In the chaotic state of our world today, there’s never been a more critical time for optimism with rigour. The uncertainty, unpredictability and sheer pace of our hyper-connected world is Chris’ passion—and life’s work. His obsession with making sense of the discomfort and challenges of this rapidly changing landscape has powered his thinking for over 15 years. Equally potent across myriad industries, Chris’ insight and expertise has benefitted trail-blazing start-ups, government bodies, and Fortune 500 companies.

As a renowned strategist and senior business advisor, Chris has worked globally with some of the biggest and most influential brands and businesses on the planet including Jaguar Land Rover, Facebook, Australia Federal Police, Ebay, Vodafone and Macquarie Bank. His intuitive and instinctive approach to tracking global patterns and unlocking opportunities has had significant impact on how businesses—and humans—can take purposeful steps towards creating real and lasting positive impact.

And making an impact is what Chris is arguably most famous for… because being in a room with Chris Riddell is an immersive and transformational experience. A combination of rigorously detailed insights delivered with unparalleled enthusiasm, and dynamic screen content… all wrapped up in sensational showmanship—any amount of time spent with Chris is a wildly entertaining and deeply revolutionary experience.

His unique skill of taking what we know—and fear—about our world and encouraging changes in attitudes, beliefs, perceptions and mindsets—is critical to business and social transformation. No sector, subject or stone is left unturned in his quest to make sense of the challenging and disrupted world of ‘the future’.

This is the power of the Chris Riddell experience. It’s real… relatable… relevant… and revelatory.

The speaker: Ria O’Donnell is a thought leader on learning technologies and the future of the workplace. She has a published book titled Transformative Digital Technologies for Effective Workplace Learning and is also the founder and Managing Director of Custom Learning Design.

Ria believes in adapting to technological advancements and challenging the status quo so that skill gaps can be closed, and education can be current and relevant to each individual lifelong learner.

The talk: The future workplace is fluid and includes three likely successful scenarios. 1. Human-Centred Design, 2. Agile Adaptors, 3. Integrated AI. How can we learn, unlearn and relearn to keep up with changing trends? What is the importance of lifelong learning and how that fits into the nature of work?

This talk analysis the ways in which technology and collaboration can facilitate the learning journey and how we can identify and fill ongoing skill gaps.

The speaker: Andrew Goodwin is an experienced data engineer with a track record of developing innovative and novel spatial and temporal analysis systems, including the software that formed the foundation for local spatial analytics company Anditi.

Andrew is currently nearing completion of a PhD through the University of Sydney where his research focuses on modelling data flow through clinical systems.

The talk: Andrew will guide the audience through several examples of visualisation of local data sources. Examples will include weather events such as the June 6, 2007 storm, visualisations of local flooding, 3D point cloud visualisations from throughout the Newcastle region, and a visualisation showing a heatmap of six months of local music activity in the Newcastle CBD.

As the developer of these visualisations, Andrew will take the audience on a “behind the scenes” tour, explaining the data collection process, and describing the steps that were taken to generate the them.

The speaker: Dr Nathaniel Bavinton is an urban sociologist, social researcher and city strategist who has researched, planned and implemented urban and social innovation for over fifteen years.
Nathaniel is an Associate Director at Urbis, and is focused on the complex challenges of creating technology and data-enabled places, and sustainable, future-focused cities and communities.

Previously the Innovation and Futures Manager at the City of Newcastle, he has a longstanding interest and history with the revitalisation and transition of Newcastle and led the city’s multi-award-winning smart city program.

The talk: We are beyond the hype of smart cities. This does not indicate that digital, data and technology will cease to impact the design, function, and experience of places but, rather, the opposite. It reflects the point where technology is now having wide-reaching and profound effects. All cities are confronted with this challenge. This is not a passing trend: Everything is affected.

We cannot ignore the acceleration of place-based technology infrastructure and digital services, so need to plan for their integration into our urban fabric. They are, when understood, powerful enablers of positive change.

The speaker: Mark is a Principal Consultant with Equal Experts. He has worked in tech for over 15 years as a software engineer and consultant. He has spent the majority of the last 7 years of his career helping teams build microservice systems on Apache Kafka, both greenfield and migrating away from monoliths. He has a passion for event driven architecture, continuous delivery and pushing directly to trunk.

