Tech Events at BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, London

Please join us for the BCS SM-ITAM AGM and Annual Lecture 2026. Our lecture this year is presented by Tejas Prvinbhai Patel, from Amazon.

Lisp was initially implemented as an function, often monolithic, system on conventional hardware.

Two hands-on tutorials on where search meets LLMs, run by the BCS Information Retrieval Specialist Group the day before its Search Solutions conference. Morning: Alessandro Benedetti (Sease) and Radu Gheorghe (Vespa AI) on open-source agentic search, covering agent orchestration, MCP, evaluation, security and guardrails across Solr, Elasticsearch, OpenSearch and Vespa, with live demos. Afternoon: Kevin Roitero and Riccardo Lunardi (University of Udine) go inside the language models behind search and RAG, from probing to mechanistic interpretability, activation patching and sparse autoencoders, with practicals. 09:00 to 18:00 at BCS, 25 Copthall Avenue in the City. Paid, from £60. Why go: a full technical day from people who build search engines rather than talk about them. Best for search, IR and RAG engineers who want depth before the conference on 25 November.

Search Solutions is the premier UK forum for the presentation of the latest innovations in search and information retrieval.

To equip aspiring, new, and experienced Non-Executive Directors (NEDs) to be your most effective self in the boardroom.

The Claude Community London closes its year with a festive meetup co-hosted with RepresentAI and BCS Pride, supported by the Pride in London Unity Fund. Expect a short talk or two on how people are building with Claude and AI, then food, drinks and time to meet the rest of London's AI community. Doors 18:30, talks 19:00, networking from 19:30, close 20:30. Free, approval required, limited spaces. Held at BCS in the City, 25 Copthall Avenue. Why go: a friendly, mixed AI room to end the year in, with the talks focused on what people are actually building. Best for anyone building with Claude who wants to meet others doing the same before the break.

A full day at BCS on Copthall Avenue treating human health, animal health and the shared environment as one system rather than three separate problems. The morning runs on AI for health: medical diagnosis after large language models, AI in mental healthcare, and a session explaining where AI regulation now stands. Before lunch there is a hands-on tutorial on building low-code AI agents for health, farming and food. The afternoon turns to quantum technologies for health and food, opening with an introduction to quantum computing for people who have not met it. 09:30 to 17:00, in person at BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. Tickets through Eventbrite; the listing does not name speakers. Why go: the one-health framing plus the quantum half makes this broader than the usual clinical-AI day, and the low-code agent tutorial is the rare conference session you leave having built something. Best for health and life-sciences technologists, and for regulatory people who need the technical picture.

Philip Greenwood and Mark Woodman run an interactive session at BCS's Copthall Avenue offices, using their Digital Acumen framework to work out where the current AI wave's automation capability frontier actually sits - which tasks it moves and which it does not. 18:30 to 20:45, in person in the City, free. It is run as an analysis the room does together rather than a talk with questions at the end, so expect to argue about examples from your own work. The BCS listing names the two speakers but gives no affiliations. Why go: most AI-and-work events either sell a tool or forecast job losses, and this one is an attempt to draw the line methodically with practitioners present. Best for engineering and product leads, and anyone who has to tell a board what automation will and will not do next year.

BCSWomen marks 25 years of supporting women across every stage of a technology career, at BCS on Copthall Avenue. The evening includes the group's annual AGM. Why go: a quarter-century makes BCSWomen one of the oldest continuous networks of its kind in UK tech, and an anniversary brings back people who have been in the industry for all of it - which is a different and more useful room than the usual early-career mixer. Best for women in technology at any stage, and for anyone interested in how the profession has actually shifted since 2001.

A BCS evening lecture on autonomous vehicles: how close the technology actually is, where the hard failure modes sit, and what the regulatory path looks like. Hybrid — attend in person at BCS on Copthall Avenue, or online. Why go: BCS lectures tend to be sober about timelines in a way vendor events are not, and the regulatory half of the self-driving question gets far less airtime than the perception-and-planning half even though it is the part that decides when anything ships. Best for engineers in automotive, robotics or safety-critical systems, and anyone tracking the UK regulatory picture. There is a real room in the City, so go in person if you want the discussion afterwards.

AI adoption is inconsistent and ineffective across organisations. UX must reconnect with its HCI roots to transform how we work with AI.

Exhibition & Talk about text generation, art, poetry, tracing a path from early experiments in generated language to today's AI systems.

Leading transformation in a world that won’t stand still.

A debate on whether the AI divide could become a bigger problem than the digital divide, and whose job it is to close it. It looks at access, identity, safety and inclusion, including the risks for people already digitally excluded and for those online who lack the skills or support to use AI safely. Opened by Julia Adamson MBE of BCS and chaired by Rubi Kaur of the BCS Digital Divide Specialist Group. Panel: Amy Low (AbilityNet), Dr Lucy Caton (University of Greater Manchester), Melanie Calver (BCSWomen) and Tim Leech (WaveLength). Debate 12:05 to 13:00, then the group's AGM, then lunch and networking until 14:30. Free and hybrid, with in-person places at BCS, 25 Copthall Avenue. Bring photo ID or your confirmation email to get past reception. Non-members welcome. Why go: a serious inclusion debate with the charities working on the ground, not only technologists. Best for people working on digital inclusion, accessibility and public-sector AI.

The Side Door to Your Production Environment: How to discover access paths hidden behind IAM policies.

The Conference and Symposium sets the agenda for the IT Leaders Forum for the next year.

BCS Enterprise Architecture Specialist Group 9th Annual Conference 2026: Connect, Learn and Explore the Next Era of Enterprise Architecture.

Homewards is a five-year locally led programme launched by Prince William and The Royal Foundation in June 2023.

Join early-career professionals & industry leaders for an evening of connection, inspiration and opportunities across the Fintech landscape.