There’s a Threat Model in my DevOps
Sharpening the saw – how tooling can make us better developers
Dr Murray Collins
Dr Poonam Malik, Ben Shorrock, David Dunn, Jane Morrison-Ross
Alyssa Miller
Chris Heilmann
13.20
Session 4
Ten Traits that Differentiate the most Trusted Advisors
Getting value from data – productionising data science
Innovating with Immigration.
Austen Mulinder
Dr James McMinn
Jamie Kerr
Tech challenges coming out of Open Banking and the GOFCoE project
50% of AI is easy, we just don’t know which half
Gavin Littlejohn
Alex Bell and Petur Einarsson
14.10
Session 5
Overcoming and handling bias in data: ethical and practical considerations
Building brand awareness for your tech company
Start up, scale up
(fun)ctionality
Navigating Venture Capital
Olivia Gambelin, Joseph Crispell
Kathryn Strachan
Peter Proud
Brian Baglow
Paul Neeson and Andrew Noble
15.30
Session 6
A Fyne future for graphical development
Launching terrestrial tech into the space marketplace
Tales from the Crypt(o)
Serverless Architecture
Andrew Williams
Dr David Alexander
Matt Summers
Julian Wood
16.15
Closing Keynote
Steve Guggenheimer, Corporate Vice President – AI & ISV Engagement at Microsoft Corporation
17.15
Young Software Engineer of the Year Awards
The YSE Awards recognise the best undergraduate software projects, drawn from across all students studying computing science and software engineering in Scotland.
