Name: NDC Manchester 2025
Start: 2025-12-01
End: 2025-12-04
Location: NDC Manchester

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NDC Manchester 2025

The Manchester Deansgate Hotel

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NDC Conferences reserves the right to make changes to the agenda at any time due to unforeseen circumstances. Any changes to the program will be noted on our website and delegates should check regularly for updates.

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Cancellations a minimum of 60 days prior to the event: 50% of the ticket price is refundable.

Cancellations a minimum of 30 days prior to the event: 25% of the ticket price is refundable.

Cancellations within 30 days prior to the event are non-refundable.

If the conference is cancelled or postponed, tickets will remain valid, and can be used at the next in-person event. Alternatively, attendees can opt for a full refund, or, a partial refund with access to the online version of the conference.

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4-Day AI & Security Event!

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Niall is an Irish guy who managed to end up in Norway after finding out the country existed when he was in New Zealand. He works at Microsoft helping customers with their technology investments. He has very strong opinions on security, web tech, food and wine.

Georges Bolssens embarked on his coding journey in the early 1990s and delved into the realm of application security in 2017. With an inherent passion for teaching, Georges is not only a seasoned developer but also an adept communicator. His unique talent lies in simplifying intricate subjects through relatable analogies, making him an engaging and effective speaker.

Having undertaken numerous consulting assignments among which he can list vulnerability scanning and penetration testing as a "lone wolf", taking on the role of Security Champion in a Medical Device development team and acting as internal Application Security Coordinator at a Big4-consultancy firm. Throughout his career and in all these assignments, Georges has assumed the role of cybersecurity educator for a diverse spectrum of professionals. His guidance has illuminated the path for individuals ranging from legal experts to ethical hackers and all those in between.

In his capacity as an Application- and Product Security Consultant at Toreon, Georges has been instrumental in assisting numerous clients in constructing comprehensive threat models for their digital assets. His expertise and commitment led threat-modeling authorities Sebastien Deleersnyder and Steven Wierckx to appointment as a co-instructor for Toreon's distinguished "Advanced Whiteboard Hacking – a.k.a. Hands-on Threat Modeling" course. Notably, he taught this course at the esteemed "BlackHat USA", "OWASP BeNeLux" and "Troopers" conferences to a wide variety of international cybersecurity professionals.

PortSwigger researcher Gareth Heyes is probably best known for smashing the AngularJS sandbox to pieces and creating super-elegant XSS vectors. He is the author of JavaScript for hackers. In his daily life at PortSwigger, Gareth can often be found creating new XSS vectors, and researching new techniques to attack web applications. He has a keen interest in hacking CSS to do wonderful, unexpected things and can often be seen experimenting with 3D pure CSS rooms, games and taking markup languages to the limit on his website. He's also the author of PortSwigger's XSS Cheat Sheet. In his spare time, he loves writing new BApp extensions such as Hackvertor.

Gary Lopez is a Senior Red Teamer on Microsoft's AI Red Team. In his current role, he collaborates with a diverse group of interdisciplinary experts, all dedicated to adopting an attacker's mindset to critically probe and test AI systems. Gary Lopez is the creator of Microsoft’s PyRIT (Python Risk Identification Toolkit), the team’s main red teaming automation tool. Prior to his tenure at Microsoft, Gary worked at Booz Allen Hamilton focusing on cybersecurity, developing tools for reverse engineering and malware analysis, specially targeting, and mitigating vulnerabilities within critical infrastructure including SCADA, ICS and DCS systems. He is also a graduate student at Georgetown University in the Applied Intelligence program focusing on Cyber Intelligence. 

Dr. Amanda Minnich is a Senior Red Teamer at Microsoft on the Microsoft AI Red Team, where she red teams Microsoft's foundational models and Copilots for safety and security vulnerabilities. Prior to Microsoft, Dr. Minnich worked at Twitter, focusing on identifying international election interference and other types of abuse and spam campaigns using graph clustering algorithms. She also previously worked at Sandia National Laboratories and Mandiant, where she applied machine learning research techniques to malware classification and malware family identification. Dr. Minnich is heavily involved with tech outreach efforts, especially for women in tech. She received her MS and PhD in Computer Science with Distinction from the University of New Mexico. 

