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ISSUE 22 JUNE 2010
Inspiration and imagination
secure NICTA’s path to success
Hello and welcome to the June
edition of NICTA News.
Since our last edition, we’ve enjoyed a
number of opportunities to demonstrate
how NICTA technologies answer some of
the hard IT and communications problems
faced by industry and Government today.
We took teams to CeBIT Australia in May
and travelled to CommunicAsia Singapore
in June.
Attending these large ICT industry events
gives us a chance to showcase our latest
research to a wide and varied audience.
It was evident at both CeBIT and
CommunicAsia that an economic recovery
is gradually taking shape, with strong
interest in the conference streams at both
events and reports of valuable leads and
new contacts from our researchers and
commercialisation staff.
At its first public outing at CeBIT, the
Cognitive and Organisational Systems
Engineering (COSE) research project
demonstrated how we are helping to
improve air traffic management, health
information systems and medical error rates.
NICTA spin-out company Open Kernel Labs
(OK Labs) also had a booth on our stand,
providing information on the way they are
helping mobile device manufacturers build
effective, cheap, open platforms. Their
software is now in some 750 million mobile
devices around the world.
In addition to exhibiting at CeBIT and
CommunicAsia, we also took advantage of
opportunities to speak at these events.
During CeBIT, we partnered in the delivery
of the AusInnovate conference. Dr John
Parker, NICTA Chief Technology Officer,
Implant Systems, spoke on the topic of
emerging healthcare technologies. I was
also involved in an AusInnovate panel
www.nicta.com.au
exploring the issues Australia must address
to gain maximum advantage from the NBN.
At CommunicAsia, Rob Fitzpatrick, our
Director of Commercialisation and Markets,
spoke at an Australian High Commission
seminar – “Why Australia for ICT?” –
highlighting NICTA’s role in both developing
and investing in IT and communications
R&D in Australia.
Demonstating this capacity, we
launched our latest start-up company at
CommunicAsia, Cohesive Data. Formed
to commercialise the NICTA IP originally
developed inside our mContext Project, the
company has attracted three experienced
IT entrepreneurs to market the technology
to mobile phone carriers in the US. Project
Leader Dr Raymond Wong will head up
the technical team at Cohesive as the
company’s inaugural Chief Technology
Officer.
NICTA supplied early seed funding for
Cohesive, underlining the important role
that targeted public investment plays in the
development of market-ready technologies.
Without the backing of Governments and
the support of universities, developments
like this too often languish in the lab, never
crossing the ‘valley of death’ to make it into
real-world use.
Raymond, a University of NSW Associate
Professor, has been an absolute asset
to NICTA and to the wider IT and
communications research community.
Along with the rest of NICTA,
I wish him all the very best in his new
venture. You can read more about Cohesive
Data and about Raymond himself, in the
following pages.
Broadband, Communications and the Digital
Economy and the Australian Research
Council which sits in the Department of
Innovation, Industry, Science and Research.
State and Territory Governments also invest
in NICTA. The ACT Government, NSW
Government (Industry and Investment)
Queensland Government (Department for
Employment, Economic Development and
Innovation) and the Victorian Government
(Multimedia Victoria), all fund and support
us. They play a vital part in making NICTA
an intellectually and creatively inspiring
institute.
This intellectual vigour is reflected in the
growing number of awards and accolades
our people are attracting. In this edition,
you will read about honours for Queensland
Lab Director Professor Terry Caelli and
Acting Scientific Director Professor Toby
Walsh, along with several important industry
awards for NICTA people including Dr Terry
Percival, Professor Gernot Heiser and the
AutoMap Project team.
Please read on for more details about
these and many other exciting events and
achievements taking place at NICTA.
Dr David Skellern
Chief Executive Officer
NICTA has many stakeholders that help
bring our breakthrough technologies to life.
The Federal Government supplies the bulk
of our funding through the Department of
From imagination to impact
Cohesive Data start-up makes its mark
NICTA and a group of
external investors
have formed a
start-up company,
Cohesive Data,
to develop and
commercialise
products based on
optimisation and
search technology
developed at
NICTA. US mobile
telecommunications
carriers will be the
first target market.
