FODI Digital Speakers

Angie Abdilla

Angie Abdilla is a Palawa, (Trawlwoolway) woman who works with Indigenous cultural knowledges to inform placemaking, service design and the resulting deep technologies for both the public and private sectors. Her published research on Indigenous Knowledge Systems, Robotics, and Artificial Intelligence was presented at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. Angie and Old Ways, New have published the co-edited the book, Decolonising the Digital: Technology as Cultural Practice, and co-founded the pioneering international Indigenous Protocols and Artificial Intelligence symposium. She previously lectured and led studio’s on Human/Technology inter-Relations and Futuring methodologies at the University of Technology Sydney and continues to publicly present on the topic. Angie is a Fellow of The Ethics Centre and holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communication from the University of Technology Sydney.

Matt Beard

Matt Beard is a husband, dad, pop culture nerd, moral philosopher and ethicist. He is a fellow at the Ethics Centre and the resident philosopher for the ABC’s kid’s ethics podcast Short & Curly. Matt is a columnist with ABC Life and New Philosopher, and the author of The Short & Curly Guide to Life. In 2016 he won the Australasian Association of Philosophy prize for media engagement. He has repented of his past life as an academic and now regularly appears on television, radio, podcasts, online and in print.

Ariel Bogle

Ariel Bogle is an award-winning technology reporter at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). She writes, edit and makes radio about technology, science and culture. Ariel was technology editor at The Conversation. Her work has been published in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Australian Financial Review and Slate, among other places.

Ellen Broad

Ellen Broad has provided independent advice on data and digital issues to governments, UN bodies and multinational tech companies. She has testified before committees of the European and Australian parliaments, written articles for New Scientist and The Guardian, spoken at SXSW and been a guest of ABC Radio National programs Big Ideas and Future Tense. Ellen designed a board game about data with ODI CEO Jeni Tennison that is currently being played in nineteen countries.

Sarah Dingle

Sarah is a dual Walkley Award-winning investigative reporter and presenter with the ABC, working across radio and TV current affairs. She is donor conceived, and is currently writing a book on donor conception and the fertility industry. In 2019 she addressed the United Nations on the rights of the child in the age of biotechnology. As a journalist, her work for the ABC has also won the Walkley Foundation’s Our Watch award for reporting on violence against women and children, UN Media Peace Prizes, Amnesty Media Prizes, the Voiceless Media Prize, and the Australian College of Educators Media prize. In 2010 she was the ABC’s Andrew Olle Scholar.

Kevin Donnelly

Kevin Donnelly AM is Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University.

Since first warning about the dangers of political correctness during the early 90s Kevin has established a reputation as one of Australia’s leading conservative commentators and authors fighting against the cultural-left ideology and group think that is poisoning society and stifling free and open debate. Kevin writes for The Australian and the Daily Telegraph and appears regularly on Sky News. His most recent book is titled A Politically Correct Dictionary and Guide, available at kevindonnelly.com.au 

Political correctness denies the ability to reason and be impartial as knowledge, supposedly, is a social construct and all relationships are based on privilege and power. In opposition, Kevin champions the strengths and benefits of Western civilisation, the Enlightement and our Judeo-Christian heritage that underpin our political and legal systems and way of life and that are being undermined by a rainbow alliance of neo-Marxist, postmodern theories. Kevin was a secondary school teacher for 18 years and in 2014 he co-chaired the review of the Australian National Curriculum. In 2016 Kevin was made a Member of the Order of Australia for services to education.

Masha Gessen

Masha Gessen is a journalist and the author of ten books of nonfiction, most recently The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, which won the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction. Gessen is also the author of the national bestseller The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin (2012). A staff writer at The New Yorker and the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Carnegie Fellowship, Gessen teaches at Amherst College, and lives in New York City.

Stan Grant

Stan Grant is ABC’s Global Affairs and Indigenous Affairs Analyst. He is one of Australia’s most respected and awarded journalists, with more than 30 years experience in radio and television news and current affairs. Prior to taking up his latest role Stan served for a decade as a Senior International Correspondent for CNN in Asia and the Middle East, broadcasting to an audience of millions around the world. Stan is an award winning and bestselling author of several books and has contributed articles to many major Australian newspapers, magazines and journals.

