About Us

Aditya Joshi (he/him) is a lecturer in Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the School of Computer Science & Engineering at UNSW Sydney. Born in India, he came out to his parents as gay at the age of 25, followed by a long series of ‘coming-out’s. He later became a core member of Saathi, the LGBTQ support group at IIT Bombay where he organised events to raise awareness of queer issues. He co-created ‘Saathi Connect’, a video anthology of personal stories of queer individuals in Indian languages. His 2018 TEDx talk ‘Detecting sarcasm, combating hate’ interleaved his PhD thesis with his personal journey. He was an organiser and a speaker at past ‘Queer in AI’ events.

Aditya obtained a joint PhD from IIT Bombay (India), and Monash University. He has transitioned through positions in industry (data scientist), startup (machine learning engineer), research (postdoc), and finally, academia. His papers have been published in ACL, EMNLP, AAAI, FAccT, RecSys, ACM Computing Surveys, etc. He co-authored ‘Natural Language Processing’, a textbook published in 2023. His on-going research spans several NLP problems: sentiment analysis, representation learning, fairness evaluation, and applications of NLP to cybersecurity.

He (officially) made Australia his home in 2023.

Ben Hutchinson (he/him) is a researcher in Responsible AI at Google Research Australia, based in Sydney. Ben did undergrad studies at UNSW and University of Sydney, majoring in mathematics and linguistics after dropping out of computer science. He came out as gay at the age of 20, and memorably spent 24 hours on a bus filled with queer students to attend the Queer Collaborations student conference in Adelaide. He spent a couple of years at a speech technology startup, before enrolling in a PhD in Natural Language Processing at the University of Edinburgh. 

After his PhD, he returned to industry positions, in roles including Computational Linguist, Software Engineer, and Research Scientist. Ben's research these days is focused on the Ethics of AI, and he has recently published at conferences such as FAccT, AIES and ACL on topics including the history of fairness, accountability in ML development, model biases against people with disabilities, evaluation practices in machine learning, and ambiguity in image generation. His current research agenda includes exploring how to work with Indigenous communities to build AI systems. 

In his spare time, his hobbies include playing sport, and he recently competed in the Gay Games in Hong Kong.

J. Rosenbaum (they/them) is a Melbourne AI artist and researcher working with 3D modeling, artificial intelligence and extended reality technologies. Their work explores posthuman and postgender concepts using classical art combined with new media techniques and programming.

J has a PhD from RMIT University in Melbourne at the School of Art exploring AI Perceptions of Gender and the nature of AI generated art and the human hands behind the processes that engender bias, especially towards gender minorities. Their artwork highlights this bias through programmatic interactive artworks and traditional gallery displays. They speak at conferences worldwide about the use of artificial intelligence in art and have exhibited all over the world. J’s artwork has been supported by the City of Melbourne Covid-19 Arts Grants and has won the Midsumma Australia Post Art Prize.

J works with classically inspired aesthetics with the latest technologies to create a speculative future grounded in the aesthetics of the past to show that gender minorities have always been here and will continue into the future.

Aaron Quigley is the Science Director and Deputy Director of CSIRO’s Data61. Having served as general co-chair for the ACM CHI conference in 2021 he is now the chair elect of the ACM CHI conference steering committee and was named an ACM Distinguished Scientist in 2020. He holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Newcastle and a 1st class honours degree in Computer Science from Trinity College in Dublin Ireland. Aaron has published over 200 papers and is interested in discreet computing, ubiquitous computing  and information visualisation. 

From 2020 – 2023 he was Professor and head of school for the School of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) in the University of New South Wales in Sydney Australia. From 2010 – 2020, he was the Professor and Chair of Human Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews, director of the Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA), board member for ScotlandIS and the DataLab. During this time he was a visiting Professor in the National University of Singapore, Tokyo Tech and the University of Tohoku. Prior to this he worked in the University of Tasmania, the University College Dublin, the University of Sydney, Mitsubishi Electric Laboratories and the University of Newcastle.

Dr Jake Renzella is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) and Co-Head of the Computing and Education research group in the School of Computer Science Engineering at the University of New South Wales, Sydney and identifies as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community. Dr Renzella’s research is at the intersection of novel software and artificial intelligence-based systems applications and world-class computing education. Jake’s work has been published in premier conferences and journals such as the International Conference on Software Engineering. More importantly, it is embedded in open-source education projects such as SplashKit, and notably, Formatif, used at several Australian and New Zealand universities with over 250,000 students.

Dr Jessica Korte is passionate about the ways good technology can improve lives. To ensure technology is “good”, she advocates involving end users in the design process; especially when those people belong to “difficult” user groups - which usually translates to “minority” user groups. Her philosophy for technology design (and life in general) is that the needs of people who are disempowered or disabled by society should be considered first; everyone else will then benefit from technology that maximises usability. Her research areas include Human-Computer Interaction, Machine Learning, and Participatory & Collaborative Design.

Jessica was drawn to research by a desire to explore some of the ways technology and design can empower and support people from marginalised groups. She has worked with Deaf children and members of the Deaf community to create a technology design approach, and a smart home personal assistant that recognises key Auslan signs; and successfully organised and run international workshops on Pushing the Boundaries of Participatory Design, leading to the World’s Most Inclusive Distributed Participatory Design Project.

Sebastian Sequoiah-Grayson is a Senior Lecturer in Epistemics at the School of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at the University of New South Wales. 

He sees AI as an affordance for human flourishing, and his research spans across many areas of human information processing, including substructural epistemic logics, dynamic theories of negative information, data-sonification, psychological theories of free will,  ethics of computer science and information more generally. He is the co-author of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries on Logic and Information, and Semantic Conceptions of Information, and has published his research across a range of specialist journals.

He received his doctorate from the University of Oxford at Balliol College, where he studied under Timothy Williamson and Luciano Floridi. 

Pauline Pounds is a professor in mechatronics at the University of Queensland since 2012.  She completed her undergraduate in systems engineering in 2002 and PhD in robotics at the Australian National University in 2008.  She is a 2013 ARC DECRA Fellow, 2019 Advance Queensland TAS Fellow, 2020 ATSE Batterham Medalist, and president of the Australian Robotics and Automation Association.  She specialises in unmanned aerial vehicle dynamics, propulsion, stability and control, with recent advances in legged locomotion and sensor module technology.  She has over 30 patents and six start-up companies.  She is a proud bisexual transgender woman and her hobbies include electronics, jewelry and metal casting.