Let’s build an intelligent future

Artificial intelligence for planetary stewardship, space exploration and human health.

Featured Trillium projects:

Awards

Outstanding Achievements & Research Contributions - AI Accelerator/Incubator

Best Innovation - Space 

IEEE LifeTech 2021 Outstanding Paper Awards - Prototyping CRISP: A Causal Relation and Inference Search Platform applied to Colorectal Cancer Data

Diversity, Equality and Inclusion Impact SpaceML - Citizen scientists for the advancement of space technology with Nasa

Winner Phase 1 of the agency’s Watts on the Moon Challenge - Team Fuelpod

TOP 100 AI for the SDGs

Winner Phase 1 NASA MarsXR 2 Challenge - Trillium Technologies - Finding biosignatures on Mars with an AI glider

Global winner (most innovative) - StrangeDesk - Hyperlocal environmental

“The world of Earth Observation (EO) is rapidly changing, driven by exponential advances in sensor and digital technologies. Recent decades have witnessed extraordinary developments in ICT, including the Internet, cloud computing and AI. This digital revolution is also accompanied by a sensing revolution providing an unprecedented amount of data on the state of our planet and its changes.”

Pierre Philippe Mathieu, Head of Φ-Lab Explore Office, ESA ESRIN

How we work

We build effective interdisciplinary teams to tackle the most interesting and important challenges of our time. These range from detecting and managing bushfires, to creating detailed maps of resources on the Moon, from mitigating the effects of global heating to deploying artificial intelligence (AI) tools into orbit.

Our research programs apply agile methods to make rapid progress towards solutions, and are guided by academic rigor and open science principles. We build supportive communities involving top-level academic institutions, national science and space agencies, leading technology firms, and global aerospace companies. This broad and deep partner network enables state-of-the-art results by supplying world-leading expertise in AI and domain science, combined with significant resources to find solutions at scale.

“Without space exploration Humanity cannot grow. Watching FDL grow too, these past years, continues to be a privilege for NVIDIA, as does assisting the FDL family to accelerate solutions to some of our most profound challenges. Despite the troubles here on Earth, every night we can simply look up & dream. Tonight, look up & know that a growing number of GPUs are smiling back at you.”

— Jensen Huang, President & CEO, NVIDIA

Our work has been deployed in all sorts of settings

"The future of AI is not just about maximising the effectiveness of a model, it's much more integrative. Tooling, NLP, knowledge graphs and predictive tools, working together is the new frontier - integrated approaches that use multiple disciplines. The bottleneck has shifted from new algos to integrating multiple methods with each other and also with human decision makers. This is the importance of Decision Intelligence."

- Dr. Lorien Pratt, Quantellia Chief Scientist and Founder

Our methods and processes

Our work is driven by the scientific method and guided by NASA’s technology readiness levels (TRLs). During the development cycle we conduct regular reviews with experts and potential end-users. This ensures the research stays on-target and delivers maximum impact, but also means that our partners gain a deep understanding of what is created.

We sincerely believe in the motto ‘better together’ - that collaboration and cooperation builds healthy knowledge ecosystems, creating opportunities for all. Our programs are built on large and diverse communities of experts who collaborate to produce open outcomes using transparent processes.

We don’t offer inscrutable ‘black boxes’. Instead we work with our partners to develop systems that explain the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of a result. We are keen on ‘explainable artificial intelligence’ as a building block of trusted systems that can be validated and audited for decision making.

Who we are

Trillium is an impact-led social enterprise operating between industry and academia. We have chosen this structure to give us the greatest chance of achieving our mission - to accelerate the adoption of trusted intelligent systems for the benefit of humanity.

We balance delivering impact in a financially sustainable way. We aim to give our team, our researchers and our faculty a great journey and the chance to do some of the best work of their lives.

We are different from traditional profit and shareholder-led companies as we do not need to maximise our returns for owners and shareholders. Instead, we invest any profit we make into new projects and programs. We are also different to charities as we can apply a wider range of business models and approaches to increase our impact, and when appropriate, maximise commercial opportunities and assets.

“We know something different needed to be done in the technology space ... to help us address these [extreme weather] issues. The future is going to be about the use of space [science] to genuinely improve the socio-economic and prosperity outcomes for this country. This is not just about data and information use during bushfires but how we monitor and manage natural resources and environment. What has been missing is something that harnesses the latest technology and lasts beyond bushfire fighting season.”

- Hugh Durrant-Whyte, New South Wales Chief Scientist & Engineer

Brands

Who we are

We are an international team of researchers, scientists, designers, developers and AI specialists motivated by ‘impact for human good’ through the accelerated application of trusted intelligent technology. 

  • James Parr

    FOUNDER AND CEO

    James has spent his career tackling challenging systemic problems such as climate change, obesity, asteroid hunting, disaster response and violent extremism.

    Part product designer - part scientist - part entrepreneur - part inventor, James is a hybrid who believes in the power of interdisciplinary approaches to fast track innovation and is a passionate advocate of the power of teams and partnerships to do great things for the good of humankind.