Contents
1 Letter from the CEO
2 Cohesive Data start-up
makes its mark
Bioelectronics Lab
launched in Victoria
3 Playing the field at
CommunicAsia and
CeBIT
Honours pile up for
talented NICTA people
4 Industry Education
program spreads the
word
OneVentures CEO joins
NICTA Board
5 NICTA researcher
realises start-up dream
Top AI post for Toby
Walsh
6 Feeling no pain –
Implant Systems
moves ahead
7 Lab News
NICTA helps drive EC
research co-operation
initiative
8 Events and short
courses
Page 2
Cohesive Data has been
founded by entrepreneurs/
investors Tim Sullivan, Todd
Viegut and Peter Vroom.
They are joined in the venture by
Dr Raymond Wong, who led the NICTA project
team that developed the mContext software. In
exchange for providing software and IP, NICTA
has taken an equity position in Cohesive as part
of a structured licensing arrangement. The team
has secured early seed funding from NICTA.
Products containing the NICTA IP will be
marketed initially to US mobile carriers to help
them provide seamless information delivery to
their customers. “We are very excited to take the
NICTA technology to the US and world markets,”
said Tim Sullivan, Executive Chairman of
Cohesive Data. “We feel this is a great fit within
the carriers’ needs for delivering large volumes of
information to an ever-growing mobile market.”
The four-person NICTA technical team, headed
by Dr Wong, will join Cohesive and will be based
in Sydney. “NICTA has provided a wonderful
development environment for us over the last
few years and now we are thrilled to be moving
forward as part of Cohesive,” said Dr Wong.
“I am excited to be working with Tim, Todd, and
Peter, who have all been down the technology
commercialisation road before and have helped
shape our path to market in the months it has
taken to get the spin-out off the ground.”
Dr Wong is also an Associate Professor at the
University of New South Wales, who has been
contributed to NICTA while leading the team.
The NICTA technology was refined through a
number of trials and won the CeBIT.AU Early
Innovators Award in 2007.
Bioelectronics Lab launched in Victoria
To support the development of
an advanced bionic eye and to
consolidate Australia’s leadership
in bioelectronics research, NICTA
has established a Bioelectronics
Laboratory at our Victoria Research
Lab in Melbourne.
The first project that the laboratory will support
is the development of the electronics for
the second prototype retinal implant device
being developed by Bionic Vision Australia, a
consortium of research institutes that received
$42 million in funding from the Australian
Government for the development of a
bionic eye.
“We are particularly interested in developing
exciting next-generation technologies using
our expertise in the design of extremely lowpowered wireless systems,” said NICTA CEO
Dr David Skellern. These technologies will also
support the development of intelligent systems
to remotely monitor patient health and treat a
variety of disorders.
The NICTA Bioelectronics Lab will include
An initiative ofsoftware tools for nano-scale
Our members
advanced
electronic circuit design and equipment to
test the performance of devices. “We are
excited that the Bioelectronics Lab will allow
us to meet our commitment to our partners
in the Bionic Vision Australia consortium to
develop a tiny, wireless retinal implant for the
bionic eye,” said Professor Stan Skafidas,
leader of NICTA’s bionic eye research and
head of the NICTA Bioelectronics Lab. “This
project will demonstrate the critical role
advanced electronics will play in developing this
breakthrough biomedical technology.” NICTA Victoria Research Laboratory
Director Professor Rob Evans welcomed the
announcement. “The Bioelectronics Laboratory
will make many important contributions to
innovation and new technology development.
It will also train the future generation of
bioengineers, who will help maintain Australia’s
leadership in medical research.”
The announcement coincided with the 2010
BIO International Convention in Chicago, where
the Governor of Victoria, Professor David
de Kretser AC, led a consortium of Victorian
investors and biotechnology companies.
Our partners
Playing the field at
CommunicAsia and CeBIT
NICTA once again took part in two
of the Asia Pacific region’s premier
ICT industry events, CeBIT Australia
and CommunicAsia in Singapore.
Both are strategically important
showcases and the largest events
of their kind in their markets.
