Tom Allen Email & Phone Number

Melbourne, Vic, Au

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Control Bionics specializes in creating cutting-edge devices that revolutionize the way people with disabilities interact with technology. Our flagship product, the NeuroNode, uses Electromyography (‘EMG’) and accelerometer data to detect a user's intent and translate it into actions on a computer or tablet. We also develop a semi-autonomous driving upgrade for motorized wheelchairs to enhance mobility for those who need it most. Our mission is to create a more inclusive world by empowering people with disabilities to access technology with ease.I have enjoyed a consulting relationship with Control Bionics for several years as a trusted advisor. Beginning with helping to design and develop the first prototype of the DROVE autonomous wheelchair, I now guide their software and engineering roadmap in a part-time capacity.

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Triple Point Games is the holding company for my game development IP portfolio. For licensing opportunities, please visit my website at triplepointgames.com

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

I'm an experienced CTO and engineering leader who can bridge the gap between business management and product development. My specialty is working with engineering teams on mechatronic products - anything that combines software, electronics, and hardware. Working as a consultant I assist clients with their technology strategy, engineering skills mix, system & software architecture, and more. Typically I work most closely with the product development or engineering team, while reporting directly to the CEO or BoD. A selection of current and former clients are listed in my timeline below. Please visit drtomallen.com/consulting for testimonials and more details on how I can help your business.

Melbourne, Australia

We're a small team developing fully-automated Escape Rooms, and we were the first in the world to bring this to market. (Seriously, we did this in 2016. I know people always claim dubious world-firsts, but this one actually checks out...) We combine robotics, product development, and software skills with story telling, gameplay, and experience design. Our creations are a cross between a computer game where the interface is a real-world environment, and a piece of interactive fiction that you experience rather than read.Our first room 'Shutdown' opened in Strike Bowling Bar at Melbourne Central in August 2016 to stellar reviews from players and press alike. Since then we've developed two new games, and built multiple copies of these throughout Australia. We now service 13 of our escape rooms across six venues in three states and have had over 150,000 players through them.In August 2022, we opened our own state-of-the-art venue, "The Curium Experience" in Collingwood, Melbourne. We've had over 500 five-star reviews of our first game "Extraction" and were the only room in the entire southern hemisphere to be awarded a Terpeca Top Room award for 2023! Please visit curium.com.au for bookings and more info!

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

SVP Melbourne is a social venture investment group, formed around a core of passionate people who want to make lasting social change in the communities we care about. We volunteer our time and our talents, and donate our pooled funds to not for profits working with disadvantaged and marginalised youth.I help SVP’s partner organisations with strategic advice, IT experience, and practical engineering efforts applied towards people and process issues, growing and dealing with operational change, and general business problem solving.

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

I sat on the board of Kids Like Us, a social enterprise aiming to broaden the horizons for 'twice-exceptional' kids - children who are gifted in one or more areas such as sport, academics, or the creative arts, and yet also have a cognitive or physical disability. These children have real struggles progressing through conventional schooling, and KLU helps to provide a range of activities and support services to help them and their families.With the changes in NDIS and related funding structures, as well as the impact of COVID on face-to-face counseling operations, the board made the difficult decision to cease operations at the end of 2022.

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

A short contract to establish the development processes for a team of software, electronics, mechanical, and machine-learning engineers developing a suite of optical radars for search and rescue, object detection, classification, and tracking applications. I will watch their progress with a keen eye - they're building some seriously impressive tech!

Melbourne, Australia

Cooltrax is a leading supplier of IoT solutions to manage the cold chain. This involves temperature monitoring and control of refrigerated containers, trucks, and the products within them, as well as tracking of goods as they move from suppliers to retailers.I ran the various Engineering teams from the Melbourne office and established Cooltrax's product and technology roadmap and strategy. I remain involved as a technology strategy and management consultant to both Cooltrax and the parent CPS Group of companies.

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Major wins in my first 12 months include: reducing cloud and IT costs by more than my annual salary in the first two months, doubling the engineering team size with diverse and complementary hires, introducing a public API that led to multiple new partnerships, zero customer churn and best ever sales figures from all our operating geographies, and a demonstrable impact on feature development velocity and customer satisfaction.

