A robot sex expert and former far-right candidate who was awarded a Queen’s Birthday honour for “significant service to international education” says he is setting up a graduate school with Fraser Anning which will teach classes on “Trumpism” and “Bannonism”.

Prof Adrian Cheok was also accused in an open letter by organisers of a 2017 academic conference of using “aggressive, belittling” language towards another professor. In a separate incident, he also labelled another academic as “psycho … old, fat and balding” and said he worked at a “tin pot university”, according to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The body that bestows the honours has declined to respond to questions about why Cheok, who ran as a candidate for Anning’s far-right Conservative National party at the May federal election, was made a member of the Order of Australia this week, saying it did not comment on individual cases.

The Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games had Cheok as a keynote speaker at its Foundations of Digital Games conference in 2017 and in the aftermath of the event it issued a formal apology for his behaviour and social media posts.

“He singled out tweets by assistant professor Gillian Smith (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), and made multiple tweets in response, directly attacking her personally,” organisers said in a open letter.

“The use of aggressive, belittling, or otherwise intimidating language, is a serious violation of the norms and values of the FDG conference and of our community.”

I hope @FDGconf organizers address the clearly toxic behavior that one of their Keynoters is displaying. This is unacceptable. #FDG17 pic.twitter.com/GuN4kZdM5D — Rogelio E. Cardona-Rivera (@recardona) August 19, 2017

Cheok also attracted controversy last year as an organiser of the International Conference on Advances in Computer Entertainment Technology (ACE) when he invited Steve Bannon, former White House chief strategist and former rightwing website Breitbart executive chairman, to be a keynote speaker.

Some academics who usually attend and present at the computer science conference were upset it was being politicised and pulled out en masse. Members of the steering committee also quit.

“I can no longer guarantee the independence of the conference or the quality of its review and publication process. I therefore announce my resignation from the ACE steering and program committees with immediate effect,” committee member Yoram Chisik wrote in his parting statement.

Cheok responded with a now deleted tirade of tweets, according to a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

“Psycho Yoram and his hater crew should worry less about ACE conference, and more about research. His h-index is a miserable 9 (mine is 44!) & even though old (+fat +balding), is still “visiting” assistant professor (not full time) in a tin-pot university in the middle of nowhere!” he wrote, according to the report.

(The h-index measures the productivity and citation impact of an academic’s publications).

Following an online backlash and boycott, that event and a connected Love and Sex with Robots conference at the US’s University of Montana were cancelled.

Cheok responded angrily to the boycott on the ACE conference website, in a post that is now deleted but accessible via an internet archive website.

“What has happened to the ACE conference in 2018 by the angry free-speech mob is very similar to what happened in Germany in 1933. In 1933, the Nazi university student association created blacklists of works by literary and political figures such as Bertolt Brecht, Erich Maria Remarque, and Ernest Hemingway that were to be thrown into the flames,” Cheok wrote.

In a recent social media post, Cheok also likened Labor’s Senate leader Penny Wong, who is a lesbian, to a man.

AUSTRALIA'S worst politician Penny Wong! pic.twitter.com/8YJ7zXSCcn — Professor Adrian David Cheok (@adriancheok) June 4, 2019

The Australian Honours and Awards Secretariat, which comes under the Office of the Governor General, receives all nominations and conducts research and reference checks.

It then forwards nominations to the Council for the Order of Australia, a 16-member advisory council, which makes decisions. The council includes prominent names such as businessman Rupert Myer, former sex discrimination commissioner Elizabeth Broderick, former Northern Territory chief minister Shane Stone and former NT Cattlemen’s Association chief Tracey Hayes, as well various state bureaucrats.

The Guardian individually attempted to contact 13 of the 15 current members – the majority referred enquiries onto the secretariat.

A spokesman for the secretariat said it did not comment on any specific nomination, as those deliberations were confidential.

But he said “each nomination is researched and due diligence undertaken”.

He said the council met in February to recommend this year’s Queen’s Birthday honours and that recommendations were “based on the information it had at the time of consideration”.