Twelve research teams attended CeBIT
Australia at Darling Harbour in May. “This is
NICTA’s sixth year at CeBIT Australia,” said
NICTA CEO Dr David Skellern. “With the rollout
of the National Broadband Network now
underway, CeBIT is more important than ever,
providing Australia’s IT and communications
industry with a vibrant platform to explore and
promote the new opportunities offered by this
enormous infrastructure project.”
NICTA took eight early stage businesses and
research teams to CommunicAsia in Singapore,
including NICTA’s new R&D Services activity.
Dr Roksana Boreli’s Trusted Networking
Project, a collaboration with Singapore’s
A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research (I²R),
exhibited along with the ePASA team from
the Business Adaptation and Interoperation
Project and NICTA’s new water management
project FarmNet. Start-up company Cohesive
Data was also launched at CommunicAsia (see
opposite page for full story).
While in Singapore, NICTA’s Director of
Commercialisation & Markets, Rob Fitzpatrick,
spoke at an Australian High Commission
seminar, Why Australia for ICT? His talk
explored how information and communications
technology is a key enabler for businesses
as they strive for a competitive edge in the
international marketplace.
Honours pile up for
talented NICTA people
NICTA has graced many awards lists
over the last three months, taking
home three ATSE Clunies Ross
Awards, a CeBIT.AU Early Innovators
Award, a University of Sydney Warren
Centre Innovation Hero Award and
Engineers Australia’s MA Sargent
Medal. Quite a haul!
Three ATSE Clunies Ross Awards
Dr David Skellern, NICTA CEO, was a joint winner
with Dr Neil Weste of the ATSE Clunies-Ross for
their work in founding Radiata Communications
in 1997. Dr John Parker, NICTA Chief Technology
Officer, Implant Systems, won an ATSE CluniesRoss for his important contributions to the
design of the Cochlear implant, or ‘bionic ear’.
Dr Terry Percival, Director of the NICTA Neville
Roach Laboratory, shared his ATSE Clunies Ross
Award with four fellow team members from the
celebrated CSIRO group behind the Wi-Fi wireless
communication technology that is now found in
laptops and mobile devices around the world.
“This year’s ATSE Clunies Ross Award winners
have made significant and positive impacts on
the lives of many Australians and our economy
through the development and commercialisation
of health, communication and industrial
innovations,” said Mr Bruce Kean AM FTSE,
Chairman of the ATSE Clunies Ross Foundation.
CeBIT.AU Early Innovators Award
NICTA’s AutoMap team meanwhile took out
the CeBIT.AU Early Innovators Award in May
2010. The AutoMap technology uses advanced
computer vision algorithms to extract signage
and other data captured by road survey vehicles,
which is then analysed and used to rapidly
update digital maps. “NICTA is
delighted to win the CeBIT Early
Innovators Award”, said AutoMap
Project Leader Dr Lars Petersson.
“We were always confident we had
some world leading technology
developed here in Australia, and
winning this award validates that
belief.”
Warren Centre’s Innovation Hero
Another winner was Professor
Gernot Heiser, Chief Technology
Officer of NICTA spin-out company
Open Kernel Labs. Professor
Heiser also has senior roles at
both NICTA and the University of
NSW. He took home an Innovation
Heroes Award from the University of Sydney’s
Warren Centre for Advanced Engineering.
NICTA’s Lars Petersson, AutoMap Project
Leader and Wolfgang Lenarz, Senior Vice
President, Global Fairs Deutsche Messe AG.
Richard Hartley paper cracks leading
journal’s top ten list
MA Sargent Medal
The editorial Board of IEEE Transactions on
Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence
(TPAMI), widely regarded as the leading journal
in machine vision, has nominated a paper
by NICTA Distinguished Researcher Richard
Hartley to its list of top 10 articles over the 30
year history of the journal. Coming in at number
three on this all-time top 10 list is his paper: In
Defense of the Eight-Point Algorithm, originally
published in TPAMI in June 1997. The full
citation of the top 10 list can be found at:
At an Engineers Australia awards ceremony
in Perth in May, the Colleges of Electrical
Engineering and Information,Telecommunications
and Electronic Engineering awarded
Dr David Skellern the MA Sargent Medal for his
contribution to technical innovation, eminence
in the practice of electrical engineering and his
exceptional management and leadership in
information and communications technology.
http://www.computer.org/portal/web/tpami/
belongie.
