Artificial intelligence (AI) has widely been talked about as taking over the world. But what does this mean for accountancy? And how much is reality and how much is hype?
Join us along with our guest speaker Narayanan Vaidyanathan Head of Business Insights and author of the report Machine Learning More Science than Fiction and a panel of experts for an exciting evening discussion where we tackle these questions and share perspectives from ACCA’s recent report on machine learning. This session will give you an insight into what machine learning is, how it is used in accountancy, what the ethical dimensions are and the implications for the skills of professional accountants. Speaker:
Speakers:
Narayanan Vaidyanathan, Head of Business Insights, ACCA
Narayanan can see the future. Because he leads ACCA's futures research, he knows how future trends will impact business and the accountancy profession. With a global remit for the topics he covers, he inspires ACCA's subject-matter and policy experts to explore specific future trends. He's also ACCA's staff expert for the Accountancy Futures Academy Global Forum, and represents ACCA on government, industry and academic forums.
Particular areas of thought leadership within his research portfolio include work on the global economy, emerging technologies and business models, sustainability, social mobility, as well as sector specific insights, in relation to the public sector, financial services and oil and gas.
George Tziortzis - Board Member, Head of Management Consulting, KPMG Cyprus
George has more than 20 years of relevant experience in Information Technology and Management Consulting matters, working for KPMG in the USA, Switzerland and Cyprus and servicing different clients in a number of countries.
He currently leads the Management Consulting practice of KPMG Cyprus. He focuses on the provision of advisory services for the design, development, implementation and assessment of enterprise architectures, development of business and digital services strategies to facilitate transformational initiatives; and development and implementation of risk mitigation strategies focusing on IT risk management.
In addition George advices organizations on the adoption of emerging technologies, in conjunction with their digital strategy, by identifying and developing the relevant use cases where those technologies can introduce added value.
Marianne Viinikainen
Marianne Viinikainen currently works as a senior lecturer at Saimaa University of Applied Sciences, Finland. She graduated from Aalto University in Helsinki with a Master of Accounting degree in 2000. In 2010, Marianne completed vocational teacher studies at Häme University of Applied Sciences. She moved into the world of research in 2018 when she began PhD studies at LUT University, Lappeenranta, Finland. Marianne has experience of teaching a wide range of different courses on subjects such as financial accounting, management and cost accounting, business intelligence and controlling, analysis of financial statements, ERP, Excel and VBA, digital accounting, business game, and project studies in accounting. In spring 2019, she piloted an e-learning course, Artificial Intelligence and Accounting, jointly with Microsoft and a local BI company. At the moment Marianne's core interests are digital accounting, robotic process automation, artificial intelligence, BI and work-oriented accounting education. She proactively looks for cooperation opportunities with partners throughout the business world: private companies, public sector actors and educational institutions. An example of this cooperation is the Digital Accounting 2025 project, which responds to the challenges of the digital revolution. This joint project with LUT University involved 16 projects with local accounting offices and their customers, university teachers and students.
Dr. Demetris Trihinas - Lecturer University of Nicosia
Dr. Demetris Trihinas is currently a Faculty Member at the Department of Computer Science, University of Nicosia and is also a senior member at the Artificial Intelligence Lab (AILab). Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Computer Science Department, University of Cyprus. His research interests include Distributed and Internet Computing with particular focus in Big Data Management, Data Visualization, and Data Mining. Demetris current work targets developing low-cost probabilistic and adaptive machine learning models for analytic insight extraction from Cloud, IoT and Edge topologies and services. Demetris has extensive experience in European research and innovation projects where he has participated as a Senior Researcher in multiple projects funded under the European Commission FP7 and H2020 schemes. Additionally, Demetris is the developer of the open-source JCatascopia cloud monitoring system, the AdaM framework for IoT services, and is also an active member of the StreamSight framework for query-driven analytics in streaming environments and the Cloud Application Management Framework (CAMF) which is an official Eclipse Foundation project.