Keynote & Guest Speakers

Te Taka Keegan
 Nō Waikato-Maniapoto, nō Ngāti Porou, nō Ngāti Whakaue hoki a Te Taka
Co-Director of AI Institute Maori
University of Waikato
Te Taka has a Diploma in Computer Engineering from CIT and a MA and PhD in Computer Science from Waikato University and has worked on a number of projects involving the Māori language and technology. These include the Māori Niupepa Collection, Te Kete Ipurangi, the Microsoft keyboard, Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office in Māori, Moodle in Māori, Google Web Search in Māori, the Māori macroniser and SwiftKey for Māori. In 2009 Te Taka spent six months with Google in Mountain View as a visiting scientist assisting with the Google Translator Toolkit for Māori.

Te Taka is an Associate Professor of Computer Science, the Associate Dean Māori of the STEMM Division, and the Co-Director Māori of the AI Institute, all at the University of Waikato. He is also a Computer Scientist for Te Kāhui Raraunga Charitable Trust.

Dame Helen Stokes-Lampard, DBE PhD FRCGP FLSW 
National Chief Medical Officer
Health New Zealand
Dame Helen recently moved to Aotearoa from the UK where she was a frontline NHS General Practitioner, Professor of GP Education and a Non-Executive Director on the board of NHS England. She has held several prestigious positions in the medical field, including serving as the Chair of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges through the Covid19 pandemic and Chair of the Royal College of General Practitioners.

In 2023 she was invited by the Prime Ministers office to join the oversight group for the newly established AI Safety Taskforce, later the National AI Safety Institute, tasked with exploring the potential and risks of frontier AI.

Her personal passion is to enable the delivery of truly person-centred health care that recognises the whole breadth of issues influencing health and wellbeing (physical, emotional, social and spiritual). She was the founder of the National Academy for Social Prescribing and a Trustee of Macmillan Cancer. She was awarded a DBE for services to General Practice in the New Years Honours list January 2022.

Jim the AI Whisperer 
Jim the AI Whisperer is an AI prompt engineer, hacker, and creative technologist who has freelanced for Sudowrite and Jasper AI. Jim’s articles on Medium — where he’s a featured writer — can reach a million monthly readers with his mix of research, rebellion, and rogue experimentation.

Jim coaches professionals and organisations on how to get the most out of generative AI tools without getting swept away by marketing myths, and is a provocative leading voice on the promises and perils of generative AI — especially the bits companies would rather you didn’t look too closely at. 

As a red-team prompt engineer (i.e. simulating real-world adversarial behavior to uncover vulnerabilities) and system prompt sleuth, Jim has spent the past five years poking holes in AI safety claims by doing what most users aren’t supposed to: asking the right questions the wrong way.

All of this work is grounded in a single question: If these models are safe, why do they need to hide so much? Jim brings a voice of caution wrapped in wit, advocacy grounded in research, and questions no PR firm wants to hear.

Michael Webster
Privacy Commissioner

Michael Webster took up the role of Privacy Commissioner on 5 July 2022. Prior to this appointment he worked in the Cabinet Office, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet for 14 years, and held the position of Secretary of the Cabinet and Clerk of the Executive Council from March 2014.  Commissioner Webster’s career has focused on enabling and driving good governance, the promotion of democratic rights and values, the development and application of codes of conduct and behaviour, and working to ensure compliance with both statutory provisions and constitutional conventions.

Since taking up the role, Commissioner Webster has focused on ensuring the Office of the Privacy Commissioner is equipped to deliver on its vision of making privacy a core focus for agencies, in order to protect the privacy of individuals, enable agencies to achieve their own objectives, and safeguard a free and democratic society.  That has seen a strengthening of the compliance and enforcement function, a focus on delivering on the Office’s regulatory stewardship responsibilities, and advocating for a regulatory framework and Privacy Act that’s fit for purpose in the digital age.

Murray Davey
Deputy Government Chief Digital Officer
Department of Internal Affairs

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