Maria Zelenskaya is a digital designer, animator, researcher, and teacher with a great passion for interactive and immersive technology. Maria specialises in motion capture and real-time character animation. As part of her doctorate research, Maria designs interactive virtual avatars and examines the benefits of collaborative community-based design.

Dr Jessica Korte is passionate about the ways good technology can improve lives. To ensure technology is “good”, she advocates involving end users in the design process; especially when those people belong to “difficult” user groups - which usually translates to “minority” user groups. Her philosophy for technology design (and life in general) is that the needs of people who are disempowered or disabled by society should be considered first; everyone else will then benefit from technology that maximises usability. Her research areas include Human-Computer Interaction, Machine Learning, and Participatory & Collaborative Design.

Jessica was drawn to research by a desire to explore some of the ways technology and design can empower and support people from marginalised groups. She has worked with Deaf children and members of the Deaf community to create a technology design approach, and successfully organised and run international workshops and a special issue in the Journal of Child-Computer Interaction on ‘Pushing the Boundaries of Participatory Design’.

Jessica’s current project through her Advance Queensland TAS DCRC Fellowship, “The Auslan Communication Technologies Pipeline”, involves designing and developing an Auslan-capable personal assistant.

Lilly Ryan is a digital security consultant, digital rights activist, and games enthusiast based in Melbourne Australia. She was one of the founding organisers of Technically Games in 2020, and rejoins the conference this year as a panel discussion facilitator.