SA Branch Forum - 24th July 2019

Dr Anisha Fernando is Discipline Lead - Tertiary Studies (Diploma of IT) at the South Australian Institute of Business and Technology (SAIBT, in partnership with the University of South Australia and Navitas). She works collaboratively with the SAIBT academic team in curriculum development and management of student outcomes and experience, in addition to lecturing and course coordinating responsibilities. She also lectures at Eynesbury College. As an educator, she enjoys teaching students with diverse learning needs and strives to create meaningful learning opportunities, to empower students in their learning journey. Anisha’s research focuses on the societal effects of technology on people's quality of life and the use of disruptive technologies to catalyse innovations for social good, specifically in the areas of information privacy, data ethics, innovation and technology design. She was a research assistant for the Regional Innovation Systems in Northern Adelaide Project, in collaboration with the City of Salisbury. She is passionate about communicating data ethics research to the general public. To this end, she recently collaborated, co-wrote and performed a science communication piece titled, ‘The Private Lives of Data’ for South Australia's National Science Week 2018, after winning a Perform Your Science Grant from the Inspiring South Australia program.

Chris specialises in collaborative partnerships to unlock the public value and organisational value from data. He actively supports innovative research, evaluation of policy, government funded programs, seeking to use data analysis to enabling greater insight and accountability from organisations and government resources. Chris has over 40 years Information Management and Technology experience working collaboratively and innovatively across the Private, Public and Non-for-profit (Welfare and University) sectors. Current role since 2009 as the Associate Director of SA NT DataLink, a nationally leading collaborative data sharing partnership across the University Research and Government sectors, as the authorised facility for South Australia and the Northern Territory to safely share de-identified data for unit record level analysis and approved use. Chris has professional qualifications in information security, and deep experience in data governance and privacy protection protocols.

Kirsten Wahlstrom is a teaching and research academic at the University of South Australia. Her research focuses on the social effects of emerging technologies and she has been involved in two successful grant applications. The first funded research into personalisation and search; the second aims to identify false discourse online. She applies a critical theoretic method to investigate whether emerging technologies disrupt privacy. Kirsten holds five awards for outstanding teaching practice, among them a national award for providing experiential learning to transnational teams of students. Her teaching ethos blends constructivist, humanistic, and experiential pedagogies to initiate and support meaningful transformation. Students are invited to undertake purposive active learning tasks and critical reflections; these intellectual activities support the completion of cognitively demanding, multifaceted assessment tasks. Kirsten’s teaching practice is also characterised by collaboration and her professional network plays an important role, with representatives from industry providing talks, projects, one to one coaching of students, placements, and more. Kirsten’s commitment and motivation emerge from her respect for others, inclusivity, intellectual practice, and social responsibility. Kirsten is currently enrolled in a doctoral programme with the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility at DeMontfort University, in Leicester in the UK. The doctoral project identifies and studies privacy disruptions arising from emerging technology; it's theoretical framework is part Theory of Communicative Action and part privacy in context; it's definition of privacy acknowledges the natural fact of privacy while anchoring research design and analysis in privacy as a social construct. Thus far, the project has produced three papers.
 

Owen is a senior statistician in the Government of South Australia where he works for the Child Death and Serious Injury Review Committee. His work spans both the mathematical and political aspects of using government data to help make decisions. In 2018 he won a Churchill Fellowship and spent six weeks in the United Kingdom studying the ethics of automated decision making in government. Before joining the public sector, Owen did his PhD in neuroscience at the University of Cambridge and worked in industry and academia.