Eleanor Gordon-Smith

Eleanor Gordon-Smith is a writer and radio broadcaster working at the intersection of academic ethics and the muddy chaos of life between real humans. Currently at Princeton University, she has produced The Philosopher’s Zone on Radio National, appeared as the Clinical Ethicist on local Sydney radio, and taught classes on ethics at the University of Sydney from environmental responsibility to the philosophy of sex. Her work has appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, Meanjin, and on This American Life.

Peter Hartcher

Peter Hartcher is a leading Australian journalist and author. He is the political editor and international editor of The Sydney Morning Herald, a visiting fellow at the Lowy Institute for International Policy and a political commentator for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Sky News television.

He has been writing about power and politics, war and peace, booms and busts for more than 30 years. His latest book is for the Quarterly Essay, entitled Red Flag: Waking Up to China’s Challenge.

Rebecca Huntley

Rebecca Huntley is an author, columnist, broadcaster, adjunct senior lecturer at UNSW, and one of Australians foremost researchers on social trends. After nine years as Director of The Mind & Mood Report – Australia’s longest running social trends report – she now heads Vox Populi research. She has authored numerous books, including Still Lucky: Why you should feel optimistic about Australia and its people, and has written extensively for essay collections, magazines, newspapers and online publications including Australian Vogue and BRW. She currently writes for the Guardian, and a twice-monthly column for ABC Life. In 2017, she co-presented the Guardian’s podcast Common Ground with Lenore Taylor. She also co-hosts with Sarah Macdonald a comedy storytelling night and podcast called The Full Catastrophe.

Daisy Jeffrey

Daisy Jeffrey is a National Organiser of School Strike For Climate Change (SS4C) – an organisation of school students drawn from cities and towns across Australia and New Zealand to fight for climate action. She is working with school and university students across the world who are asking politicians to take our future seriously and treat climate change for what it is – a crisis. Daisy is currently a student of the Conservatorium High School in Sydney.

Chris Kenny

Chris Kenny is an Australian political commentator, author and former political adviser. He is currently a columnist for The Australian newspaper as well as the host of a weeknight current affairs program, The Kenny Report, and weekly media program, Kenny on Media, on Sky News Australia. He takes an unashamedly rationalist approach to national affairs.

Antoinette Lattouf

Antoinette Lattouf is a multi award-winning journalist whose career spans across television, radio and online in public broadcasting and commercial media. She is a senior journalist at Network 10 and the Director of co-Founder of Media Diversity Australia. Antoinette was named among the AFR’s 100 Women of Influence in 2019.

Jason Yat-Sen Li

Jason is currently Chairman of investment group Vantage Asia and Managing Director of corporate advisory firm YSA. YSA specialises in complex cross-border, China-related M&A and capital raising mandates.

Jason is a Fellow of the University of Sydney Senate (non-executive Director), the Sydney Committee for the Australian Chamber Orchestra, a Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum and a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on China. He was previously a non-executive director of the George Institute for Global Health, Vice Chair of the Australia-China Chamber of Commerce, a Director of the Sydney Institute and a Governing Member of the Smith Family.

Jason completed an Arts-Law degree at the University of Sydney and a Masters of Law at New York University, where he was Australia’s Hauser Global Scholar. He was formerly Head of China Strategy for Insurance Australia Group and Head of Sales & Marketing for IAG’s China operations. His work on road safety in China won the China PR Association Silver Medal for Best Campaign in 2005. Jason has also worked as a commercial lawyer for Corrs Chambers Westgarth in Sydney and Davis Polk & Wardwell in New York.

Simon Longstaff

CO-CURATOR

Simon Longstaff began his working life on Groote Eylandt in the Northern Territory of Australia. He is proud of his kinship ties to the Anindilyakwa people. After a period studying law in Sydney and teaching in Tasmania, he pursued postgraduate studies as a Member of Magdalene College, Cambridge. In 1991, Simon commenced his work as the first Executive Director of The Ethics Centre. In 2013, he was made an officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for “distinguished service to the community through the promotion of ethical standards in governance and business, to improving corporate responsibility, and to philosophy.” Simon is an Adjunct Professor of the Australian Graduate School of Management at UNSW, a Fellow of CPA Australia, the Royal Society of NSW and the Australian Risk Policy Institute.

