Speaker - Kathy Reid

Kathy Reid works at the intersection of open source, emerging technologies and technical communities. Over the last 20 years, she has held several technical leadership positions, including roles as Digital Platforms and Operations Manager at Deakin University, managing platforms such as WordPress, Drupal, Squiz Matrix and Atlassian Confluence, technical lead on projects involving digital signage and videoconferencing, and has worked as a web and application developer. More recently, she has run her own technical consulting micro-business, and been engaged on a variety of projects involving data visualisation, certification applications and emerging technologies workshops. She was previously Director of Developer Relations at Mycroft.AI, an open source voice assistant startup, and President of Linux Australia, Inc, a not for profit organisation which advocates for the use of open source technologies and runs technical events such as Linux Conference Australia. She brought GovHack – the open data hackathon – to Geelong in 2015 and 2016 and in 2011 ran Geelong’s first unconference – BarCampGeelong. Most recently, she worked as a voice open source specialist for Mozilla. Kathy holds Arts and Science undergraduate degrees from Deakin University and an MBA (Computing) from Charles Sturt University, a Master in Applied Cybernetics (MAppCyber) from Australian National University, as well as several ITIL qualifications. In 2019, she was one of 16 people from across the world chosen to undertake a Masters Program in a brand new branch of engineering at the Australian National University's 3A Institute, where she is now a PhD candidate researching voice data and ways to prevent and respond to bias in machine learning systems that use voice and speech, like speech recognition. Kathy recently completed a Research Partnership with Mozilla's Common Voice team, where she used Mozilla Common Voice data to assess the performance of the Whisper speech recognition on accented English, showing it was much less accurate for many spoken accents.