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, Artificial Intelligence Institute
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 is a content writer and former academic, currently specialising in the new field of AI writing and prompt engineering. His favourite place in the world is sitting at his desk with a pen, laptop or typewriter before him and a cat on his lap.

Murray Davey
Deputy Government Chief Digital Officer
Department of Internal Affairs