Members’ Networking Event, April 2019
In a first of its kind, The Malta Business Network will be co-hosting the next Member’s event with “WomenOnIT”. Our guest speakers for the evening will be Hon. Silvio Schembri, UoM lecturer Claudia Borg as well as Entrepreneur and WomenOnIT Founder, Beata Young.
Unlike other MBN events, the evening will start at 18:00 to ensure adequate time for our speakers’ presentations and a networking session at the end.
About our Speakers:
Hon. Silvio Schembri
MP, Parliamentary Secretary for Financial Services Digital Economy and Innovation
Hon. Silvio Schembri graduated with Honours and a Master in Economics at the University of Malta where he is today a visiting lecturer in Economics.
As a Junior Minister within the Office of the Prime Minister, Hon. Schembri forms part of Malta’s Cabinet of Ministers and is responsible for a wide portfolio including the Malta Gaming Authority (MGA), The Malta Communications Authority (MCA), The Malta Financial Services Authority (MFSA), Finance Malta, The Malta Council for Science and Technology (MCST) and The Malta Information Technology Agency (MITA).
Prior to becoming a Member of Parliament, Hon. Schembri started his career as a banker with a private bank in Malta. He then advanced to the position of supervisor economist at the Central Bank of Malta. Later Hon. Schembri worked as a General Manager of the GAL Xlokk Foundation, advising private and public institutions including local councils within the South-Eastern Maltese territory, to access EU funding for capital and social projects aimed at helping further economic, social and cultural development.
Claudia Borg
Lecturer, University of Malta
Claudia Borg describes herself as ” an accidental IT geek.” A University of Malta lecturer with the Department of Artificial Intelligence, Claudia is especially interested in the automatic processing of languages.
She enjoys building and teaching about software that can extract information from text and do amazing things with it! Together with colleagues, she recently won the University of Malta Research Fund for a project aimed at building the first prototype Automatic Speech Recognition system for Maltese while she is currently pursuing methods to use crowdsourcing and AI techniques to aid language learning.
Claudia is a member of the Association for Computational Linguists European Chapter committee and the ICT subcommittee for the Maltese Language Council. As Country Lead for Google’s Women Techmakers initiative, she encourages women to take up tech careers.
Beata Young
Entrepreneur & Women on IT, Founder
Beata Young is a serial entrepreneur from Poland, Beata Chairs Mission To Run, a startup community she co-founded in the birthplace of Copernicus. Building on that 500-year innovative legacy, Beata created tech cafe coworking space Hanza Cafe where she has mentored women and startups from around the CEE region and beyond.
Beata facilitated and developed Women in tech community Geek Girls Carrots in diverse cities such as Torun, Tokyo, Dublin, and Oslo. Her business focussed workshops have been attended by delegates from as far afield as Armenia, Australia, Turkey, and the USA.
In Malta, Beata has created WomenOnIT to hack the future throughout business from the #BlockchainIsland across the world.