Sam Backwell

2019 Alumni

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Builder. Mentor. Pathfinder.#

Sam engineers, deploys, and maintains AI systems as the Technical Program lead at Thaum, a contract design and engineering firm. Cybernetics is a core pillar of Thuam’s full stack services: understanding the humans, nature, and existing technologies touching the hardware and software they build. Thaum has delivered a computer vision platform detecting whales around marine activity, a simulation system for autonomous ocean craft and medical image detection systems.

Education and its intersection with technology has always captivated Sam. The MACYB was an incredible melting pot for these ideas culminating in their group maker-project, cognitive cubes, where physical blocks set spatial reasoning puzzles. Explaining how this AI system tailored its game design based on an individual’s progression to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is a memory topped for Sam only by playing a duet with their AI piano in the first cohort’s cybernetics band.

Sam has also worked as a strategy consultant and data scientist for Alpha Beta (acquired by Accenture). Combining cybernetics and econometrics Sam pioneered real time modelling of the human recovery from the pandemic leveraging Australia’s largest financial datasets and wrangled a decade of telecommunications data to model the social and economic benefits of broadband in Australia.

Areas of Expertise: AI Deployment, Software Engineering, Data Science, AI Pedagogy, Game theory, Drone Racing, Sailing.

You are on Aboriginal land.

The Australian National University acknowledges, celebrates, and pays our respects to the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people of the Canberra region and to all First Nations Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and work as the oldest continuing culture and knowledges in human history.

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