UNSW Centre for Ideas

Dr Karaitiana Taiuru is a leading global voice at the forefront of Māori data sovereignty and AI ethics. His practice draws on tikanga Māori and mātauranga Māori to facilitate conversations about the ways emerging technologies must uplift, protect and empower Indigenous knowledge, culture and communities.
Hear him in conversation with Dr Sue Keay, where he explores why protecting Māori knowledge as a living treasure is one of the most exciting and urgent challenges of our tech future.
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Every day, generative AI is pumping millions of new pictures into existence. Researcher and UNSW lecturer Dr Charu Maithani is redefining how we think about the images flooding our world, exposing how they capture only the narrowest sliver of human experience. Her work reveals how reimagining the way AI is trained – what it sees, learns, and absorbs from culture – defines our visual vocabulary and reshapes our collective imagination. Sometimes, what we don’t see is just as important as what we do.

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Richard Holden | Alan Kohler
Australia, a land of sweeping plains, has one of the lowest population densities on the planet. So, how did we end up with a housing shortage?

In conversation with economist and author Richard Holden, veteran finance journalist Alan Kohler’s new Quarterly Essay, The Great Divide: Australia’s Housing Crisis and How to Fix It, investigates where things went wrong at the start of the 21st century with escalating property prices leading to a rental crisis, a dearth of public housing and a mortgage crunch.

This event is presented by the Sydney Writers' Festival and supported by UNSW Sydney.
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Since its 2025 publication, Laurie Woolever’s Care and Feeding was an immediate New York Times bestseller, tracing her path from small-town childhood to working with two of the most powerful men in the food business, chefs Mario Batali and Anthony Bourdain. The book’s success is no surprise. Laurie doesn't sugarcoat the consequences of a life where desire has been met with opportunity in equal measure. She weaves her story deftly, capturing the essence of New York city during the golden era of the 1990s and 2000s food celebrity without downplaying the darker side of indulgence and the treatment of women in the male-dominated food industry.
Hear Laurie alongside Good Weekend senior writer and former editor Katrina Strickland as they discuss the love language of food, living life without guardrails and learning to curb her appetites.
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As one of the world’s leading researchers in artificial intelligence, Toby Walsh has been awarded the Humbolt Research Award and elected as a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of AI. In The Shortest History of AI, Toby outlines the six key ideas for understanding artificial intelligence today.
Hear Toby trace the origins of artificial intelligence in science and culture and predict where the technology is heading in the future.
This event was presented by the Sydney Writers' Festival and supported by UNSW Sydney.
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