Page 3
Industry Education program
spreads the word
NICTA’s Industry Education team,
based in Adelaide, is responsible
for the delivery of NICTA’s short
course program. These courses
are developed and delivered by
NICTA researchers and external
contractors who
are global
experts
in their
fields.
The NICTA short course program is a key
international provider of advanced training
in surveillance technologies and is also
developing its training capabilities in embedded
systems and software architecture. The short
courses program attracts over five hundred
scientists and engineers each year to its fee
paying short courses and a further several
hundred to free workshops and seminars. It
develops the advanced skills of scientists and
engineers who work in organisations such as
Defence Science and Technology Organisation
(DSTO), Cochlear, Canon Information Systems
Research Australia (CISRA) and Thales.
The Industry Education team of four is led
by Industry Education Manager Anne-Marie
Eliseo.
“We delivered thirty three courses last year,
attracting much positive feedback from
attendees. This program really does fill an
important gap in IT industry education in
Australia and it is exciting to reach out to new
audiences.” Since its beginning in 2005 over
two thousand people have attended NICTA’s
short course program.
Dr Abbas Bigdeli from the Queensland
Research Lab recently delivered a short
course called ‘Introduction to Digital Signal
Processing using FPGAs’ in various
locations across Australia. He is also
scheduled to deliver this course in San
Jose, California later in 2010.
Industry Education Manager
Anne-Marie Eliseo.
OneVentures CEO joins
NICTA Board
Dr Michelle Deaker has been
appointed to the NICTA Board.
As Chief Executive Officer
and Managing Partner of
fund management company
OneVentures Pty Ltd., Dr Deaker
brings a wealth of relevant ICT
industry experience to her new
position.
“I am looking forward to being part of the
NICTA Board, especially as it gives me a
wonderful opportunity to support new IT and
Communications businesses as they make
Page 4
their way out of laboratories and into the
marketplace,” said Dr Deaker.
NICTA Chairman Neville Stevens, AO,
welcomed Dr Deaker today. “Michelle’s
skills in founding, building and successfully
exiting early stage technology companies
are uniquely suited to the position and will
complement those of our other distinguished
Board members,” he said.
Dr Deaker replaces Emeritus Professor
Graham Hellestrand, who is standing down
from the Board to concentrate on other
activities.
External short course presenters usually have a
background in academia and industry and are
experienced with audiences of engineers and
scientists. Overseas presenters are sponsored
by NICTA Short Courses to come to Australia
and often deliver courses over a one or two
week period, sometimes in different locations
across Australia or New Zealand. Over the last
twelve months six overseas presenters have
visited from the UK, Israel and USA.
Courses are delivered in all capital cities in
Australia as well as regional locations such as
Alice Springs, Wollongong and Port Stephens.
In addition they are offered in overseas
locations such as New Zealand, Singapore,
Kuala Lumpur, London and San Jose. Courses
are also presented in-house for particular
organisations such as Boeing, Defence
Materiel Organisation, BAE Systems, Saab and
Air Services Australia.
Two new courses will be delivered by Allen
Greenwood of the University of Mississippi
next month. The first is on enterprise systems
engineering and the second on simulation and
modelling. Interest in Allen’s courses has been
shown by those in the Defence, aerospace
and health sectors. In October Paul Zarchan
from MIT in the US will be returning to Australia
for the second time, at NICTA’s request, to
deliver courses on kalman filtering and missile
guidance. The courses will be delivered in
Adelaide with many attendees travelling from
interstate and overseas to attend.
Other new courses include one on cloud computing
by the NICTA e-Government group and one on
Space Policy by Australian consultants Brett
Biddington and Roy Sach.
2011 will see new courses on unmanned aerial
vehicles by Armand Chaput from the University
of Kansas and several courses on critical
infrastructure.
NICTA researchers who deliver short courses have
the opportunity to deepen their understanding of
the external market. The short courses program
may even act as a channel to help transfer NICTA
technologies to the market. The program promotes
the NICTA brand and its achievements to wide
audiences. Through its customised delivery of
state-of-the-art courses to organisations such as
Raytheon, Telstra, Defence Materiel Organisation
and the NSW Roads and Traffic Authority, the short
courses program is providing high quality customer
service and building important external linkages.