When you follow the cables, behind every piece of tech is a person, consumer and creator, and we should never lose sight of this.

Lianne is an award-winning cyber anthropologist and security transformation leader with experience in the retail, healthcare, finance, private and non-profit sectors. 

Driving Security Operations Maturity and Resilient Security Functions

I specialise in providing strategic and technical consultancy to help organisations build and evolve their security operation functions into mature, resilient, and forward-thinking teams. From guiding the establishment of new security functions to elevating existing ones, I partner with organisations to ensure their SecOps department is not just operational but transformational.

Previously, as Head of SecOps for Europe's largest greenfield technology transformation, I built a cutting-edge security team from scratch to safeguard a modern retail organisation. My leadership empowered the team to set new benchmarks in industry best practices through innovation and collaboration.

As an international keynote speaker for both technical and academic audiences, I share insights at the intersection of cybersecurity, technology, and anthropology. Drawing on my practical experience as a security-focused software developer and my continued work as a practicing anthropologist, I bring a unique perspective that combines deep technical expertise with a focus on human-centered design and cultural understanding.

Currently, I’m pursuing an MSc in AI and Data Science, deepening my understanding of emerging technologies and their societal implications. My work focuses on AI safety and alignment, striving to ensure AI systems respect human rights, promote equity, and are resilient against adversarial risks.

Committed to fostering diversity and inclusion in tech, I’ve advised community initiatives, authored publications, host award-winning podcasts, and earned accolades including Security Specialist of the Year, Security Leader of the Year and Cybersecurity Personality of the Year.

Beyond cybersecurity, I co-founded Liria Digital Health, a health-tech startup focused on improving outcomes for underrepresented health conditions within marginalised communities.

You can listen to me talk about my human-centric approach every Thursday on my award-winning technology podcast Compromising Positions, in which I interview non-cybersecurity people from the world of anthropology, psychology and behavioural science about cybersecurity culture.


Publications include:

* The Times
* Raconteur 
* Computing.com
* The Yorkshire Post
* Security Magazine
* IT Pro 
* EmTech Anthropology Careers at the Frontier (Book)

Recent awards and honours include:

* Podcast Newcomer - 2024 European Cybersecurity Blogger Awards
* Cybersecurity Personality of the Year 2023 - The Real Cyber Awards
* Security Woman of the Year - Computing Security Excellence Awards 2023 (Highly Commended)
* 40 Under 40 in Cybersecurity - Cybersecurity Magazine
* Security Leader of The Year 2021 - Women in Tech Excellence 
* Woman of the Year 2021 - Women in Tech Excellence
* Security Specialist of the Year 2021 - Computing.com


After almost two decades of leading digital transformation and building technology solutions at scale, I've embarked on a new mission: making AI a force for good by making it accessible to anyone ready to build, learn, and grow.

Niek is a Principal Engineer in the Philips Software Center of Excellence. He supports businesses in the goal of building better software and engineering practices. Niek is closely involved in shaping the future of software within Philips by driving DevOps culture transformation. He is playing a key role in driving the InnerSource community in Philips to build faster, better software together. As public speaker, blogger, open source maintainer and book reviewer, he advocates and shares his expertise on key areas as Cloud, DevOps and Software Development. 

I am an experienced software developer and engineering leader, who loves learning and sharing. 

