Josh Cooper - Bachelor of Science and Bachelor of Engineering (Specialisation) with Honours in Engineering, majoring in Computer Systems Engineering and Computer Science
I graduated from the University of Tasmania with a combined Bachelor of Engineering and Bachelor of Science, majoring in Computer Systems Engineering and Computer Science across both the Launceston and Hobart campuses. From early on, I was drawn to artificial intelligence, not just as a technical discipline, but as a tool to tackle real-world challenges. My honours thesis focused on building a facial-recognition system resilient to heavy occlusions and age-related changes, combining colour-space–based skin-tone clustering with transfer-learned neural models and synthetic-occlusion data. I also completed a research project on coreference resolution, fine-tuning BERT-style models to improve entity linking, work that anticipated the capabilities of today’s Large Language Models.
UTAS hackathons (UHack) were my proving ground. After multiple finalist and winner placements, I co-founded Bufferlo, a startup that used deep learning to flag predatory behaviour in children’s social media chats. That early experience taught me how to apply AI for social good and gave me the entrepreneurial foundation I’ve carried into my professional career.
I now work as an AI Engineer at ReadyTech, where I’ve gone from software engineering into a role focused on designing and deploying Gen AI and machine-learning systems that tackle some of the country’s most pressing issues, like improving education outcomes, streamlining employment services and enhancing workforce productivity. These are complex, economy-wide challenges and it’s incredibly rewarding to apply advanced AI techniques to problems that matter.
What’s especially meaningful is being able to do all of this from Launceston. I’m proof that you don’t have to leave Tasmania to work on frontier technology or have a national impact; you can build a meaningful tech career right here.
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