See http://www.nicta.com.au/short_courses
NICTA researcher
realises start-up dream
Dr Raymond Wong is working the NICTA booth at
CommunicAsia, one minute chatting to tech journalists about
the start-up company he has founded with US and Australian
investors and NICTA, the next working on that afternoon’s pitch
to one of Asia’s largest telecommunications carriers. Above
him is a banner bearing a new company name – Cohesive Data.
For over five years, Raymond has been the
face and voice of NICTA’s mContext Project,
which has developed novel data compression
technology for XML files that compresses
them to around one tenth their original size
and lets the data be indexed, searched and
updated without decompressing the files.
The team produced the TiniWikiTM iPhone
application last year, and is now on the hunt
for even bigger things as the four members
of the mContext team take their places in
the technical division of start-up company
Cohesive Data.
Cohesive will promote the core mContext
technology to mobile phone operators, firstly
in the US, before moving on to other markets.
The idea is that the mobile phone operators’
customers will be able to download data
such as news feeds and access them on their
mobile phones whether or not they are in
network range.
An Associate Professor in the School of
Computer Science and Engineering at the
University of New South Wales (UNSW),
Raymond has been a Researcher at NICTA
since 2005. Starting with a team of two, he
began working on a mobile search technology,
later widening the research to compression
technologies. The result of this development
work was the mContext software.
Raymond has always been interested in
both the business and science of information
technology, completing his post-Doctoral
work at University of California, Los Angeles
(UCLA) and Stanford University in the heady
days of the dotcom boom in 1999. He was a
Research Associate in a 30-strong Database
Research Group which included Google
founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and
many other talented researchers. Raymond
loved the Stanford/UCLA experience. “You
can go to MBA classes after work, networking
The next steps for
Raymond and the
Cohesive team is to get
the company off to a
flying start by making a
good product for the US
mobile market.
The next steps for Raymond and the Cohesive
team is to get the company off to a flying start
by making a good product for the US mobile
market. Then, says Raymond, the Cohesive
technical team will continue to develop the
technology.
Raymond completed his undergraduate
Computer Science degree at the Australian
National University and his Masters and PhD
in Hong Kong. At NICTA, his team started with
two people, peaked at seven and ended at its
current level of four staff – all of whom are off
to Cohesive. Raymond was a Senior Lecturer
at the UNSW School of Computer Science
and Engineering before
becoming an Associate
Professor.
was always happening. There was an ease to
making connections and an energy to make
things happen. It was like a current – we were
all moving forward.”
The experience fuelled his long-standing
interest in commercialising technology. “I
had been interested in the entrepreneurial
side of IT since graduation,” Raymond says.
“I have worked in several universities with
commercialisation departments, and while
they were definitely useful, the NICTA model
suited my interests more precisely. The
commercialisation team at NICTA was really
valuable as we developed the mContext
technology. Media support and the guidance
of NICTA’s legal team were also very important
elements.”
Dr Raymond Wong
Top AI post for Toby Walsh
NICTA’s Acting Scientific Director Professor Toby Walsh was elected
to a three-year term as Executive Councilor of the Association for the
Advancement of Artificial Intelligence. This is the premier organisation
for the promotion of Artificial Intelligence globally. Each year, members
of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence elect four
members to sit on the Executive Council. Councillors are charged with the
running of the Association.
Page 5
According to Raymond, the key factor in
mContext’s success has been ‘the boss’
– Dr Terry Percival, NICTA’s Neville Roach
Lab Director. A widely respected scientist in
his own right, Terry also helped support the
development of technologies that became
part of two other NICTA start-up companies,
Audinate and Open Kernel Labs. “Terry
not only said he believed in what we were
doing, he showed it. He made us feel like
the company was really behind us,” says
Raymond.
“I am honoured to sit on the Executive Council of
the Association for the Advancement of Artificial
Intelligence. I hope to bring an international
perspective to the decisions of the Association,
and reflect the interests of members in Australia,
Europe and elsewhere,” said Prof. Walsh.
