4-day Cambridge Campus Session

Dr Mark Perkins is a dynamic educator in business and academic training, and an expert on business and academic writing. Mark is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Cambridge Explorations in Arts and Sciences (CEASC). The inaugural June edition (2023) contains articles dedicated to Artificial Intelligence applications in a number of fields. In his training career, Mark has trained undergraduate students in Italy and Czechoslovakia, postgraduates in Sweden, personnel at all levels from large European companies, senior academics from Polish universities, and European politicians. Sometime lecturer of English in Italy (Bari) and Czechoslovakia (Prague), he was Head of Teacher Training (English) at the Folk University of Sweden. Mark owns MPL with its team of highly qualified teachers and editors. Today, Mark regularly attracts large lecture audiences among Chinese university students and faculty (up to 1,000 participants).

Mark also developed a system for sentiment analysis of free text opinion data (supervising a development team in India) and completed a related sale and license deal with a Canadian company. In addition, he owns a large text database of 30bn words curated from blogs.

Tom Ling has over 25 years of experience in designing, managing and delivering evaluations. He is a senior research leader at RAND Europe where he is head of evaluation. He leads evaluations and applied research focused on the key challenges facing organisations in health, well-being, and international development. Before re-joining RAND, Ling was head of Impact Innovation and Evidence at Save the Children where his responsibilities included ensuring that evaluations contribute to policy and change in the challenging environment of international development. Prior to Save the Children, Ling spent ten years at RAND Europe as director for Evaluation and Performance Audit following four years as senior research fellow at the National Audit Office in the UK. Before that he taught and researched in various universities.

He has over 20 years’ experience contributing to research projects with the European Commission, Save the Children, UK government departments, the National Audit Office, the Health Foundation in the UK and many others. He has published widely on evaluation, accountability, and related topics. He recently co-edited Performance Audit: Contributing to Accountability in Democratic Government (London: Edward Elgar), following his Performance Audit Handbook and The Evidence Book, a critical examination of the use of evidence in public policy and service delivery. He is a senior research associate with Cambridge University and a Professor (Emeritus) with Anglia Ruskin University.

Tom is also President of the European Evaluation Society (https://europeanevaluation.org/).

Brian has 40 years of commercial experience in business management, rising to senior management positions within the IT sector. Founder of a start-up commercialising fitness monitoring technology from the University of Cambridge. Previously Founder/CEO of a start-up company addressing the market for enterprise applications of speech technology. Prior to that CEO of a US/UK hi-tech start-up in voice recognition, with full P&L responsibility, successfully managing the business through to a highly lucrative acquisition by Microsoft. MBA qualified (Cranfield School of Management). Key areas of competence comprise: a) business planning; b) business development (including active involvement in sales and contract negotiations); c) marketing; d) staff recruitment, training, management and motivation; and e) raising investment and corporate restructuring.
Brian has also worked for over 10 years as a core member of the International Outreach team at University of Cambridge Enterprise, supporting innovative researchers across the world. Brian is also currently a founder manager of the AI startup Maxapiens.

Co-Founder and Chief Technical Officer of Iceberg Bio, Victor works to improve data management in healthcare, with a focus on tightening the integration of research and “real world” application. He believes that artificial intelligence could greatly improve human efficiency and efficacy, but more work must be done investigating the ways in which it complements (or disrupts) human workflows, specifically the human factors psychology underlying its design, development, and daily use. He has advanced degrees from the University of Toronto and Cambridge University in the field of Philosophy of Science, with a specialisation in digital tool use (both traditional and ”smart” systems) and their interactions with individual or collective cognitive processes.

Outside of his research, Victor is a full stack software developer and is involved in a number of software and engineering projects, such as the development of adaptive interfaces for clinical decision support systems, and portable hardware solutions to support mobile ad hoc networks for use in disaster relief. Over the past 20 years, he has developed numerous award-winning electronic and software solutions spanning industries as diverse as clinical trials, early childhood education, and humanitarian response.

Willem has a BA in musical performance (percussion) and an MA in Music Therapy. He is interested in how artificial intelligence can be used in therapeutic interventions and patient data collection and analysis. He is currently working in a long-term project jointly conducted by the Cambridge University Autism Research Centre led by Professor Sir Simon Baren-Cohen and the Cambridge Institute for Music Therapy Research (CIMTR) at Anglia Ruskin University. The goal of the project is to assess the impact of music therapy on autistic children and involves significant data collection. He is also interested in the use of AI in music therapy and other therapy professions.

Patricia studied French and German at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford University.  She later took a Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults and a Diploma in Teaching Foreign Languages to Adults. After university, Patricia worked in the printing and publishing industry as Typesetting Account Manager for Computer Weekly.  She then moved to IBM where she was a Systems Engineer specialising in end-user systems within the insurance industry. Patricia has since spent over 20 years in education.  Her teaching has focussed mainly on business communication in English for non-native speakers, but she has also taught IELTS as well as German, Spanish, and French, and is an expert facilitator for courses of all types.

As a materials writer, she has produced many seminars for Cambridge assessment on the subject of their main suite exam offerings, and contributed to several of their exam preparation publications.  One example is the Cambridge English publication Business Benchmark Teacher’s Resource Book.