WELCOME TO THE STAGE

On 8-10 October, the industry is descending on the Gold Coast for the 2023 NIBA Convention. We’re focused on ‘thinking differently’ this year, and we’ve enlisted a number of exceptional people to help us do just that over the course of the three days. Here are a handful of the people you can look forward to hearing from, and meeting, at The Star later this year.

Sam’s a sports broadcasting pro, and her award-winning work spans print, television, podcasts, and radio. She spent 13 years writing for Melbourne’s The Age and Sunday Age, and The Sydney Morning Herald newspapers, and in that time reported from three Olympic Games.

She has also reported from the men’s Tour de France and the landmark first women’s Tour de France, in print, on radio and ABC television, and has also covered men’s AFL on Channels Seven and Ten for more than 15 years.

She was part of Seven’s recordbreaking broadcast of the 2018 Commonwealth Games, a panellist on Channel Ten’s Before the Game for 10 years, has covered every season of AFLW since its inception in 2017, hosts a weekly ABC podcast, and has featured in the ABC’s Agony Aunts series.

In 2018, Sam published her first book, Roar, which is the definitive account of the birth of the Australian

Football League’s elite competition for women, and is formally endorsed by Australia’s first woman Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

That topic has been the subject of numerous keynote presentations for Sam – including one at the Australian Embassy in Paris.

Sam’s won a raft of journalism awards, including two Melbourne Press Club Quills, a Walkley, the AFL Players’ Association and AFL Coaches Association media prizes, and an Australian Sports Commission media award.

Throughout 2022, she co-hosted the Australian national speaking tour of basketball legend Luc Longley in soldout shows, and moderated live events with Australian of the Year Adam Goodes in 2019.

Throughout Sam’s career, she’s never been afraid to ‘think differently’ about sport – and we’re delighted that she’ll be hosting our 2023 NIBA Convention.

OUR OPENING SPEAKER… DR Jordan Nguyen

If you’re looking for someone to inspire you to ‘think differently’ then this is your man. Dr Jordan Nguyen is the Founder and CEO of Psykinetic, a social business creating futuristic, inclusive and empowering technologies to improve independence and quality of life for people living with disability, in aged care and beyond.

Jordan designs life-changing technologies to transform lives and the business is committed to bringing positive, sustainable and life-altering change.

Together with his team, Jordan has successfully created a mind-controlled wheelchair, numerous virtual and augmented reality applications, inclusive gaming, an instrument that enabled a friend with cerebral palsy to perform live music with her eye movements and blinks, and devices that make it possible to control household appliances or even drive cars using only the tiny electrical signals created from eye movements.

As well as creating and making some incredible ideas a reality, Jordan has also written A Human's Guide to the Future, and is an award-winning documentary maker and presenter.

In 2016, he collaborated with the Australian-based production company, The Feds, and the ABC Catalyst to create and present his first TV documentary, Becoming Superhuman, which went on to win many prestigious awards both locally and internationally.

His work is regularly featured in the media, and he has since gone on to present a second ABC Catalyst documentary, Meet The Avatars, exploring the impacts of virtual reality – including creating virtual interactive avatars to preserve memories of loved ones.

He has also presented numerous documentaries with Discovery Channel and National Geographic – including Frontiers of Science, Smart China Start up Revolution, Vietnam: Connecting East Africa, and Tibet: Living on the Roof of the World. He recently founded his own media company and aims to continue creating world-changing content on the intersection between technology and humanity.

Jordan is committed to improving as many lives as possible, and becoming a driving force behind both human and technological evolution as we move into the future.

In November 2022, the Dr Jordan Nguyen Innovation Centre at Baulkham Hills North Public School was officially opened – named by the school’s students. Jordan was a finalist for NSW in Australian of the Year in 2017, and a finalist in the AmCham (American Chamber of Commerce) awards for Artificial Intelligence.

He was named in the six Harper's BAZAAR’s Visionary Men of 2019, has made the list of Australia’s Most Innovative Engineers by Engineers Australia’s Create magazine, was named twice in Onalytica’s Top 100 Global Influencers on Virtual Reality, travelled on a Think Inc tour with Steve Wozniak and won the Australian Computer Society’s (ACS) ‘ICT Professional of the Year’ Digital Disruptors’ Award.

As well as that, he’s also had the honour of being MC for An Evening With President Barack Obama, on Obama’s last visit to Sydney.

If that’s not an impressive CV, we don’t know what is!

In October, Jordan will speak at the NIBA Convention about his career, and the importance of ‘thinking differently’.

This is certainly one that you simply cannot miss.