Karaitiana Taiuru

Dr Karaitiana Taiuru is a Māori AI, data, and emerging-technology ethicist at the forefront of Māori data sovereignty and AI ethics. As a leading global voice, he delivers practical guidance for boards, agencies, and industry leaders about how emerging technologies must uplift, protect and empower Indigenous knowledge, culture and communities.  

Karaitiana asserts protecting Māori knowledge as a living treasure is one of the most exciting, urgent challenges of our tech future. His practise draws on tikanga Māori and mātauranga Māori, to deliver practical guidance for boards, agencies, and industry leaders on AI governance, Māori Data Sovereignty, IP, and preventing bias and discrimination across the AI lifecycle.

Sue Keay

Sue Keay is the Director of the UNSW AI Institute and founder of Robotics Australia Group, the peak body for the robotics industry. As an expert in robotics, AI and automation, she led the development of Australia’s robotics roadmap leading to Australia’s first National Robotics Strategy. A strong advocate for the Australian AI ecosystem, Sue is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Technology and Engineering (ATSE), a Chaikin medallist, a member of the Kingston AI Group and Chief Executive Women, and is on the board of computer vision start-up, Visionary Machines. Sue has an MBA from UQ Business School, PhD in Earth Sciences from ANU and is a Graduate of the Australian Institute for Company Directors.

Joel Pearson

Joel Pearson is a neuro‑futurist who turns the mysteries of intuition and consciousness into mind‑bending science. He is the Director of the Future Minds Lab, and an ARC Future Fellow at the University of New South Wales. His debut book, The Intuition Toolkit The New Science of Knowing What, Without Knowing Why, came out in 2024. 

Blending his art‑school roots with cutting‑edge neuroscience, Joel decodes how the brain responds to AI disruption, observing the intersection of humanness and AI. A key focus is exploring how imagination can supercharge our relationship with AI, whilst talking through practical steps on how to be ready for an AI shaped future.

Charu Maithani

Charu Maithani is currently a Lecturer in the School of Arts & Media, UNSW Sydney. As a researcher who organises her inquiries in the form of writing and curated projects, she is redefining how we think about AI and the images it floods our world with. Her work reveals how reimagining the way AI is trained—what it sees, learns, and absorbs from culture—defines our visual vocabulary and reshapes our collective imagination. 

Angie Abdilla

Angie Abdilla creates video installations interrogating Indigenous deeptime knowledges, automation and AI, focusing on technology as cultural practice. Her research, artworks and films have been exhibited at premier cultural institutions, including the current Data Dreams: Art and AI exhibition at the MCA, and previously, the United Nations; Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria; the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam; the Museum of Old and New Art, nipaluna/Hobart; and the Goethe-Institut, Sydney. Her pioneering research on cultural governance for AI has influenced governments globally. She is the founder and director of Old Ways, New; co-founder of the Indigenous Protocols for AI working group; won the inaugural Women in AI Award for Creative Industries; and is a Professor at the School of Cybernetics at the Australian National University.

Xanthe Dobbie

Xanthe Dobbie is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher working across digital and physical realms to capture the strangeness, urgency and humour of contemporary life through a distinctly queer and feminist lens.  

Their work has been exhibited locally and internationally, including Matrix Re-Loaded at RMIT First Site Gallery (2023), Cloud Copy at Lismore Regional Gallery (2023), The Long Now at ACMI (2022), and Don’t Be Evil at UQ Art Museum (2021). Their most recent work was Distraction at Science Gallery (2025). Xanthe's practice spans interactive media, VR, AR, collage, live performance and installation, drawing on pop culture, history, and iconography to build lush, provocative “shrines” for a post‑truth era.

Toby Walsh

Toby Walsh is an ARC Laureate Fellow and Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at UNSW and CSIRO Data61, and adjunct professor at QUT. He is a strong advocate for limits to ensure AI is used to improve our lives, having spoken at the UN, and to heads of state, parliamentary bodies, company boards and many other bodies on this topic. He is a Fellow of the Australia Academy of Science and the winner of the prestigious Celestino Eureka Prize for Promoting Understanding of Science.  

Toby appears regularly on TV and radio, has been profiled by the New York Times and given talks at public and tradeshow events all over the world. He has authored five books on AI for a general audience, the most recent ones entitled The Shortest History of AI and Faking It: Artificial Intelligence in a Human World.

Rodolfo Ocampo

Rodolfo Ocampo is a creative technologist, applied AI researcher and artist who’s obsessed with the wild frontier where humans and AI make things together. His work spans everything from building viral GPT‑powered storytelling tools to designing multisensory art installations and projects for the Sydney Opera House, Milan, London and Miami Design Weeks, The Australian Financial Review and more. 

He is currently an Applied AI Researcher at Leonardo AI, acquired by Canva, and working on bringing new model capabilities to user facing products for millions of people worldwide. His work explores how humans and AI can co‑create in ways that unlock new artistic possibilities.