Hamish Macdonald

Hamish Macdonald is a broadcast journalist and news presenter. He is the host of The Project on Friday nights, and The Sunday Project on Network Ten. He previously hosted Q+A on ABC TV from 2020 to 2021. Hamish regularly hosts RN Breakfast for the ABC, and reports for Foreign Correspondent.
Hamish has won a Walkley award for current affairs journalism and was named Young Journalist of the Year by Britain’s Royal Television Society in 2008. In 2016 he was awarded a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University; he now sits on the Walkley’s Judging Board.

Audrey Mason-Hyde

Audrey Mason-Hyde has appeared in ABC series F**king Adelaide, feature film 52 Tuesdays and short films Rapture, Elephantiasis and A Field Guide to Being A 12-Year Old Girl which was a peer created documentary, which won the Crystal Bear at the Berlinale film festival. In 2017, Audrey created a talk for TedX Adelaide about their experience of gender, which they performed live to 950 people. Audrey was the 2018 Winner of Spoken Word SA’s inaugural Youth Slam Rumble and has since been a consultant and speaker on Channel Nine’s Cultural Conversations series – The Evolution of Gender, and was the peer facilitator on Carclew Youth Arts’ Project Carclew Futures. In 2019 Audrey opened the DreamBig Children’s Festival of the Arts, in front of 2,500 primary school students.

Bryan Mukandi

Bryan Mukandi is an academic philosopher and health humanities researcher, with a background in the practice of medicine in a resource-poor, sub-Saharan African context. His work is directed towards understanding and addressing the social configurations that improve or worsen the wellbeing of those served least well by society.

Mark Pesce

Mark Pesce invented the technology for 3D on the Web, has written seven books, was for seven years a judge on the ABC’s The New Inventors, founded postgraduate programs at USC and AFTRS, holds an honorary appointment at Sydney University, is a multiple-award-winning columnist for The Register, pens another column for IEEE Spectrum, and is professional futurist and public speaker. Pesce hosts both the award-winning ‘The Next Billion Seconds’ and ‘This Week in Startups Australia’ podcasts.

Lauren Rosewarne

Lauren Rosewarne is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Melbourne where she directs the undergraduate Political Science program and chairs the humanities, law and social sciences ethics committee. She has been a visiting professor at the University of Massachusetts and the University of Connecticut, and was based at Wesleyan University in 2019.

Lauren writes and commentates regularly in local and international media. She is particularly interested in the intersection of politics, media, gender and sexuality. To this end, she is the author of eleven books, most recently Why We Remake: The Politics, Economics and Emotions of Film and TV Remakes (Routledge, 2020). Lauren’s writing has been published widely including with Meanjin, Crikey, the ABC, and the Sydney Morning Herald. More information can be found on her website: www.laurenrosewarne.com. She also tweets at @laurenrosewarne.

Kevin Rudd

The Honourable Kevin Rudd served as Australia’s 26th Prime Minister (2007-2010, 2013) and as Foreign Minister (2010- 2012). He led Australia’s response during the Global Financial Crisis—the only major developed economy not to go into recession—and helped found the G20. Mr. Rudd joined the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York as its inaugural President in January 2015. In 2015-16, Mr. Rudd led a review of the UN system as chair of the Independent Commission on Multilateralism. In February 2014, Mr. Rudd was named a Senior Fellow with Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, where he completed a major policy paper, U.S.-China 21: The Future of U.S.-China Relations Under Xi Jinping.

Mr. Rudd is Chair of the Board of the International Peace Institute, and Chair of Sanitation and Water for All. He is a Distinguished Fellow at Chatham House in London, a Distinguished Statesman with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, a Distinguished Fellow at the Paulson Institute in Chicago, and a member of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organization’s Group of Eminent Persons. Mr. Rudd is a member of the Concordia Leadership Council. He serves on the International Advisory Board of the Schwarzman Scholars program at Tsinghua University, and is an Honorary Professor at Peking University. Mr. Rudd is proficient in Mandarin Chinese. He also remains actively engaged in indigenous reconciliation.

