Chief Scientist, CSIRO

Professor Bronwyn Fox is Chief Scientist of CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency and innovation catalyst.

Professor Bronwyn Fox joined CSIRO in October 2021 and became CSIRO’s fourth female Chief Scientist. She is known globally as a leader in advanced manufacturing, materials science, and industry 4.0 technologies, and is passionate about bringing together multidisciplinary teams for collaborative research.

She was formerly Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research and Enterprise) at Swinburne University of Technology and founding Director of Swinburne’s Manufacturing Futures Research Institute. During that time, she established of a world first Industry 4.0 Testlab for additive manufacturing of carbon fibre composites, in collaboration with CSIRO.

Director for International Freedom of Expression, Electronic Frontier Foundation

Jillian C. York is a writer and activist whose work examines the impact of technology on our societal and cultural values. Based in Berlin, she is the Director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a fellow at the Center for Internet & Human Rights at the European University Viadrina, a visiting professor at the College of Europe Natolin, and the author of Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech Under Surveillance Capitalism (Verso 2021).

Jillian is a frequent public speaker on topics including censorship, surveillance, and the impact of social media on our lives and our societies, and her writing has been published by the Motherboard, Buzzfeed, Al Jazeera, the Atlantic, the Guardian, Quartz, The Washington Post, and Die Zeit, among others. Jillian currently serves as Deputy Convener on the IFEX Council, on the Advisory Council of the Open Tech Fund, the Advisory Board of SMEX, and on the International Advisory Board of the International Free Expression Project.

Tech Ethicist

Mathana (they/them) is fascinated by the question “what does it mean to be human in a 21st century that is increasingly dominated by technology?” This question has led them down a journey of pioneering provocation in several domains of emerging technology. As a Berlin-based ethicist, philosopher and activist, their work studies the socio-cultural impact of AI and automated bias, ethics-based approaches to responsible AR/VR design and development, and the nascent proliferation of weaponised robotics in society.

Over the past 6 years, Mathana has worked at the leading edge of (what some might call ‘dystopian’) tech advocacy, creating harm-reduction frameworks within technical standards development around emotion recognition algorithms; advocated to responsible policy oversight for facial recognition; published articles on digital identity management asking questions like ‘who owns our face’ in the age of NFTs, the ‘metaverse’, deepfakes and image generation algorithms. Mathana is a co-founder of the AI transparency project xplainr.ai, and has chaired the IEEE Standard Association’s Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality, where they have brought together researchers and experts across industrial applications and facilitate the publication of a series of cohesive best-practice recommendations for more socially responsible AR/VR/’metaverse’ technologies.

In this year’s Something Digital talk, Mathana will discuss tomorrow’s technology in the context of today’s social structures and share thoughts on how we can think about —and advocate for— an enhanced set of human rights that can scale, both the age of the algorithm, and throughout new domains like virtually immersive worlds.

Artist

Matt Sheridan is a Los Angeles-based artist working in abstract painting and video. He earned his BFA at New York University, his MFA from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, and he teaches at UCLA’s Geffen Academy.

Trained as an animator, Sheridan has screened work in two Olympic Games and exhibited in museums including Centre Pompidou, the Jeu de Paume in Paris and most recently CICA Museum in South Korea.

He has won multiple grants including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant for painting, an Audiovisual Grant from the Secretary of Culture in Bahia, Brazil and a residency sponsored by Japan Agency of Cultural Affairs / Bunkacho. Sheridan has otherwise participated in exhibitions, residencies, fellowships and events on five continents over the past decade.

Matt Sheridan’s work is placed in American collections in New York, Los Angeles and Miami as well as Australian collections in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.

Director, Business Innovation, Condé Naste

Siobhan Keam is the Director of Business Innovation at Condé Nast. Previously leading the development of global membership propositions, including Vogue Business and Vogue Club, the Business Innovation team is now focused on building the company’s web3 strategy. This involves investigating blockchain technologies, virtual worlds and community building strategies.

Siobhan is originally from South Africa, where she completed her degree in Fine Art and English at the University of Cape Town. She moved to London in 2014 and worked in publishing and media. After joining Condé Nast in 2017, she began focusing on the intersection of technology, content creation, audience and brand strategy.