Feeling no pain:
Implant Systems moves ahead
Imagine a future where the
symptoms of illnesses like
Parkinson’s disease, epilepsy
and depression can be
relieved using tiny, inexpensive
electronic implants that perform
deep-brain stimulation. Or
where implants to manage
chronic pain were cheap,
easy to access, and lasted for
many years inside the body.
This future has already arrived
in some ways – think of the
Cochlear implant that has let
thousands of profoundly deaf
people ‘hear’ again. But this is
only the beginning.
The medical implant of the future will be a
long life, increasingly autonomous device
that can mimic the complex electrical,
mechanical and chemical behaviours of
biological systems. It will need reliable,
adaptive and provably correct behaviours;
new generation processing elements,
sensors and actuators which are low
power, effective and manufacturable;
distributed architectures and fault-tolerant
communication between elements inside
the body and to devices outside the
body; high levels of neural selectivity over
potentially large volumes; and components
and sub-systems which are inherently
reliable and easy to manufacture.
Although there are implantable therapies
on the market today, they are relatively
expensive to produce and have certain
physical limitations that make them
inappropriate for many disorders.
The NICTA Implant Systems team is
addressing these limitations, developing
new platform technologies to be used
in implantable devices, expanding the
toolkit of technologies available to therapy
developers.
Tissue interfaces, device packaging and
systems architectures are three critical
areas these platforms will address. The
first steps have been taken – the team
has developed and patented a novel
Page 6
fabrication method for the tissue interface
that is implanted into the spine to stimulate
nerves. The technique offers superior
mechanical and electrical performance and
automated manufacture possibilities. The
team has also developed new approaches
to chip level packaging and architectures.
At the moment, the Implant Systems
team is concentrating on developing
proof of principle demonstrations of its
technologies. Prototypes of the electronics
hardware and electrodes have been
fabricated.
The work of Implant Systems has begun to
attract the attention of senior researchers in
the pain field and a close co-operation has
developed with Professor Michael Cousins
Senior Mechanical Engineer David Thomas,
Implant Systems team.
AO from the Pain Management Research
Institute at the Royal North Shore Hospital.
Once fully developed, the core technologies
from the Implant Systems Project could
help people suffering from heart disease,
chronic pain, obesity, Parkinson’s disease,
Tourette’s syndrome, deafness and
depression.
Lab News
Queensland Research Lab
Congratulations to the Advanced Surveillance
team who presented their video-based Face
Recognition software at CeBIT Australia. They
were featured on The Australian’s website as
one of the highlights of CeBIT. Take a look at
http://player.video.news.com.au/theaustralian/#I
6tHPvpkcIFOLQy1X3n34wVgoix_Sn_L
Queensland Lab Director Prof. Terry Caelli has
been invited to sit on the State Government’s
ICT Ministerial Committee. The ICT Ministerial
Advisory Group provides advice to the
Treasurer and Minister for Employment and
Economic Development, the Honourable
Andrew Fraser MP.
According to the statistics gathered by
SourceForge.net, NICTA’s open-source C++
linear algebra library known as Armadillo has
been downloaded over 7000 times. Armadillo
is being developed in conjunction with QRL’s
Advanced Surveillance Project, in order to
provide a solid backbone for computationally
intensive experimentation, while at the same
time allowing for relatively painless transition of
research code into production environments.
It has been recently used as part of NICTA’s
product demonstrators at CeBIT in Germany.
Armadillo is listed at www.opennicta.com or for
further information, go to:
http://arma.sourceforge.net
Richard Hartley’s paper ‘In defence of the eightpoint algorithm’ was ranked 3rd in the TPAMI
top 10 papers ‘of all time’ (See page 3).
Victoria Research Lab
Antonio Robles-Kelly became the Treasurer of
the IEEE Computer Society Tech Committee on
Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.
VRL Embedded Systems Graduate Researcher
Colin Hales is one of four winners in the
inaugural Association for the Scientific Study of
Consciousness (ASSC) Student Essay Contest.
Colin’s essay is on the topic of the subjective
quality of a conscious experience, known as
qualia. Colin is the only Australian winner, with
other winners coming from Oxford University
and the University of Edinburgh.
