Since its inception, ScotSoft has hosted an enormous variety of local and international speakers from organisations such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Cisco, CGI and more.
The Young Software Engineer Awards have featured After Dinner speakers from comedians like Kevin Bridges, to athletes like Sir Chris Hoy, to motivational speakers like SAS: Who Dares Wins’ Colin Maclachlan, to “People Hacker” Jenny Radcliffe.
Check out our agenda below as the 2024 lineup starts to take shape – click on each section for further details.
ScotSoft 2024 Conference
08.30 – 09.00 REGISTRATION
Tea and coffee provided upon arrival.
09.00 – 09.25 WELCOME
A welcome from ScotlandIS CEO, Karen Meechan, to open the conference.
09.25 – 10.25 KEYNOTE: Professor Joe Little
Renowned futurist, Professor Joe Little, will kick off the conference with a keynote titled ‘The Most Important Decade for Mankind and How Software Will Make it Happen.’
10.25 – 10.50 BREAK
Tea and coffee will be provided with the chance to network and browse the exhibition hall.
11.00 – 11.40 SESSION ONE
▸ JAMES ALLMAN-TALBOT
Head of Incident Response and Threat Intelligence, Quorum Cyber
The Rise of Application Vulnerability: A Call for Action
Cybercriminals are increasingly taking advantage of vulnerabilities in applications to breach organisations’ networks and gain access to valuable data. The race to develop and release applications as quickly as possible has left many of them open to exploitation. Security lapses have led to the theft of business information and the personal data of employees and customers on a huge scale.
James Allman-Talbot will explain why and how threat actors are targeting weaknesses and why it’s essential to act now. He’ll emphasise the importance of designing and building software with security in mind from the outset to help protect confidential and sensitive data from getting into the wrong hands.
▸ EYAD ELYAN
Professor of Machine Learning and Computer Vision, Robert Gordon University
AI Emerging Trends: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, and The Urgent Need to Reimagine How We Do Things
Eyad will guide you through the AI landscape, highlighting emerging trends and the advantages of adopting AI in our societies. He will also address concerning challenges, potential risks and provoke thought on the urgent necessity for us as societies to maintain or rethink our current practices.
▸ IRENE COYLE
Chief Operating Officer, OSP Cyber Academy
GDPR Adventure: Empowering Your Team to be Data Protection Heroes
▸ SHERYL NEWMAN AND GEMMA JONES
CEO at Appetite for Business, and Director – Enterprises Sustainability at PwC
How Business Leaders Can Be Climate Leaders
▸ ABHINAV ANAND
Product Developer and QA Manager, Inoapps
11.50 – 12.30 SESSION TWO
▸ TREVOR BOLDEN
Head of Technical Centre of Excellence, Resillion
Single Pane Of Glass
Trevor will highlight how you can unify, streamline, and accelerate your security remediation processes with Single Pane of Glass (SPoG). Intelligently aggregating and prioritising vulnerabilities, SPoG transforms findings into actionable remediation items. Tailored to your business objectives and seamlessly integrating with existing tools, SPoG automates workflows and enhances data with intelligence, experiencing fewer vulnerabilities, significantly less manual tasks, improved productivity and ROI, and robust security management.
▸ BRIAN BOYD
Head of Technical Delivery, i-confidential
Ransomware: Understanding the Threat and How to Prepare for It
Ransomware is a top concern for cyber security teams everywhere. Organisations of all kinds are being successfully targeted, and there is a constant stream of news stories charting the often devastating consequences of these attacks.
This session will explore exactly what ransomware is, how it works, and what makes it such a successful form of attack for cyber criminals.
Crucially, it will also outline what can be done to defend against this threat, and the responses available should the worst happen, including some complex legal and ethical considerations. Finally, the session will explore what the future may hold for criminals and victims alike.
12.40 – 13.30 LUNCH
Tea, coffee and buffet lunch will be provided with the chance to network and browse the exhibition hall.
13.40 – 14.20 SESSION THREE
▸ STEVE HIGGON
Chief Executive, TAAP
AI App Builders and the Future of Software Development
For the last 50+ years, the software industry has focused on the challenges of “Implementation” – how to write software. This has been slow, costly, prone to errors, and attracts heavy maintenance costs and technical debt, until finally the software has to be re-written again. This is the software industry, but not any longer.
Steve Higgon of TAAP will be talking about AI App Builders and how the future of the Software Development industry is pivoting from “Implementation” to “AI-Assisted Knowledge Engineering”. He will talk about how TAAP’s technology is now generating fully functional enterprise-scale applications in minutes, machine-generated and bug-free.
This is the next stage in the evolution of the no-code paradigm, further accelerating the process of developing software, not just by Citizen Developers and Domain Experts but professional programmers; the more you know, the more you can do!
▸ JAMES GOUGH AND NICK EBBITT
Distinguished Engineer at Morgan Stanley, and Technical Lead (VP) at Morgan Stanley
Observable, Secure Architectures using FINOS Architecture as Code
FINOS (Financial Open Source Foundation) hosts the open source CALM Architecture as Code project. CALM aims to provide a modelling environment for complex systems, but it is not necessarily tied to finance.
In this presentation, James and Nick will explore the motivations behind CALM, how it works, and the usage in complex platform teams.
They will cover how they introduced Observability, SRE, and security concepts into the CALM model as a supplementary domain and the value of this for different teams. The pair will look at patterns and how they are structured, using an example from Mastering API Architecture. Using the CALM CLI they will create a visualisation of the architecture, generate a pattern instantiation, and validate the pattern integrity. From here, they will demonstrate how CALM can be used to deploy their Observable example on Kubernetes.
▸ INVESTMENT PANEL DISCUSSION
tbc
14.30 – 15.10 SESSION FOUR
▸ PROFESSOR STEPHEN MCARTHUR
Chief Technology Officer, Bellrock Technology
Accelerating Successful Data and AI Product Journeys
Stephen will highlight examples of how business and industry can use data and AI, including the opportunities they hope to unlock, barriers they face before they can unlock the opportunity, and how partnerships can help – such as companies, suppliers of software, research teams.
He will offer an insight into Bellrock’s case studies and experience of building value-adding data and AI solutions, and how the companies tackled the technical and operational challenges.
Stephen’s talk will culminate with a deep dive into how AI can help to build AI products through self-organising systems, and what the future of building data and AI products looks like.
▸ JO MARTIN
Business Transformation Consulting Manager, Sopra Steria Next
Transformation Leadership: Strategies for Lasting Change
As organisations struggle to get to grips with Gen AI, what can we learn from the successes and failures of previous digital transformations?
From operating models to people and leadership, to governance and decision making, we’ll look at how to set up organisations to create valuable change that sticks.
15.15 – 15.35 BREAK
Tea and coffee will be provided with the chance to network and browse the exhibition hall.
15.45 – 16.45 KEYNOTE: Tom Johnson
The Human Firewall
Tom Johnson’s fascination with hacking began at a young age. Despite facing legal troubles as a teenager for his hacking activities, he redirected his skills towards positive contributions in cybersecurity.
This talk will not only highlight Tom Johnson’s personal journey through the clandestine underworld of hacking, but also stress the importance of building a robust Human Firewall within organisations to combat ever-evolving cyber threats, exploring things that would make your toes curl.
16.45 – 17.00 CONFERENCE CLOSE
CEO Karen Meechan will close the conference.
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 the brilliant Red Hot Chilli Pipers.