Flower UK Health and Life Sciences Day
Event Main Venue: Jesus College Cambridge (use the West Court entrance — google maps link here)
Flower Labs is hosting an informal one-day event in Cambridge on October 29 to bring together UK-based scientists, engineers and executives advancing privacy-enhancing technologies (PETs) and federated AI for healthcare and life sciences (HLS).
Flower is an open-source framework that has enabled federated AI deployments involving more than 1 million individuals worldwide, and is trusted by organizations such as Owkin, JP Morgan, Samsung and Mozilla. Originating from Cambridge, Flower has been used within the NHS and more than 150 medical institutions world-wide.
The event will showcase UK research and deployments in federated HLS, deepen understanding of the underlying technology, and demonstrate how Flower supports adoption—from early trials to large-scale production.
Our goal is to accelerate responsible AI adoption in healthcare, keeping HLS organizations in control while maintaining public trust.
Agenda — Wednesday Oct 29th
Main Venue: West Court, Jesus College Cambridge (use this entrance)
9.00am — Doors Open and Registration
9.20am — "Accelerating Responsible AI for Health & Life Sciences with Flower", Nic Lane (Flower)
9.40am — "Elevating Global Healthcare Through Collaborative Federated AI", Fan Zheng and Michael Roberts (BloodCounts!)
10.10am — "Flower Supergrid for Health and Pharma", Chong Shen Ng (Flower)
10.30am — Coffee Break
11.10am — "PharosAI: Building the UK’s Largest Federated Multimodal Biomedical Dataset for Cancer Research", Gregory Verghese (PharosAI)
11.40am — "Federated Learning in Surgery: A Pathway to Scalable and Secure AI for the Operating Room", Yang Li (King's College London)
12.10pm — "Owkin and Flower enabling AI Biotech", Javier Fernandez (Flower)
12.35pm — Lunch and Networking
1.35pm — "Flower Outperforms Traditional ML For Clincial AI: A 26,000 Global Patient Study", Yan Gao (Flower)
2.00pm — "Taking Eye2Gene Global with Flower", Ismail Moghul (Eye2Gene)
2.30pm — "Federated Learning for Clinicial Studies", Joshua Daniel Kaggie (University of Cambridge)
3.00pm — "Flower Intelligence for the HLS Domain", Mohammad Naseri (Flower)
3.20pm — Coffee Break
3.50pm — "Advancing Federated Learning towards Real-World Medical Image Analysis: From Data Sharing to Data Access", Pramit Saha (University of Oxford)
4.20pm — "The Flower Approach to Confidential Compute", Patrick Foley (Flower)
4.50pm — Event Summary and Next Steps
Reception and Dinner Venue: Cambridge Union (use the Orator entrance)
5.30pm — Drinks Reception
6.30pm — Dinner
What to expect from the main program
Talks and discussions featuring UK experts sharing real-world HLS deployments and research using federated and privacy-preserving methods, with topics spanning multiple clinical and research domains.
Collaborative working groups designed to foster partnerships and shape the next generation of cross-institutional projects.
Networking opportunities throughout the day, including lunch and a closing college dinner.
Breakout sessions offering one-on-one technical guidance and feedback from Flower scientists on your own PETs or federated AI initiatives (limited capacity, first-come basis)
Optional tutorials and technical Q&A sessions accessible to participants of all experience levels.
Schedule tight on the 29th?
We'll run an executive summary of the day starting at approximately 6pm that will then run into a brief reception and dinner. Come after your main work day and still get a lot of the benefits including networking opportunities. Simply mark this option on your registration.
Want to contribute?
You’re welcome to propose a talk or contribution when registering.
Learn more about Flower in HLS
Flower is the world's most widely used open-source framework for federated and PETs. More than 2,500 federations of various sizes have been built on Flower in the past five years. More background about Flower and HLS uses cases can be found here. To see any of the recent health or pharama talk using Flower, you can click any of the links below.
Andrew Soltan (Oxford) — 170k NHS patient trial, Lancet paper [video]
Eden Ruffell (UCL) — Foundation model fine-tuning [video]
Honghao Li (Owkin) — FedECA powered by Flower [video]
Joseph Taylor (NHS) et al. — BloodCounts! [video]
Nikolas Pontikos (UCL) et al. — Taking Eye2Gene global with Flower [video]
Minhaj Alam (UNC Charlotte / Stanford) — FL Diagnosis of Macular Degeneration [video]
Pramit Saha (Oxford) — FL for Medical Image Analysis [video]
David Emerson (Vector Institute) — FL4Health with Flower [video]