Jon Whittle
Professorial Fellow (Artificial Intelligence)
Professor Jon Whittle is Australia's leading thought leader on AI for business, currently a Distinguished Fellow at the Institute for Digital Innovation and AI (IDIA) at Melbourne Business School.
A former technical lead at NASA and director of CSIRO's AI capability, he also founded Australia's National AI Centre. He has a global reputation for applying AI to achieve real world impact with a human-centred approach, having worked with or advised many international companies, including Boeing, Google, NASA as well as state and federal governments. He has worked extensively in the US, the UK, UAE, Germany and Australia.
He is author of two books on AI: Responsible AI - Best Practices for Creating Trustworthy AI Systems, and AI for Business - A Guide to AI Adoption. He also hosts the award winning podcast, CSIRO Presents Everyday AI. He regularly appears in the media, having recently been interviewed for ABC Radio, The Age, Sydney Morning Herald, The AFR, Sky TV and ABC TV.
Jon has over 30 years’ experience developing and applying AI solutions at scale within government, business and not-for-profit organisations. He has led teams developing AI to protect the Great Barrier Reef, to save lives using robotics in search-and-rescue operations, and putting Australian AI on the International Space Station. He brings this knowledge to executive education programs he teaches at Melbourne Business School, most notably the course Leading Strategically with AI. He also teaches AI and related topics on the MBA program.
Books:
AI for Business: A Guide to AI Adoption, Whittle, J., CSIRO Publishing, 2026.
Responsible AI: Best Practices for Creating Trustworthy Systems, Xiwei,X., Lu, Q., Zhu, L. and Whittle, J., Addison Wesley Professional, 2023
Most Notable Research
Sung Une Lee, Harsha Perera, Yue Liu, Boming Xia, Qinghua Lu, Liming Zhu, Olivier Salvado, Jon Whittle: Responsible AI Question Bank for Risk Assessment. ACM Computing. Surveys. 58(9): 232:1-232:36 (2026)
Yue Liu, Sin Kit Lo, Qinghua Lu, Liming Zhu, Dehai Zhao, Xiwei Xu, Stefan Harrer, Jon Whittle: Agent design pattern catalogue: A collection of architectural patterns for foundation model based agents. Journal of Systems and Software. 220: 112278 (2025)
Qinghua Lu, Liming Zhu, Xiwei Xu, Jon Whittle, Didar Zowghi, Aurelie Jacquet: Responsible AI Pattern Catalogue: A Collection of Best Practices for AI Governance and Engineering. ACM Computing. Surveys. 56(7): 173:1-173:35 (2024)
Qinghua Lu, Liming Zhu, Jon Whittle, James Bret Michael: Software Engineering for Responsible AI. Computer 56(4): 13-16 (2023)
Waqar Hussain, Harsha Perera, Jon Whittle, Arif Nurwidyantoro, Rashina Hoda, Rifat Ara Shams, Gillian C. Oliver: Human Values in Software Engineering: Contrasting Case Studies of Practice. IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 48(5): 1818-1833 (2022)
Jon Whittle, Maria Angela Ferrario, Will Simm, Waqar Hussain: A Case for Human Values in Software Engineering. IEEE Software. 38(1): 106-113 (2021)
