🚀 ML Club Oct 2026 Meetup: AI in Action at the BBC

🚀 ML Club Oct 2026 - AI in Action at the BBC : Transforming News and Content Discovery

How can AI transform the way news is produced and audiences discover content? Join us for two talks exploring the practical application of AI and machine learning at the BBC.

Together, the two talks will offer practical insights into developing, evaluating, and deploying AI in a public service organisation, exploring both the opportunities and trade-offs involved in delivering real value to audiences.

We also thank the Waracle Glasgow Team for facilitating the venue.

What to expect

17:30 - 18:00
Doors Open, Refreshments and Networking

18:00 to 18:05
Welcome and Kickoff

Talk 1: 18:05 - 18:35
Improving Content Discovery: Lessons from Recommendation Systems at the BBC
Speaker : Florence Edwards, Data Scientist, BBC
Helping audiences find relevant content is regarded as a core challenge for modern digital products. In this talk, examples from recommendation system work at the BBC will be presented, and practical lessons from the development, evaluation, and improvement of personalised recommendations will be discussed. Through these use cases, experimentation, evaluation, model performance, and the trade-offs involved in the application of machine learning within a public service organisation will be explored.

Talk 2 : 18:35 - 19:05
AI in the Newsroom: Lessons from Rewriting and Translating News at the BBC
Speaker : Katya Saint-Amand, Principal Data Scientist, BBC

An ambitious initiative has been established by the BBC to create a faster, repeatable route through which AI tools that deliver real value can be accessed by News while editorial standards are maintained. In this talk, two systems developed through this initiative will be presented: LDRS Style Assist, an LLM-powered article rewriting tool, and machine translation for BBC World Service languages. Through these use cases, evaluation, deployment, human oversight, and the practical lessons learned from the introduction of AI into real newsroom workflows within a public service organisation will be examined.

Why attend?

- Learn how teams are building with AI systems and products in practice
- Explore real world architectures\, patterns\, and implementation lessons
- Hear practical insights from enterprise AI delivery
- Connect with others in the local AI and machine learning community

Whether you are actively building AI systems or simply want to stay close to the latest developments, this will be a valuable and engaging evening.
We look forward to seeing you there.

Got a topic you’d love to present or suggest for the upcoming meetup?
We’re still building the speaker lineup for rest of the year — reach out!
📩 Emmanuel: [email protected]
📩 Andy: [email protected]
📩 Abhi Singh : [email protected]

Follow us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ml-club/