Melbourne, Australia

I was the point of contact providing Product Architecture guidance and governance to the $1.4bn Enterprise Mobility portfolio of Telstra Enterprise. My team was at the core of the "Design Dojo" which led the charge in turning Telstra from telco to tech-co. I then worked directly within the enterprise digitisation programme to establish strategy and patterns to transform every one of Telstra's B2B products onto a new IT and networking stack. In particular, I established a common language for modular product development, and the organisational design and cadence for getting cross-company teams to work together from design to delivery.

Melbourne, Australia

Brought on to manage a four year old product in the intellectual property protection space, I rewrote the system for better scalability using Python, Celery, Redis, AWS EC2 & S3, Vagrant, Ansible, and more. It now handles millions of data points per day (up from tens of thousands), has a far better sales proposition, and has higher accuracy than any of the competitors in the field. The company was acquired in 2019.

Melbourne, Australia

I provided mentoring, regular one-on-ones, and input into performance reviews for a quarter of PI's 20+ software engineers.

Melbourne, Australia

I was promoted out of the Engineering stream directly into PI's consulting discipline. That meant more projects, more responsibility, and more fun! In the new role I took a pro-active approach to generating leads and new business for our consulting arm, developing and promoting the culture of innovation within Planet Innovation, and providing technical engineering and software advice to our clients. I managed one small project and was the team lead for a larger project as it transitioned from development into manufacture.

Melbourne, Australia

Roles included writing the software and firmware that enabled our hardware to shine, thinking up new inventions for in-house product development, and liaising with clients in a consulting capacity.

Sydney, Australia

At Bigcommerce I rapidly grew my programming and architecture skills, while using my experience in designing large scale systems to help transition the company to a service oriented architecture. My primary responsibility was to design and implement an authentication and authorization system to secure communications between internal and external services. This helped open up the Bigcommerce platform to outside developers, and enables a marketplace of third-party services for merchants. 90% of my code here was riding Ruby on Rails.

Sydney, Australia

Triple Point Robotics was a lean startup that aimed to bring useful and innovative robots and robotics technology to the world. I led the small team in exploring the market for a stablized projector/camera combination ideal for multi-viewer augmented reality, portable tele-conferencing and video chat, and novel occlusion based interfaces.After performing an efficient customer development process, we concluded that these technologies were still outside the consumer price range, making the business non-viable.

At the Rio Tinto Centre for Mine Automation (RTCMA) within the Australian Centre for Field Robotics (ACFR), I designed control, planning, and automation software to enable robots to optimise the open pit mining process. This involved decomposing tasks into chunks that could be assigned to individual vehicles and people, then scheduled appropriately while ensuring safe transitions between manned, unmanned, and mixed zones within the mine site. This architecture and its network protocols were taken over by Rio Tinto proper, and incorporated into their "Mine of the Future" programme. I also had my own research agenda within the planning and optimisation fields, creating an efficient algorithm for non-holonomic trajectory planning for different vehicles simultaneously.My main project was jointly leading the development of the "Entity Interface and Protocol" which provided message structures from high level operational instructions all the way down to the wire format for transmission. This interface was prototyped in C++ and demonstrated on two robotic vehicles and a manned vehicle, in a scenario representative of a real mining environment. Following the successful demonstration, this code and interface is being production readied by Rio Tinto's internal teams, and made available as a standard to mining vehicle OEMs.

Sydney, Australia

Undertook a thesis to solve the Time-Optimal Planning and Execution (TOPE) problem. (See publications below.)

Sydney, Australia

Developed a working implementation of parallel computation of path planning from coarse large-scale routes to detailed small-scale manoeuvres, and wrote this up as a thesis for which I was awarded 1st Class Honours.

Sydney, Australia

Designed a suite of cross-platform multi-threaded GUI utilities for the control and monitoring of two autonomous ground vehicles. These GUIs were still in use in 2012, and several generic sensor data visualisation tools have been used in over ten different projects.

Contract research secondment from ACFR. Led research into novel hierarchical planning architectures for unmanned ground vehicles. Demonstrated and delivered working proof-of-concept system within two months.

Sydney, Australia

Computer and network support, software training, receptionist duties, invoicing and inventory management. I also carted a metric shitload of liquid nitrogen across the university grounds.

Ph.D., Robotics

How do you solve problems quickly, without also spending too long thinking about how to do it? What if the problem changes while you're.

B.E./B.Sc., Mechatronic Engineering, Physics

Graduated with 1st Class Honours