Trillium Technologies

Trillium Technologies is a social enterprise with a dedicated team of project leads, engineers and designers, aiming to develop technology platforms that tackle grand challenges. Trillium’s head office is based in London UK, with offices in Colorado, USA and Sydney, Australia.

A specialised technology consultancy focused on tackling grand challenges, such as Obesity, Planetary Defense (Asteroids, Comets), Space Situational Awareness (SSA), Lunar Exploration, Sustainability, Climate Change, Disaster response and Bushfires. Over the past half-decade it has established leadership in the application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to challenges on the ‘to-do’ list of ESA, NASA, CSA, LSA and most recently, the Australian Space Agency through its ‘Frontier Development Lab’ (FDL.ai) and Data Quest initiatives (FDLausnz.org). FDL is a case study in the efficacy of public/private partnership, and since its inception, has encouraged the involvement and engagement of the private sector, where contributions include funding, subject matter experts, facilities, hardware (GPU/CPU) cloud compute and storage, software and AI/ML algorithms. Private sector partners have included Google, Intel, NVIDIA, Airbus, the Satellite Applications Catapult and Nvidia.

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.

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.