“Any action undertaken by an individual after the council has considered a nomination is not part of the council’s decision making process, but could be grounds for future reconsideration of the individual’s membership of the Order.”

The council considered 1,374 nominations and recommended 993 awards, which equates to a 72% chance of success.

Some people have had their honours stripped in the past, after being embroiled in scandals or serving jail time.

Asked if he was a worthy winner of an Order of Australia, Cheok responded: “Yes absolutely. I am a strong believer of freedom of speech.”

“The Order of Australia is not an award from North Korea, to name but one country which often punishes freely expressed opinions. People can express their views about me and I am free to express my opinions about others,” he told Guardian Australia.

At the May federal election, Cheok attracted 868 votes in the lower house seat of Boothby in South Australia running for Anning’s party.

Last year, Anning was widely condemned for invoking the “final solution” in a speech to parliament, in which he called for a plebiscite on ending immigration by Muslims and non-English speaking people “from the third world”. Anning was not re-elected.

Cheok is setting up an educational institution claiming to be located in Brisbane called the Nikola Tesla graduate school, which lists Anning as the honorary chairman and president. The website offers no physical address for the school or phone number.

The school is named after Cheok’s hero, Tesla, a Serbian-American inventor and engineer who discovered and patented the rotating magnetic field.

The website says the school offers masters and graduate diplomas in electric energy technologies and electrical, energy and computer business and technologies. It also says it offers masters and graduate diplomas in western civilisation and political philosophy where students can study subjects ranging from “Knights, Ladies, Kings, Questers” to “Bannonism” and “Trumpism”.

The website lists $8,500 fees for a master’s degree and $1,950 for a graduate diploma and says there are rolling enrolment dates so perspective students can start any time and finish courses within a year full-time.

The school’s website also asks for donations, however the institution is not presently registered with the Australian Charities and Not for Profit Commission.

The school is not presently registered with the Tertiary Education and Quality Standards Agency.

“All higher education providers as defined in the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency Act 2011, must be registered by TEQSA,” a spokesman said.

“Higher education providers that have not been granted self-accrediting authority (almost all of the non-university providers) must also have their courses of study accredited by us.”

“The Nikola Tesla graduate school is not on the national register of higher education providers.”

Fraser Anning, Australian senator, on the Nikola Tesla graduate school website. Photograph: NIKOLA TESLA GRADUATE SCHOOL- Website

Cheok and Anning insist the website is a draft and hasn’t been publicly launched.

“We are asking people around the world (our personal contacts) to look at our draft and help us with suggestions and edits to the page. Whoever is prompting you to enquire about our plans for the school is basing their dirt digging on a pre-alpha version of a website,” Cheok said.

A spokesman for Anning confirmed the senator would not be teaching at the proposed school.

“He has very little involvement in it,” he told the Guardian. “It’s at conceptual stage... the graduate school is a work in progress. Also there are talks with lawyers about school registration.”

Cheok also says he is presently the “director of the Imagineering Institute” in Malaysia.

A now deleted tweet, which shows up on Cheok’s Pinterest account, shows the Imagineering Institute has closed down.

“I begged Malicious May Quah and Bean Counter Effizal to donate the equipment to @utm_my or Raffles University. They were so wicked & wasteful that they demanded a “fire sale” of all our precious equipment. Most of our lab equipments were trashed! Malaysian students loss! Sick!”

Cheok said the lab’s previous five-year funding had run dry.

“It is quite common for research labs to be temporarily in-between research grants, and the Imagineering Institute is in discussion with other grant funders who we expect will enable the institute to reopen,” he said.



Adrian Cheok’s Imagineering Institute appears to have been closed down. A Twitter screengrab from his Pinterest page. Photograph: Pinterest/ Adrian David Cheok on

Cheok was a professor in the pervasive computing section of City University of London between 2013-2018, according to his online CV. His profile no longer appears on its website.

His CV also states he is presently a full professor at i-University Tokyo Japan. That institution does not open until next year, but has confirmed his future employment.