So I get a blue shirt… Chief Science Officer

I’ve been with my current company for 9 months as Chief Information Officer and had responsibility for everything technical from production systems down to ensuring the phone systems worked and everything in between.  The only technical responsibilities not under me was the actual development and QA of our products.  CIO is a thankless role – when everything is going right, questions are raised over the size of the team and the need to replace servers and budget for new projects.  When something breaks, for whatever reason, you are the focus of the negativity until it is resolved.  The past 9 months have been a rollercoaster of business needs, including many sleepless nights.  However, I can look back on this knowing that when I do finally get around to writing about my experiences as a woman in IT I will have a lot of fun stories for the CIO chapter¹.  While I didn’t have the opportunity to finish off as many of the improvement projects as I would have liked, I’ve built up a fantastic team and know that they’ll continue to do a fantastic job going forward.

This week, I finished the handover of all my old responsibilities and started the role I was actually hired for back in 2015, but didn’t start with because the business needed a strong pair of hands elsewhere. I am now Chief Science Officer and have a new team of Computer Vision researchers and am taking over all of the data science and machine learning activities worldwide.  I’ve been given a remit of thought leadership with the team, so I’ll be attending (and speaking at) conferences, writing blog posts, publishing papers and let’s not forget that I’ll be neck deep in the research myself, leading a team of academics within a corporate environment on computer science research.

While I won’t be able to talk about what we’re doing until we’re ready to make it public, I will be blogging about the kit we’re using and some generic machine learning issues, as well as interesting papers as and when I find them.

It’s going to be a pretty exciting time – there are several cool projects that we’ve started and I’ve given myself some harsh deadlines so that we can have some results ready for a conference…