  • Sarah McGeehan

    CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER

    Sarah is responsible for the operations and finance across the UK, American and Australian group of companies. She has over 20 years of experience, setting up and managing programs across science, innovation and finance. Previously, she led the Health Innovation Programme at The Young Foundation, the NESTA Social Enterprise Investment Fund and was deputy chief executive of the CDFA (now Responsible Finance) for five years.

  • Jodie Hughes

    HR AND OPERATIONS DIRECTOR

    Jodie is responsible for the human resources strategy, focusing on global talent, diversity, inclusion, and cultural development. She also manages the operational and financial aspects of the business. With a learning ethic at heart she has been instrumental in enabling Trillium’s vision by leading the team in delivering world-class research accelerator programs. With over 15 years of experience in operations and management, Jodie brings the passion, talent, experience, and strategy that allows Trillium’s ambitious team to thrive.

  • Cormac Purcell

    CHIEF SCIENTIST

    Cormac is Trillium’s chief scientist, leading R&D efforts into bushfire and flood resilience, as well as machine learning on-board satellites. With a 20-year background in professional astrophysics, he has worked between academia and industry as an interdisciplinary scientist, building intelligent systems for ecology, astronomy and disaster management.

    Cormac has a PhD in astrophysics and is also an Adjunct Senior Lecturer at the UNSW School of Computer Science and Engineering.

  • Anne Spalding

    PROGRAM DIRECTOR

    Anne has a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics and experience in mathematical modelling and software engineering. Anne's background is in education and technical training encompassing a combination of skills in team leadership, learning and development and program management. She has worked in academia, early and late stage education startups and established technical companies. As program director at Trillium, Anne will create a collaborative research space for innovation.

  • Jonathan Knowles

    EXPLORATION DIRECTOR

    With 30 years in Silicon Valley senior leadership positions at Apple, Adobe, and Autodesk, in addition to an active career in a variety of science, engineering, and academic domains, Jonathan is a proven creative thinker and respected voice on future trends, mindset, long-range vision, and "moonshot" thinking. Jonathan provides insight on the intersection of emerging technologies and societal trends, and closing the gap between the theory and the practice of innovation in a world of rapidly accelerating technological capabilities.

  • Leo Silverberg

    DIGITAL DESIGNER + FULL STACK DEVELOPER

    Leo is a digital designer and technologist working across the fields of interaction design, artificial intelligence and grand challenges, with experience ranging from full-stack web development, front-end / UX designed to risograph print. Leo has a focus on data gathering, data visualisation and engaging interaction.

  • Jon Rushton

    INDUSTRIAL + SYSTEMS DESIGNER

    Jon is an experienced product + systems designer with 8+ years of experience specialising in space related concepts, hardware development, CAD, systems design, sustainability, prototyping, illustration, aid dependency avoidance and open source projects.

    He graduated from Brunel University with 1st class honours in Industrial design which allowed him to follow his passion in a career that solves challenging problems and prototypes on a different level with cutting edge tools, processes and materials.

  • Ana Freitas

    COMMUNICATIONS DESIGNER

    Ana is a communications designer with experience in branding, print-media, web and UX design. She combines technical proficiency with creativity and a modern design aesthetic. Ana has spent over 10 years collaborating with artists and galleries, as well as freelance design for corporate clients, charities and start-ups.

  • Catherine Ballarin

    PROJECT MANAGER

    With a background in socioliguistics and a passion for AI Catherine brings a unique set of skills to Trillium. Based in Sweden, our globe trotting PM is a facilitation fanatic, a proud sustainer of women in tech and a restless italian, bringing enthusiasm and adaptability to every project.

  • Vít Růžička

    ML RESEARCHER

    Vít is a DPhil student at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Oxford, supervised by Andrew Markham and Niki Trigoni. He participated in FDL Europe 2021 as a ML researcher in the “AI On-Board” team and in FDL US 2022 as a ML team lead. In 2019-20, he was working as a research assistant and lecturer at the University of the Arts London in the Creative Computing Institute. Before that he was on a research internship at ETH Zurich in the EcoVision group (2019) and at Carnegie Mellon University in Franz Franchetti’s group (2017-18). He did his MSc and BSc at the Czech Technical University in Prague. He likes Machine Learning research, Arts, literature, travelling and analog photography.

  • Giacomo Acciarini

    ML RESEARCHER

    Giacomo has a diverse range of expertise, spanning from astrodynamics to applied machine learning, where he focuses on probabilistic programming and deep learning techniques in the context of space science problems. Currently, he is a PhD researcher at the University of Surrey, working in collaboration with the ESA/ACT. His research focuses on advanced mathematical techniques applied to dynamical system theory, specifically the motion of spacecraft around small uncertain bodies. He has also been working on several topics at the intersection between space science and advanced machine learning, including spacecraft collision avoidance, orbital propagation, thermospheric density modeling, and space weather forecasting, among other topics.

Each edition of Intelligence Age features discussions between today’s AI and space leaders about tomorrow’s most pressing problems and most promising ideas, from AI safety and ethics to inter-planetary stewardship.

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Contact us

Do you have questions or comments?
We are always looking for new challenges. Help us build an intelligent future.

team@trillium.tech