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Professional

Profile

I am a situation and narrative modeler with 17 years of experience using structures from storytelling to address shortfalls in computational models of the open world. My goal is to develop formal models of multi-contextual influence and situated reasoning for artificial intelligence, to support agile, intelligent technologies, especially for Defence. My transdisciplinary methods have been applied in collaboration with Disney Research, the Weiss Lab at UCLA and with context logician, Keith Devlin, at Stanford University. My projects have been awarded $2.5M AUD in US and Australian funding and the results have been published in over 33 peer-reviewed papers, patents and science fiction works. I was an Advance Queensland Research Fellow at Trusted Autonomous Systems Defence CRC (2020–2024), and a Principal Research Fellow at Griffith University, working closely with industry partners CAE and Downer to make machines more collaborative and adaptable in situations of risk. I am now the Principal Situation Modeler at Sirius-Beta Labs, developing new approaches and technology to detect adversarial greyzone and EMS strategies, in projects funded by RAND, ADF and CASG.

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Fellow at Trusted Autonomous Systems Defence CRC: In this 3.5 year position, I modelled processes of narrative inference and context change to advance human-machine collaboration and trust. These techniques were used to model the emergence of risk across workplace contexts in collaboration with Downer, and develop a new suite of representations for the augmented reality platform in collaboration with CAE. I also advised on trust in autonomous systems for international (NATO Science and Technology Office panel), national (AI and Wargaming community, Defence Science and Technology Group) and state decision-makers (Office of Innovation, QLD Government), as well as the general public.

Project Co-Investigator (Design Lead) of a $160k project, Asgard EW: Communication of EW Threats in Contested Environments, to visualize cumulative influence of assets and effects in CAE’s VR modeling tool, Asgard. This was funded by the Queensland Defence Science Alliance and awarded within the DST Agile C2 STaR Shot and brings together Griffith University, Trusted Autonomous Systems and CAE.

Project lead (Chief Investigator) of a $280k project to build a narrative modelling tool: I led this team across four institutions (Old Dominion University, Griffith University, Eastern Virginia Medical School, University College London) to develop a prototype modelling tool that used narrative principles to capture psychological, social and biological information across scale. We produced a working prototype, two peer-reviewed publications, a conference presentation and an invited talk.

Project lead (Chief Investigator) of a $50k grant from the National Academies Keck Futures Initiative (NAKFI): This project, Design in Information Flow, developed a modelling method based on narrative structure to represent the flow of influence among systems as they cross disciplines in disorders such as PTSD. Experts included: three medical researchers from the Eastern Virginia Medical School, a fashion designer and two computer scientists. An immersive Unity prototype, three peer-reviewed publications, four conference presentations and an invited talk were produced.

Narrative Modelling Consultant, Disney Research: During this 12 month project, I developed a narrative annotation method in collaboration with Albert Li from Disney Research and trained a team of coders to annotate 30,000 Quora stories for automatic identification.

Managing Editor, Africa Content: At Project Syndicate, I brought African Nobel Laureates to global news. When I joined, PS only had a dozen African member newspapers because its articles were too Europe-centric. I solicited and edited articles from African leaders such as Nobel Laureates Desmond Tutu, Wangari Maathai and Wole Soyinka, as well as the election opposition leader Berhanu Nega after the Ethiopian elections collapsed. By the time I left in 2006, there were 40 active African memberships; ten years later, membership had increased to 82 and a dedicated series for African articles has been established, The African Century.

Winner First Place, Communication Planning, Association of Media Evaluation Companies, 2003: During this four-year analysis for the Australian Federal Government as a senior Isentia analyst, I expanded existing methods of media stories to include anomalous occurrences in the analysis. This enabled the government to better position its messages, producing a fourfold increase in coverage for the Harmony Day campaign over four years. This work won the above international award.

Co-Investigator $100k NAKFI grant, Weiss Lab UCLA: This project, the Innernet, developed a design to monitor the endogenous ‘communications’ between the gut microbiome and its human host, with the aim of commercializing an approach to personalized health monitoring.

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Contact details available on request.