Henry Been is an independent architect and developer from The Netherlands. He enjoys working with software development teams to create and deliver software for the Azure cloud. His interests include Azure, Agile, DevOps, software architecture and the design and implementation of testable and maintainable software. Besides his work he is a speaker at international conferences, is the author of two books, and creates online training courses for Pluralsight and A Cloud Guru. For his work in the community, he has been awarded the Microsoft MVP Award since 2019. To follow Henry, you can go to his blog henrybeen.nl or look him up on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henrybeen


Andreas has been working in different positions within enterprise during the last two decades. A few years ago his focus was on all things mobile, then it shifted towards building web systems. After that, the focus was on cloud solutions and planet-scale architecture. Nowadays it's producing customer value using AI, for real - not writing chatbots for everything.

Andreas is the AI architect at Voyado, one of Sweden's fastest-growing SAAS companies. In his spare time he spends time with his family, lifts things in the gym, and is involved in OSS as an Aurelia Core Team member.

Karl Ots is a cloud security leader, author, and educator with over 15 years of experience in the technology industry. He serves as the Head of Cloud Security at EPAM Systems, where he leads global teams in delivering secure, scalable, and compliant cloud solutions for Fortune 500 clients across diverse industries.

Karl is the author of the book Securing Microsoft Azure OpenAI (Wiley) and a LinkedIn Learning instructor, where he teaches advanced topics in cloud security architecture. He is a recognized Microsoft Regional Director and Security MVP, and holds certifications including CISSP, CCSP, and SABSA SCF.

A frequent speaker at global conferences, Karl is passionate about helping organizations build secure cloud-native systems and communicate complex security designs effectively across technical and executive audiences.

Niels Tanis has got a background in .NET development, pentesting and security consultancy. He is Microsoft MVP and has been involved in breaking, defending and building secure applications. He joined Veracode in 2015 and right now he works as a security researcher on a variant of languages and technologies related to Veracode’s Binary Static Analysis service. He is married, father of two and lives in a small village just outside Amersfoort, The Netherlands.

Alex Shershebnev is a seasoned Computer Vision and MLOps Engineer with over ten years of experience shaping the future of AI-driven software development. Currently, Alex leads the ML/DevOps team at Zencoder, where he leverages his extensive background in Software Engineering, ML and DevOps to deliver high-quality machine learning solutions. His work spans complex data pipelines, cloud infrastructure management (GCP, Kubernetes), and advanced ML/DevOps pipelines, ensuring scalability and efficiency. Before Zencoder, Alex played pivotal roles in numerous projects, including leading teams at Sanas, ivi and MTS AI. His technical expertise in machine learning, data science, and bioinformatics has led to impactful solutions across industries, ranging from bioinformatics at the University of Massachusetts to video analysis at ivi.ru and MTS AI. Alex has a proven track record of managing complex infrastructure that scales to hundreds of GPUs, enabling effective and easy use of cloud infrastructure for data scientists while driving down costs through cloud consolidation efforts and boosting productivity through the deployment of sophisticated AI models. In addition to his technical contributions, Alex has been instrumental in mentoring teams and fostering a culture of innovation and collaboration. His deep understanding of AI systems, from developing recommendation engines to cutting-edge computer vision algorithms to voice and NLP, positions him as a thought leader in the AI and ML space. Whether it’s speaking on the latest advancements in MLOps, sharing insights on AI-driven automation, or discussing the future of AI in the enterprise, Alex brings a wealth of knowledge, practical experience, and a passion for pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with AI.

Carly is Developer Advocate Lead at Elastic, based in London, UK. Before joining Elastic in 2022, she spent over 10 years working as a technologist at a large investment bank, specialising in front-end web development and agility. She is a UI developer, who occasionally dabbles in writing backend services, a speaker and a regular blogger.

She enjoys cooking, photography, drinking tea, and chasing after her young son in her spare time.

Dr. Neda Maria Kaizumi, A Norwegian citizen who is a distinguished expert at the intersection of AI development, global compliance, and international regulations. With a doctorate in Organizational Behaviour. She combines a rich academic foundation with practical insights. She has further honed her expertise through the Business Analytics and Data Science executive program at Harvard Business School.

Dr. Kaizumi is ISO standards committee member, and she shapes AI governance and compliance frameworks, advocating ethical AI aligned with global standards like the EU AI Act and beyond.