The talk: This is a talk about scaling delivery using a log based architecture.
It will look at the problems faced when using microservices, introduce the concept of existential coupling and demonstrate how “Turning the Database inside out” can overcome these challenges.

We will examine how this architecture enables autonomy and agility, and discuss how to implement appropriate architectural controls for organizational cohesion. We’ll finish up by highlighting some common anti-patterns and provide patterns for pragmatic implementation this architecture.

The speaker: Sarah Wallis is one of the masterminds behind Skript, a financial tech (FinTech) start-up taking on the new frontier of open banking.
A prolific tech innovator, Sarah has worked at the ever-evolving intersection of IT and financial management for more than twenty years, building countless bespoke solutions for medium to large enterprises while in senior roles at nib and Qvalent – a wholly owned Westpac subsidiary.

Having based her entire career out of Newcastle, Sarah is evidence of the immense talent in regional Australia. An experienced and visionary leader, she is passionate about creating opportunities for others.

The talk: Recent high profile data breaches at Medibank and Optus have brought information security into the mainstream and caused concern among the population that the companies they deal with can’t be trusted to safely store their personal data. This comes as the Australian government are looking to expand the Consumer Data Right initiative. The CDR provides individuals with the ability to give informed and explicit consent to share their customer data from companies such as banks and telecommunications providers with third parties.

The speaker: Alex has a broad skill set in technical team leadership, solutions architecture, DevOps and data driven application development. He has worked in the construction, health, energy, logistics and materials research industries. His particular focus is balancing pragmatic delivery of business outcomes with rigorous, principled software design and development. He is passionate about programming language design and implementation, and its impact on product development. He is currently leading Sendle’s USA engineering division as they scale up to take on entrenched players in the USA logistics market.

The talk: We are in a prison of our own making. Complicated, tangled deployment pipelines and wasted cpu cycles on endless automated testing. A haunted forest of branches no one dares to look at.

All programming languages, continuous delivery pipelines and hosting infrastructure suffer the same fate because they are all built on the same foundation. In this talk we will peel pack the layers and face something hiding in plain sight. We will also look at one of the most unique projects in open source software aiming to do it differently. Aiming build a utopia.

The speaker: Daniel is the Security Operations Manager at nib where he leads a dynamic team that supports internal teams in maintaining and uplifting the security posture of the nib Group. Prior to that he was Information Security Manager at Honeysuckle Health and led the implementation and expansion of the Information Security program.

Daniel has a background that covers running small businesses to the UK operations of a multinational web systems development company, which provides a unique insight into the delivery of Information Security practices and the development of lean business systems.

The talk: Every business is different. The Information Security risks and business processes to match are developed in the way that works for you. It is with this in mind that this talk will show you a way to align the common aspects of Information Security risk management to your business and the way you do things.

You will be shown how you can leverage an agile approach to the development of your Information Security program to create something that works for your business, keeps you teams focussed on delivery value and minimises the bureaucracy of standards compliance.

The speaker: Aleena is a Data & Analytics thought-leader with over 12 years experience in Data, Analytics and Governance. She has experience in Cloud platform establishment, Data Warehouses, Data Lakes, Data Marts, Business Intelligence, Machine Learning and AI. Aleena is particularly passionate about leveraging data to drive better insights, improve decision-making, and help organisations achieve business objectives.

Aleena leads the Data, Governance & Analytics division at Newcastle Permanent. Her strategic mindset and drive has resulted in the adoption of data driven decision making and the machine learning based solution across the organisation. Aleena is a champion of the ethical use of data and sees the understanding the adoption of this as vital as the world start to become more reliant on AI.

The talk: The ethical use of data has moved from a nice to have to a must have for all organisations. AI technology has become part of our day to day lives through stealth. AI software is used to make determinations about health and medicine, employment, creditworthiness, and even criminal justice without having to answer for how they’re ensuring that programs aren’t encoded, consciously or unconsciously, with structural biases. Will the coming age of AI bring a faster way to potentially discriminate and divide at scale? And if this is the risk, what can we do about it?

This is where AI and Data ethics come in. AI presents 3 major areas of ethical concern for society:

1. privacy and surveillance,

2. bias and discrimination,

3. the role of human judgment

My talk with dive into this topic, bring awareness and will include some practical takeaways for the audience on what they can do in their personal and professional lives to improve their data literacy and bring conscious awareness to Data and AI ethics.