To celebrate the incredible work and achievements of women from across the security industry, Genetec caught up with Dr. Helen Kimber to find out how she earned the title of Genetec Inventor of the Year 2025.
First up, introduce yourself!
My name is Helen and I’m a senior data scientist here at Genetec. I’ve been here for six years and work out of the UK, as part of an an international team.
My doctorate was in chemistry, but I now devote most of my time to ensuring neural networks are accountable. Or in other words building explainable AI.
That’s hugely important as any data being generated from our systems could one day need to be presented as evidence in a court of law. Which in turn means operators and investigators must be able to show their working and explain how their use of our software helped them to reach a particular conclusion.
Outside of work you’ll find me listening to drum and bass, dressmaking, reading ancient history, or maintaining the rainbow-dyed hair that has become my trademark. You see that chemistry degree still gets some use!
And what’s your proudest career achievement?
That would have to be successfully securing patent protection for key parts of my largest research project. It focused on finding meaningful patterns in large datasets using machine learning and has since become a vital component of the Intelligent Forensic Search functionality with Genetec Security Center SaaS.
Which brings us to your recognition as Genetec ‘Inventor of the Year’.
Yes, that was a huge surprise and quite the honour given the entire Genetec culture is built on innovation. As I’m sure you’re aware, Genetec has strong views on both the strengths and limitations of AI for security, intelligence and operations.
We’re big fans of what we refer to as Intelligent Automation (IA), which has the human making the decisions, supported by machines that do the heavy lifting. Yet, we’re highly sceptical about attempts to delegate the actual decision-making to an algorithm.
Our founder Pierre Racz really highlighted this when presenting me with the award. He emphasised just how crucial it is that our forensic search tools enable operators to group, filter and explore structured and unstructured data appropriately without knowledge of machine learning techniques.
For example, guiding them to be able to locate a specific vehicle in video footage even when they don’t know the make or model on which to search.
What does a typical week look like for you?
A significant chunk of my time is spent on pure research, reading up on the latest academic research and keeping up to speed with the art of the possible. It was a dream come true to find myself in a private sector job that enables me to do what I once thought would only be possible within academia.
The bulk of my day is then devoted to scoping projects and possible use cases to assess their feasibility and how they can best be incorporated into our offering.
Finally, an increasingly part of my role now involves spending time speaking directly to our channel partners and end users to understand their needs and evolve our services further.
You’d be amazed just how often a chance conversation leads to us pushing out a new feature or functionality for the benefit of all our customers.
Finally, what advice would you give to other aspiring inventors and data scientists?
I’d say don’t disregard Genetec and the wider private sector as a place where you can get paid to do meaningful original research. You don’t know what you don’t know and I personally only fully became aware of this as a possibility after attending a conversion fellowship course run by Faculty.ai.
I’m sure many other ideal candidates will be missing out on opportunities that could lead to very rewarding career opportunities.
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