David Sinclair

David A. Sinclair, Ph.D. is one of the world’s most famous scientists and entrepreneurs, best known for understanding why we age and how to reverse it. He is a New York Times bestselling author with Lifespan – Why we age and why we don’t have to (published September 2019) and a tenured Professor of Genetics, Blavatnik Institute, Harvard Medical School, co-Director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging Research at Harvard, Professor and Head of the Aging Labs at UNSW, Sydney, and an honorary Professor at the University of Sydney. He is best known for his work on genes and small molecules that delay aging, including the Sirtuin genes, resveratrol and NAD precursors. He has published over 190 scientific papers, is a co-inventor on over 50 patents, and has co-founded a dozen biotechnology companies in the areas of aging, vaccines, diabetes, fertility, cancer, and biodefense. He serves as co-chief editor of the scientific journal Aging, works with national defense agencies and with NASA and has received 35 honors including being one of Australia’s leading scientists under 45, the Australian Medical Research Medal, the NIH Director’s Pioneer award, TIME magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world (2014) and the Top 50 people in Healthcare. (2018). In 2018, he became an Officer of the Order of Australia for his work in medicine and national security. His work is regularly featured in print, podcasts, TV, and books, including 60 Minutes, a Barbara Walters special, NOVA, Morgan Freeman’s Though the Wormhole.

Tim Soutphommasane

Tim Soutphommasane is a human rights advocate and political philosopher. He was Australia’s Race Discrimination Commissioner from 2013 to 2018, and during that time twice led the successful defence of federal racial discrimination laws against repeal. He has held posts at the University of Sydney and Monash University, has been a columnist with the Age and the Australian, and has been a presenter on ABC Radio National. Tim is the author of four books: I’m Not Racist But … (2015), The Virtuous Citizen (2012), Don’t Go Back to Where You Came From (2012), and Reclaiming Patriotism (2009).

Dylan Storer

Dylan Storer is a young journalist that grew up in the remote Kimberley region of Western Australia. He’s pasionate about equity, justice and youth leadership on the issues of our time. Dylan has appeared on ABC’s Q&A program and is currently studying Journalism and International Relations at the University of Wollongong.

Norman Swan

Dr Norman Swan is a multi-award winning producer, broadcaster and investigative journalist. Swan’s career has been highlighted by his desire to keep the Australian public informed of health developments as they happen, combining medical expertise with journalism. Trained in paediatrics, Norman was one of the first medically qualified journalists in Australia, with an international broadcast career spanning more than 30 years. He currently hosts The Health Report on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National. He is also a guest reporter on Four Corners; appears regularly on The Drum and occasional host of Radio National Breakfast.

Yaqiu Wang

Yaqiu Wang is a China researcher at Human Rights Watch. She has a Master’s degree in International Affairs from George Washington University. Her articles have appeared in Foreign Policy, The Atlantic and China Brief, and elsewhere.

Claire Wardle

Claire Wardle is a leading expert on user generated content, verification and misinformation. She is co-founder and director of First Draft, the world’s foremost nonprofit focused on research and practice to address mis- and disinformation. In 2017 she co-authored a report for the Council of Europe entitled, Information Disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policymaking. Dr. Wardle is a co-founder and Executive Chair of First Draft, the world’s foremost nonprofit focused on research and practice to address mis- and disinformation. Previously, Dr. Wardle was a Research Fellow at the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy, and also the Research Director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia Journalism School. She has worked with newsrooms and humanitarian organizations around the world, providing training and consultancy on digital transformation. Dr. Wardle earned a PhD in communications and an MA in political science from the University of Pennsylvania. She is based in New York City.

Vicky Xiuzhong Xu

Vicky Xiuzhong Xu is a researcher for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s Cyber Policy Centre.

Previously, she was a journalist for The New York Times Sydney Bureau, covering general news with a focus on China-Australia relations. She also covered China and Chinese diaspora communities for Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Asia Pacific Newsroom in Melbourne.

She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from the University of Melbourne. During her exchange semester in Jerusalem, she researched One Belt One Road, China-Iran and China-Turkey relations at The Harry S. Truman Research Institute.