An accomplished author, public speaker, and advocate for ethical AI development, Dr. Kaizumi integrates her technical acumen and business expertise to empower organizations navigating the complex global landscape of AI governance. With a deep understanding of regulatory frameworks and their impact on technology, Dr. Kaizumi is a leading voice in fostering innovation that aligns with compliance and sustainability.

Olena is a Staff Developer Advocate at Confluent and a recognized expert in data streaming and analytics. With two decades of experience in software engineering, she has built mission-critical applications, led high-performing teams, and driven large-scale technology adoption at industry leaders like Nokia, HERE Technologies, AWS, and Aiven.

A passionate advocate for real-time data processing and AI-driven applications, Olena empowers developers and organizations to use the power of streaming data. She is an AWS Community Builder, a dedicated mentor, and a volunteer instructor at a nonprofit tech school, helping to shape the next generation of engineers.

As an international speaker and thought leader, Olena regularly presents at top global conferences, sharing deep technical insights and hands-on expertise. Whether through her talks, workshops, or content, she is committed to making complex technologies accessible and inspiring innovation in the developer community.

Matteo is a software engineer with a deep interest in programming languages and type systems. He works on the design and development of embedded and distributed applications, primarily using JVM-based languages like Java and Scala, to build complex systems that remain simple and maintainable. A frequent conference speaker and technical author, Matteo enjoys exploring how language design and type safety can lead to more robust software. He has authored a Scala course on testing best practices and regularly shares insights on functional programming, type-driven development, and secure coding techniques.

Arohi Naik is a Security Engineer at SQR and brings both technical depth and a human-focused lens to her work. With a Master’s in Cybersecurity and experience across threat intelligence, incident response, risk management, and GRC she is passionate about creating security solutions that are not just effective, but also inclusive and user-aware.
A committed advocate for gender equity in tech and a vocal feminist, she works to elevate diverse voices and drive meaningful change in the cybersecurity space. With a lens grounded in empathy and inclusion, Arohi examines how behaviour, psychology, and culture intersect with the security landscape. Whether she’s building threat models or speaking on stage, she brings clarity, and a mission to make security safer, smarter, and more accessible for everyone.


Jeff Watkins is the Chief Technology Officer at CreateFuture, the award-winning digital consultancy formed from the 2024 union of CreateFuture and xDesign, where he previously served as Chief Product & Technology Officer. In this dual-hat role, he steered multi-disciplinary teams across AI strategy, product engineering and cloud, turning bold ideas into secure, human-centred digital experiences for big-name brands.

Jeff has founded multiple cybersecurity teams and now champions “secure-by-design” practices for generative-AI solutions, weaving threat modelling and ethics into every project. He holds an MSc in Cybersecurity, is midway through a second Master’s in Artificial Intelligence, and leads CreateFuture’s AI Enablement practice, helping clients move from hype to production-grade AI safely and at pace.

He’s a self-confessed “lifetime technologist”, having written his first lines of code at the age of six! A veteran chief engineer, architect, and former tech lead at AND Digital and BJSS, Jeff draws on over 25 years of experience in financial services, healthcare, and retail to translate complex problems into breakthrough, user-loved products used by millions globally.

On the international circuit, Jeff is a sought-after keynote speaker, headlining Webinale (Berlin), AppDevCon (Amsterdam), the International JavaScript Conference (London), and Edinburgh Napier’s PlusEquals5 summit. Audiences value his frank, story-driven take on where AI and cybersecurity collide with culture.

He co-hosts the multi-award-winning “Compromising Positions” podcast, grilling psychologists, anthropologists and UX gurus for outsider perspectives on security. Jeff’s thought-leadership has appeared in Wired, Forbes, Raconteur, IT Pro, Business Cloud and Information Age, and he’s a regular voice for the wider industry press.

