Speakers

Michele Barker is an new media artist. She recently completed an interactive CD-ROM, Præternatural, part of a PhD exploring the monster in Western culture from the 17th to the 20th century.

Dr. Cynthia Breazeal is a postdoctoral fellow at the MIT AI Lab where she develops autonomus robots. Inspired by the behaviour of living systems, her interests focus on social interaction and learning between people and humanoid robots such as her anthropomorphic robot Kismet.

Dr. Don Colgan is head of Evolutionary Biology at the Australian Museum. His research concentrates on the use of DNA data to study phylogenetic relationships between animals and the genetic structure of populations within species. He is working on the cloning of the thylacine.

Stephen Jones is an artist, engineer and theorist working in physical interactive systems and in the philosophy of consciousness. He has lately become something of a nomad, presently working at Advanced Telecommunications Research Lab in Japan.

Steve Kurtz is member of Critical Art Ensemble, a collective of five tactical media practitioners which explores intersections between art, critical theory, technology, and political activism. The collectiveÞs books include Flesh Machine: Cyborgs, Designer Babies, and New Eugenic Consciousness.

Jon McCormack is an artist and computer scientist who develops his work primarily through writing software, interpreting the mediation of nature through technology. Current work includes Future Garden, an electronic "garden" of Artificial Life for MelbourneÞs Federation Square.

Dr. Nicolas Rasmussen teaches in the School of Science and Technology Studies at UNSW. He has published extensively on industrial life science and technology in scientific change, including the book Picture Control: The Electron Microscope and the Transformation of Biology in America, 1940-1960.

Prof. Tom Ray is Professor of Zoology at the University of Oklahoma and on external faculty of the Santa Fe Institute for Complexity Studies. A tropical biologist, he is currently conducting research on evolution in the digital medium, and is a pioneer in the new discipline of Artificial Life (ALife).

Prof. Lesley Rogers is Professor of Neuroscience and Animal Behaviour at UNE. She is a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and has written over 200 scientific papers and 9 books, including Minds of their Own: Animal Thinking and Awareness, and Sexing the Brain.

Prof. Claude Sammut is Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW and Head of the Artificial Intelligence Research Group. His main research interests are in Machine Learning. He lead the team that won this yearÞs Sony legged robot soccer league, RoboCup 2000.

Dr. John Sutton teaches philosophy at Macquarie University. He is author of Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (1998) and coeditor of DescartesÞ Natural Philosophy (2000).

Dr. Cathryn Vasseleu is the author of Textures of Light: Vision and Touch in Irigaray, Levinas and Merleau-Ponty (Routledge, 1998) and numerous essays on the intersections between contemporary imaging technologies and biotechnologies. She currently has a five-year ARC fellowship at UTS.

Mitchell Whitelaw recently completed a PhD on artists using ALife. He writes for Leonardo, Artlink and RealTime. He has a CDR/MP3 release forthcoming through Fällt.

Dr. Elizabeth Wilson is research fellow in the Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences, Sydney University. She is the author of Neural geographies: Feminism and the microstructure of cognition (Routledge, 1998) and is completing a book on neuroscience, the affects and evolution.

Prof. Alex Zelinsky is Professor and Head of the Department of Systems Engineering at ANU where he runs the Robotic Systems Laboratory. Alex is recognised as a leader in the fields of Human-Friendly Robotics and Computer Vision, and is CEO of Seeing Machines