Colin’s winning essay has been published in the
current issue of Pysche. http://www.theassc.
org/journal_psyche/archive/vol_16_no_1_2010
Canberra Research Lab
Patrik Haslum received the ICAPS (International
Conference on Automated Planning and
Scheduling) 2010 Influential Paper Award for his
paper titled ‘Admissible Heuristics for Optimal
Planning’.
The Automap Team (led by Project Manager
Lars Petersson) received the CeBIT Australia
2010 Early Innovators Award (See page 3).
CRL Lab Director Dr Sylvie Thiébaux became
President Elect of the Board of Directors of the
International Conference on Automated Planning
and Scheduling.
Australian Technology Park Lab
Congratulations to Jacky Keung, Jenny Liu,
Kate Foster and Thong Nguyen for winning the
Best Research Paper at the 21st IEEE Australian
Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC) for
“A Statistical Method for Middleware System
Architecture Evaluation.” The paper was based
on NICTA’s collaborative work with DSTO. In April, NICTA hosted the inaugural Smart
Transport Infrastructure Technology Forum at
the ATP Lab. NICTA believes it is crucial to use
ICT research to better position Australia to take
advantage of advances in Smart Infrastructure.
Speakers included representatives from
DSTO, the Australian Logistics Council, CSIRO
and Intelligent Transport Systems Australia.
NICTA helps drive EC
research co-operation
initiative
NICTA is a member of a new European Commission
Project called Strategies for European ICT RTD
Collaboration with Australia and Singapore (SECAS).
The project is an initiative aimed at improving the
level and quality of research co-operation in the area
of ICT between Australia, the European Union, and
Singapore.
The project aims to catalyse deeper strategic collaborations and promote
the benefits of co-operation benefits and best-practice in each region. The
initiative is co-ordinated by eutema, a research consultancy from Austria.
Other partners include Optimat (UK), the Singapore Management University
(SMU) and NICTA.
The SECAS project is funded by the
European Commission as a part of
its Seventh Framework (FP7) ICT
programme.
www.secas.eu
Page 7
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Events
Big Picture Seminars
Presenter: Philip Mallon,
NSW Roads and Traffic Authority
When: Friday 27 August 2010
3.30pm for a 4.00pm start
Venue: NICTA Australian Technology Park Lab
Seminar Room, Level 4, 13 Garden Street
Eveleigh, Sydney
Presenter: Richard Stallman,
Founder of the GNU Project
When: Wednesday 6 October 2010
Venue: Australian National University Canberra,
Manning Clarke Centre
Canberra Research Lab TechNet Research Showcase
When: Wednesday 15 September 2010
Venue: Canberra Research Laboratory
NICTA Seminar Room, Ground Floor, Tower A,
7 London Circuit, Canberra City
European Union ICT 2010: Digitally Driven Event
This event, held every two years, is hosted by the
Belgian Presidency of the European Union. NICTA has
been successful in its application for an ‘Australian ICT
Expertise’ exhibit in Europe’s most significant research
expo, the EU’s ICT 2010: Digitally Driven expo.
This is the first time that Australia has been
represented at an EU ICT event.
When: 27-29 September 2010
Venue: Brussels Expo
Meet the Founder
Presenter: Brand Hoff
Founder, Tower Software
When: Tuesday 14 September 2010
5.30pm
Venue: Canberra Research Laboratory
NICTA Seminar Room, Ground Floor, Tower A,
7 London Circuit, Canberra City
Short Courses
DATE
TITLE
PRESENTER
LOCATION
22-23 July Enterprise Cloud Computing:
Understanding Costs, Managing
Risks and Realising Business Value Paul Brebner & Anna Liu, NICTA Canberra
23 July Introduction to Embedded Systems
Design Using Virtual Prototyping
Rami Mukhtar, NICTA Brisbane
26-27 July Linux for Embedded Developers Godfrey van der Linden, NICTA Brisbane
28-30 July Introduction to Enterprise
Systems Engineering Allen Greenwood, MSU, USA Adelaide
02–04 August Introduction to Discrete-Event
Simulation Modelling and Analysis Allen Greenwood, MSU, USA Adelaide
11-12 August Tracking and Data Fusion Branko Ristic, DSTO Adelaide
13-14 September Fundamentals of RF Systems Design and Simulation Rowan Gilmore,
University of Queensland Perth
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