Whether mentoring the next generation of tech leaders, coding proofs-of-concept or demystifying CyberSecurity and AI on stage, Jeff’s mission is constant: build technology that elevates people, not the other way around.


I've been working as a .NET developer for over 16 years now in a variety of industries including government, retail and manufacturing. But I've been hacking around with computer code since I was old enough to read my Dad's copy of the ZX Spectrum BASIC coders manual. 

I've been speaking about Functional C# at various user groups and conferences around the UK, USA,  Europe and Australia and am particularly interested in seeing just how far we can push C# without breaking it.  

In 2023 I released my first technical book: "Functional Programming with C#", published by O'Reilly Media.  

When I'm not coding, or running after my two small children, I have been known to enjoy the classic series of Doctor Who, Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, Cryptic Crosswords, and rather more coffee than is probably good for me.

Tom van den Berg is a lead developer at Info Support.
As a developer he is part of a team that realizes new and innovative solutions.
Tom likes to think outside of the box and he gets a lot of energy from sharing knowledge and encourage other people to think outside of the box.

Taswar Bhatti works for Microsoft as Azure GTM Manager. Prior to his current position he also worked as a Solutions Architect for AWS, his focus areas are security and machine learning. He holds a BSc in Mathematics and Computing Science from University of Alberta, and is well versed in architectural design, security and building large scale security web applications; not to mention he was a Microsoft MVP for 8 years. 

Taswar is also fluent in many spoken languages: Cantonese, English, Turkish, and Urdu/Hindi.

A Principal SWE Lead at Microsoft with nearly 20 years of experience in building cutting-edge software and leading high-performing engineering teams.
Deeply involved in the open-source community as a co-chair of the Open-Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) Best Practices WG and Memory Safety SIG.

Dr Pedram Hayati is the founder and CEO of SecDim, where he makes secure coding second nature for developers. As a researcher across both offensive security and application security, Pedram has:

* Published 25 + zero-day advisories since 2005
* Reported thousands of vulnerabilities to Fortune 500 companies
* Led the global penetration-testing unit at the world’s second-largest defence contractor

Holding a PhD in Information Security & Machine Learning, Pedram lectures postgraduate cyber-security at the University of New South Wales – Australian Defence Force Academy (UNSW ADFA) and founded SecTalks.org, a multinational non-profit security community with more than 25 000 members. His research regularly features on the global stage at Black Hat, DEF CON, FIRSTCon, NDC, and OWASP AppSec.

A back-end developer turned security person. Father, gamer, and passionate about game development. I balance my time between family, gaming, and exploring AI technology. 

Roman is a cybersecurity expert, engineer, and leader with over 17 years of hands-on experience securing complex systems and products at scale. Currently Principal Architect at Red Hat, he leads open-source security strategy, upstream collaboration, and cross-industry initiatives focused on building trusted software ecosystems. He has built and scaled programs across security architecture, threat modeling, secure development, vulnerability management, incident response, and security education - for both engineers and senior leadership. His work spans trusted AI, privacy, compliance, and secure software supply chains. Previously, Roman led Product Security & Privacy for Data Center and AI software at Intel. He is a Security Champion for several open-source projects and an active contributor to working groups under the OpenSSF, Eclipse Foundation, and other global initiatives. Roman is also a university lecturer, startup advisor, and mentor - advocating for a practical, collaborative, and responsible approach to open-source and cybersecurity. He is an official member of CEN/CLC and ETSI standardization working groups, contributing directly to the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA).

Jiachen Jiang (they/them) is a Senior Product Manager at Coder, an open-source and self-hosted CDE that powers enterprise AI governance. Previously, they were a PM on the Azure Container Apps and .NET teams at Microsoft. 

Ben Potter is an engineer and Head of Product at Coder, an open-source platform for cloud developer environments. Before Coder, Ben did all of his professional projects and tinker projects on remote machines and now works with enterprises to move their developer boxes to the cloud.

