AI development company for Hobart Antarctic research, aquaculture, tourism, and renewable energy.

We do not operate a Hobart office. Aiinfox runs from our Mohali, India HQ and a Frisco, TX office. For Hobart clients we deliver with a clean afternoon AEST/AEDT overlap from Mohali (9am IST is 1:30pm AEST winter / 2:30pm AEDT summer). For on-site engagements at the AAD Kingston headquarters, CSIRO Castray Esplanade, IMAS at Salamanca, Royal Hobart Hospital, Hydro Tasmania, or the Tasmanian aquaculture sites (Macquarie Harbour, Tasman Peninsula, Bass Strait facilities) for kickoff, milestone reviews, or security walk-throughs, we travel to Hobart on a scheduled cadence rather than maintaining a sub-scale local presence.

No — and we are explicit about that on the first call rather than after the contract is signed. The Information Security Registered Assessors Programme (IRAP) is the Australian Government's cyber-security assessment framework. Aiinfox is a foreign engineering provider, not an Australian-hosted SaaS, so IRAP-assessment of our own platform is not the relevant control structure. For Australian Antarctic Division-adjacent or Commonwealth PROTECTED-classified engagements, we structure the work to fit inside an existing IRAP-assessed Commonwealth cloud boundary (typically AWS Australia or Azure Australia at the appropriate classification, with the IRAP assessment held by the cloud provider and your delivery prime); our engineers connect over a privileged-access path that your security team controls. If your engagement absolutely requires an IRAP-assessed delivery vendor, we will recommend an IRAP-assessed Australian prime rather than pretending otherwise. For commercial-confidential AAD and CSIRO engagements, we deliver the senior engineering directly.

Strong. Tasmania observes AEST (UTC+10) in winter and AEDT (UTC+11) in summer. From Mohali IST (UTC+5:30), our 9am IST is your 1:30pm AEST winter / 2:30pm AEDT summer, giving a clean four-hour afternoon overlap with the Hobart working day every weekday. Daily standups, twice-weekly demos, and most ad-hoc problem-solving sessions land inside that window. Written async updates land before your morning. For engagements needing morning Hobart coverage as well, we extend to early-IST starts on a planned cadence.

Carefully and explicitly. For Huon, Tassal, Petuna, and broader Tasmanian aquaculture engagements where the data is commercial-confidential — proprietary fish-pen camera feeds, biomass models, harvest timing, feed conversion ratios, environmental telemetry, contract terms with growers — the engagement defaults to source-available delivery (your repo, your IP) with self-hosted Llama 3 on vLLM inside the customer's Australian VPC where the trade-secret posture requires zero third-party inference. For environmental permits and export certifications (MSC, BAP, EU import) where the documents are intended for regulator submission, document intelligence on managed inference endpoints is supported. Audit logs capture every prompt and tool call against the trade-secret boundary.

Yes. Our engagement defaults are aligned with the Privacy Act 1988, the 13 Australian Privacy Principles, and the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme. The Tasmanian Personal Information Protection Act 2004 (PIPA Tas, administered by the Tasmanian Ombudsman) governs personal information handling by Tasmanian public sector bodies and certain external service providers — relevant for Tasmanian Government-adjacent and TasNetworks / Hydro Tasmania-adjacent engagements. We map both regimes into the engagement DPA, run a Privacy Impact Assessment for engagements processing personal information at scale, and structure data flows so Tasmanian-public-body personal information remains in Australia through every step of the pipeline including inference. For NDB obligations, the incident response playbook includes the 30-day assessment window and the OAIC notification path.

At engagement-design level, yes. The Antarctic Treaty System imposes data-sharing obligations on Australian Antarctic Programme participants — CCAMLR (the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources) governs data sharing for marine living resources, ATCM (the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting) governs environmental data sharing among Treaty parties. For AAD-adjacent engagements where we ship ML or document-intelligence pipelines over Southern Ocean datasets, we structure the engagement so that AAD-side stewardship of CCAMLR-reportable and ATCM-reportable data flows is preserved — we do not silently move treaty-scoped data to non-Australian endpoints, and audit logs capture every data movement against the treaty-scoped boundary. The data-stewardship decision is the AAD's, not ours; we build the engineering to honour it.

Your call on the region. AWS ap-southeast-2 (Sydney) is the broadest-catalogue AU primary region and the default for most Hobart clients. AWS ap-southeast-4 (Melbourne) is the alternative — geographically closer to Hobart than Sydney. Azure Australia East (Sydney) and Azure Australia Central (Canberra) are supported. GCP australia-southeast1 (Sydney) is the standard GCP option. For inference, we route Claude or GPT-4o to an Australian region depending on your DPA, or we self-host Llama 3 on vLLM inside your Sydney or Melbourne VPC for zero third-party inference — the default for AAD-adjacent commercial-confidential and high-trade-secret aquaculture engagements.

Most v1 engagements at Aiinfox land between AUD 40,000 and AUD 180,000 fixed-price for a focused build — an AI agent, a RAG system, a voice pipeline, a computer-vision pipeline, or a bespoke ML model. Larger multi-quarter engagements with fine-tuning, custom evals, Antarctic / CSIRO scientific-ML work, aquaculture computer-vision over fish-pen camera feeds, or Tasmanian PIPA-aligned public-body work typically reach AUD 220,000 to AUD 420,000. Pilots are usually AUD 15,000 to AUD 28,000 with acceptance criteria written into scope. Hobart clients invoice in AUD via bank transfer or USD by preference.