ADVISER

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Tom is a leader in innovation and technology.

The Australian Federal Government awarded Tom a Distinguished Talent Visa and within months of his arrival he led an initiative that transformed Adelaide into the nation’s first gigabit city, earning him the title of Chief Innovator of South Australia for 2017-2018. In this role he took a delegation to the White House to secure Adelaide’s membership as the first international city to join the US Ignite Smart City Program. Tom also co-founded the South Australian Blockchain Lab.

As Professor and Chair of Creative Technologies at the University of Adelaide, Tom is the Director of the Sia Furler Institute, focusing on creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship within the Faculty of Arts. He co-founded the Art Intelligence Agency in 2019, where he launched the world’s first AI Artists in Residence program. Laurie Anderson was the inaugural invitee, and the initiative was featured in the New York Times and 60 Minutes. For example, outputs have appeared at Harvard University’s Norton Lectures and the Smithsonian Museum.

Before focusing on disruptive technologies, Tom co-founded tomandandy in 1990, where he helped redefine the role of music in visual media and dramatically reduced production costs while elevating creative standards. Over the years, tomandandy grew to become one of the largest music media companies in the world. His collaborations include Oliver Stone, U2, and Lou Reed, as well as corporations like Microsoft, Ford, Intel and Coca Cola.

Thomas, a sought-after speaker and thought leader, has been invited to prestigious forums, including the original TED Conference and the CalTech/MIT Forum. He has served on numerous award juries, been a member of the Digital Advisory Group for the Australia Council for the Arts, and has mentored emerging talent through programs like the Founder Institute. Tom holds a Ph.D. and MFA from Princeton University and a Presidential MBA from Pepperdine University.

R&D

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Chris has had a long and distinguished career as a coder and systems designer.   From his early, seminal work on jQuery, through several years of Drupal web programming which culminated in the development of his hyper-object-oriented DOH system, Chris has always manifested a profound insight into computational systems, cutting through Gordian knots of complexity with his keen sense of uncompromising design.

CDO

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Andy is a leader in bridging technology and creativity. During 8 years at Princeton University, he contributed to the development of the seminal computer music language “Cmix.” His academic research centered on generative AI systems and data embeddings.

Additionally, Andy co-founded tomandandy, one of the leading music production facilities in North America. As Creative Director he developed mission-critical applications aimed at revolutionizing digital music production. He applied AI algorithms to enhance compositional and engineering workflows, meeting the demands of time-sensitive professional music production.

CTO

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Terry provides software architecture and process leadership for Disrupter. After completing an undergraduate degree in Astrophysics from UCLA, he immediately embarked on a far reaching career in technology with some of the biggest companies in the U.S.  and Europe.

Terry has over twenty years of experience in mission critical software for large institutions from Citibank to FedEx; he delivered one of the first embedded Windows NT deployments for Citibank and handled a multi-year modernization of the FedEx freight logistics software infrastructure. He was also one of the pioneers in outsource leadership overseeing code teams of more than 100 engineers to deliver cutting-edge software using the most modern technologies. At Disrupter, Terry drives a collaborative team of unique individuals who are realizing the disruptive ideas and technology that are changing the face of information.

CFO

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Lori comes with an extensive background in executive leadership as the Director of Finance and IT, leading strategic programs at a number of multi-national corporations including, Hewlett-Packard,  United Launch Alliance, Sony, LPL Financial, Qualcomm, and Symantec.

Her areas of expertise are in designing and leading transformational programs in the electronics, aerospace & defense, financial services, and high-tech industries, focused on innovation.  Lori leads large, global, cross-functional teams through the disruptive change required to realize significant value enhancement for the enterprise.  She received her Presidential Key Executive MBA from Pepperdine University.

ADVISER

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Joe is among the leading thinkers and speakers on advanced and gigabit networking. He is co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of US Ignite whose objective is to create applications for next-generation gigabit networks where he inaugurated a new national public/private program focused on smart cities and the implementation of the Internet of Things.

He has written and received significant federal grants from NSF and NIST over the past 2 years to support the organization’s activities. Joe was previously the founder of a wireless network operator and also held positions at Verizon. Joe received a Bachelor of Science in Engineering degree from Princeton University.

ADVISER

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Nick Falkner has extensive experience in software development, data computer network design and development, network security, and privacy preservation. He has made significant contributions in the private, public, and academic sectors, and is currently tenured at the University of Adelaide as an Associate Professor of Computer Science where he also serves as the Deputy Head of School for the School of Computer Science.

Nick’s active research areas include network topologies, Internet of things, network abstraction and TOR. His long interest in networking and ethics has driven important research into problems of anonymisation and privacy preserving operations – especially privacy preservation of large data repositories.

ADVISER

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John Underkoffler is principal of Treadle & Loam, Provisioners LLC and is one of the world’s leading user interface (UI) designers. From the mid 1980s through the late 1990s at the MIT Media Lab he was responsible for innovations in optical and electronic holography, large scale visualization and interaction techniques, and the I/O Bulb and Luminous Room systems. In the early 2000s he served as science advisor to films including Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report, Ang Lee’s Hulk, Karyn Kusama’s Aeon Flux, and Marvel’s first Iron Man movie. Subsequently John founded the technology firm Oblong Industries to bring the spatial and gestural interface ideas he’d designed for ‘Minority Report’ into commerical reality. He is the recipient of the 2015 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award and holds a PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

ADVISER

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Professor Anton van den Hengel is a distinguished figure in the field of machine learning, currently serving as the Director of Applied Science at Amazon and the Director at the Centre for Augmented Reasoning, Australian Institute for Machine Learning. A tenured Professor at the University of Adelaide, he is also the Convenor of the Kingston Group of AI Professors and a Fellow of both the Australian Technical Society of Engineers and the Royal Society of South Australia.

With an impressive academic background including a B.Sc. (Mathematics and Science), L.L.B., M.Sc. in Computer Science, and a Ph.D. in Computer Vision, Professor van den Hengel’s leadership in the field is well-established. He founded Amazon’s machine learning research group in Australia and was the inaugural Director of the Australian Institute for Machine Learning, growing it into a top-ranked global research group in computer vision.

Professor van den Hengel’s international recognition is marked by over 30 keynote and plenary addresses, editorial roles in top-tier journals, and leadership positions at major conferences. His contributions have earned him numerous awards, including the Outstanding Service Award for AI leadership and the prestigious CVPR Best Paper prize.

His research impact is significant, with an h-index of 77, over 350 publications, 8 commercialized patents, and involvement in groundbreaking medical technology that achieved FDA approval. He has founded three startups, with one having a global presence, and has successfully supervised 15 PhD students, many of whom have advanced to leading institutions and companies.

A primary investigator on over $40 million in external research funding, Professor van den Hengel has secured support from major industry and government sources. He is actively involved in advising state and federal governments and contributes to numerous AI initiatives and reports, demonstrating his commitment to advancing the field.

Professor van den Hengel’s expertise lies in the intricate ways information is encoded in data, particularly images, and in developing methods to extract actionable information from this data. He has led pioneering research in vision-and-language navigation for robots and visual recommender systems, significantly contributing to the advancement of machine learning and AI technologies. His leadership in growing high-quality research teams has further cemented his status as a leading figure in the world of artificial intelligence and computer vision.