Soroush is a distinguished web application security expert with over 20 years of experience specialising in web application security testing, vulnerability discovery, security source code review, and penetration testing. He has contributed numerous security advisories to industry giants such as Microsoft, Mozilla, Adobe, Yahoo, and Facebook. Soroush's expertise has been showcased through speaking engagements at security conferences and events, including AppSec EU, SteelCon, BSides Manchester, and HackPra.
Soroush has also developed a widely-adopted testing methodology for financially-oriented web applications, which is utilized by security testers across the globe. Soroush may also be recognized for his discovery of the IIS semicolon vulnerability and the IIS Short File Name Disclosure vulnerability. In recent years, he has served as a judge for the Top 10 Web Hacking Techniques alongside esteemed industry experts such as James Kettle.

Spyros has over 15 years of experience in the security world. Since the beginning of his career he has been an avid supporter and contributor of open source software and an OWASP volunteer. Currently he is interested in the harmonization of security tools and information and is currently helping Fintechs setup and automate large parts of their AppSec programmes. He also maintains several Open Source projects including the security automation framework Smithy, and opencre.org, the worlds largest security knowledge graph. Also, he usually doesn’t speak about himself in the third person.

Chisom Nwokwu is a multi-talented Software Engineer, Published Author and Digital Creator. Passionate about Big Data and Artificial Intelligence, her expertise cuts across leveraging big-data and cloud technologies to design and develop scalable data platforms for organisations. She is currently contributing to the development of the next generation of systems that redefine how data powers large-scale AI model training. 

Chisom Nwokwu holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and has worked with some of the biggest international firms, such as Microsoft, where she was a Big Data Engineer on the Windows Engineering Team, and Bank of America, where she was a Technology Analyst on the Robotics and Automation Team. 

Chisom is also a multi-published author with two popular books to her name, A Techie’s Guide into Big Tech Companies, a valuable resource that helps aspiring software engineers secure roles at top international tech firms, and Data Engineering for Beginners, a complete roadmap for aspiring data engineers, published by Wiley Global. She is also the developer of Igbo Amaka, a language-learning app on Google Play Store with over 40,000+ downloads. 

As someone who has made tremendous progress in a short period, she was nominated as a Rising Star of the Year by the Women Tech Network; Author of the Year and Women in STEM award by Women Business Awards & a finalist for the Young Digital Woman of the Year Award by Digital Women UK. 

Her career ambition is to become a world-class engineer, designing systems that power the next generation of AI, shape conversations that bring more women and underrepresented voices to the forefront of tech and most importantly, leave behind a blueprint; one that shows it’s possible to break in, stand out, and lift others as you climb.

Over ten years of experience in application security. Currently working as a Product Security Architect at Intel, responsible for securing open-source AI/ML frameworks and systems. Contributor to OWASP and MITRE ATLAS projects. Speaker at Hacktivity, sec4dev, and OWASP conferences. Holds a Ph.D. in C.S, CISSP, CSSLP.
Previous speaking experience examples:
- Secure by Design: Microservice Application Architecture Assessment (Hacktivity 2021) - 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZPdsnrEyAM


- The needed Information for AppSec Purposes? (sec4dev 2021) - 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxOauEjpBco

Richard is the CTO at Blue Beck Ltd, an experienced software professional focussed on Machine Learning and Apps with a passion for Open Source AI and a strong interest in novel ways Machine Learning can be used on locally on low power devices. His background is in backend service and mobile development, going back to when the first releases of the Android and iOS SDKs became available, and older devices before that, having started his career at RARE as a console game developer.

In 2025 Richard has spoken at Global AI Barcelona, dev.talk Bournemouth, the Dev Talks conference in Bucharest (one of the largest developer conferences in Eastern Europe) and the DevBCN conference, these have ranged from a high level talks about Open Source AI models to a more detailed explanation about model alignment with DeepSeek R1. In late 2024 he delivered a talk for Google DevFest Scotland, and spoke at the Macc Tech.

Here is a video with some clips of the latest talks 

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