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	Dr Mark Howden is a Senior Principal Research Scientist with CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, Canberra, Australia. He is also the leader of the ‘Adaptive primary industries and enterprises’ theme in the new CSIRO Climate Adaptation Flagship and has recently been involved with the new Agricultural Sustainability Initiative in CSIRO and the Prime Minister's report on adaptation to climate change. Mark’s work has focussed on the impacts of climate on Australian ecosystems and urban systems dealing with amongst other things: the dynamics of grazed and cropped ecosystems, development of innovative and sustainable farming systems, biodiversity, energy systems and water use. He has also developed the national (NGGI) and international (IPCC/OECD) greenhouse gas inventories for the agricultural sector and assessed sustainable methods of reducing greenhouse emissions from agriculture. Mark has worked on climate change issues for over 20 years with farmers, farmer groups, catchment groups, industry bodies, agribusiness, urban utilities and various policy agencies. He has been a major contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Second, Third and Fourth Assessment reports, the IPCC Regional Impacts Report and the IPCC Special Report on ‘Land use, land use change and forestry’ that addressed issues of carbon sequestration and the Kyoto Protocol, sharing the 2007 Peace Prize with other IPCC participants and Al Gore. For further information about Dr Mark Howden, see http://www.csiro.au/people/Mark.Howden.html
	Dr David Hughes is Emeritus Professor of Food Marketing at Imperial College London, and Visiting Professor at the University of Kent Business School and at the Royal Agricultural College, U.K. David is a much sought-after speaker at international conferences and seminars on global food industry issues, particularly consumer trends, and is a strong proponent of building vertical alliances between key chain members in the food industry - farmers, life science and input companies, ingredient firms, food and beverage manufacturers, retailers and food service. He has lived and worked in Europe, North America, the Caribbean, Africa and South East Asia. David has extensive experience as an international advisory board member with food companies and organisations in three continents. Currently he is a Non-Executive Director of KGG – a U.K. farmer-owned berry fruit business (US$260 million turnover in 2006) with a blue chip customer portfolio; and on the Advisory Board of Rabobank, UK. He works closely with senior management of food and beverage firms on business strategy development and with governments on food policy formulation.
	Professor John Billingsley graduated in mathematics and in electrical engineering from Cambridge University in 1960. After four years working in the aircraft industry on autopilot design, he returned to Cambridge and gained a PhD in control theory in 1968. He led research teams in Cambridge University developing early 'mechatronic' systems including a laser phototypesetting system which was the precursor of the laser printer and the 'acoustic telescope' which enabled sound source distributions to be visualised (this was used in the development of jet engines with reduced noise). He moved to Portsmouth Polytechnic in 1976, where he founded the Robotics Research Group. In April 1992 he took up a Chair of Engineering at the University of Southern Queensland in Toowoomba. His primary concern is mechatronics research and he is Director of Technology Research of the National Centre for Engineering in Agriculture (NCEA). He has contrived machines which have been exhibited in the 'Palais de la Decouverte' in Paris, in the 'Exploratorium' at San Francisco and in the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, hands-on experiments to stimulate an interest in control. Several robots resulting from projects with which he was associated are now on show in the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney. He is the international chairman of an annual conference series on Mechatronics and Machine Vision in Practice that is now in its fourteenth year. He was awarded an Erskine Fellowship by the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, where he spent two months February and March 2003. In December 2006, he received an achievement medal from the Institution of Engineering and Technology, London. He has published three books in Mechatronics, some of which were translated to German and Spanish, and edited half a dozen volumes of conference proceedings, published in book form.
	Sarah Pennell is General Manager of Professional Services at Horticulture Australia Limited. She started her professional life as a journalist, but for the last 15 years has worked in nutrition education and food marketing, initially in the dairy industry. She has been with HAL and its predecessor, the AHC, for nine years in various roles including corporate communications, marketing and industry services. She is now responsible for the team of 20 program managers that oversee around 1,200 industry marketing and R&D projects.