Carr strengthens India research ties

AUSTRALIAN Innovation Minister Kim Carr has met with his Indian counterpart and says the two countries are working toward strengthening science and technology relationships.

Senator Carr met the Indian Minister for Science and Technology and Earth Sciences Kapil Sibal in Melbourne last week to discuss the bilateral relations between the two countries.

These include forthcoming jointly-funded workshops the Australia-India Strategic Research Fund.

“Australia and India share many common areas of research interest and there are many exciting and world leading projects currently taking place between the two countries that will provide benefits to both our nations,” Senator Carr said.

“As part of our commitment to mutually beneficial research the Australian Government will support two collaborative workshops in emerging fields of biotechnology where we have complementary strengths,” he said.

The Indian and Australian governments have already committed to supporting two collaborative workshops in emerging fields of biotechnology where we have complementary strengths.

These include a joint workshop next month sharing developments in the research fields of nutraceuticals and functional foods, and another workshop on commercialised transgenic crops as well as those under development.

"The Australian Government remains committed to the relationship with India, particularly through our largest bilateral research arrangement - the Australia-India Strategic Research Fund.”

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NICTA secures additional funding

THE nation’s peak technology industry research body, National ICT Australia, has secured an extra to hire a group of Australian chip researchers recently made redundant when their lab was shut down.

The 16 researchers, considered world-class in their field, were recently made redundant from LSI Australia – formerly Agere Systems – following the closure of their North Ryde research facility.

The additional $4.8 million in funding over two years was set aside by Communications and IT Minister Helen Coonan just before the federal election was called.

The extra funding from the Australian Government means NICTA will be able to offer new employment to these researchers. They will be working on wireless-related research within NICTA’s Embedded Systems research theme. This research is developing next generation wireless networks.

“Through this team Australia has developed a core competency in silicon chip design which is leading edge and contributed to Australia’s ICT capability,” NICTA acting chief executive officer Professor Aruna Seneviratne said.

The addition of the researchers to the Millimetre Wave Gigabit Wireless Project team will allow NICTA to fast-track research on the technology. NICTA envisages that the increased effort afforded by the LSI team could mean that research from the project would be ready for commercialisation in two years.

“NICTA identified an opportunity to merge the LSI Australia-Agere team with an existing research effort to create state-of-the-art personal broadband wireless chips which will enable people to transfer large multi-media files, such as entire movies, a thousand times faster than currently possible,” NICTA Chief Technology Officer of Embedded Systems Dr Chris Nicol said.

The researchers will be based at NICTA’s New South Wales facilities and will be part of NICTA’s efforts in Embedded Systems.

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EMC doubles China investment

STORAGE market leader EMC has opened a new research and development facility in Beijing and committed to doubling its planned investments in China to 1 billion (A$1.1 billion) over the next five years.

The investment of US$500 million announced in June last year is now expected to double, the company said, with the additional funds to be used to expand the EMC R&D capability in China, boost its partner community and strengthen sales and service channels.

The new EMC R&D in Beijing is the second for the company, which opened a Shanghai R&D facility in June 2006. The Shanghai centre was subsequently “evolved” into an EMC Centre of Excellence in January this year.

EMC chairman and chief executive Joe Tucci said China’s contribution as a market and as a culture of innovation “has been spectacular.”

“We have demonstrated our success by gaining customer confidence in the local marketplace and our China R&D operation is an integral part of our industry-leading information infrastructure product development efforts,” Mr Tucci said.

“The additional investment reiterates our deep commitment to this rapidly growing economy and emphasises the important role that China will have in EMC’s long-term business success.”

The new center in Beijing, located in Zhong Guan Cun, known as the Silicon Valley of China, will house over 200 engineers and concentrate on the company’s core technologies including information storage, virtualisation, security, resource management and content management and archiving.

The centre will also include EMC Research China, the first EMC research lab to be established outside of the United States.

The Asia Pacific & Japan region now includes 4,700 EMC employees.

NICTA spin-off leaves Australia

THE first tech start-up to be spun our of the federally funded research agency NICTA has been a mixed success for the organisation – the company has good technology that attracted customers, but it has also left Australia for good.

Open Kernel Labs was established as a commercial entity in Australia just nine months ago, the result of research work at NICTA’s Embedded, Real-Time and Operating Systems Research Program.

OK Labs (as it is called) has now moved on, establishing its corporate offices – including business development and field application engineering functions in the US as it headquarters.

The company said research and development functions would remain in Australia.

OK Lab’s product, OKL4 is an advanced microkernel and “supports a structured approach to building trusted and secure systems, and is being successfully deployed in a number of commercial consumer mobile devices,” the company said.

In a statement, NICTA chief executive Dr David Skellern did not express disappointment at the company’s operations heading offshore.

“With the incorporation of OK, NICTA can claim another success of its program to commercialize technology developed at its resource-rich development labs,” Dr Skellern said.

“OK is the first spin-out of NICTA to be incorporated in the United States and the company begins its commercial life with a revenue stream as well as strong interest from large global companies.”

Secure, reliable and trustworthy embedded systems software for mobile and consumer electronics requires strong, hardware-enforced protection boundaries around system components, enforced by a trustworthy microkernel.

OKL4 was initially developed under the direction of Dr Gernot Heiser, the chief technology officer and co-founder of OK. Dr Heiser is also professor of operating systems at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and a program leader at NICTA

With additional input from early customers, the open source community and PhD candidates at UNSW, this team has produced the highest performing microkernel operating system available today, he said.

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Research priorities outlined at Future Parc

TECHNOLOGY that can assist the environment – in particular water resources – will be a key theme when the nation’s flagship information technology research organisations outline research priorities at CeBIT’s Future Parc showcase.

The CSIRO ICT Centre is expected to use Future Parc to highlight its ongoing work in one of the hottest topics in Australian politics – the way it monitors Australia’s scarce water resources.

The organisation has made impressive progress in developing wireless sensor networks for use in collecting geospatial data.

CSIRO ICT will showcase the sensors used in its $9 million-a-year Water Resources Observation Network (WRON), which is being developed to help better management Australia’s water and to protect river systems.
“Spatial data and sensor technology have a wide range of applications, particularly in the environmental field,” CSIRO researcher Gavin Walker.

“This technology will improve our scientific understanding of Australia’s scarce water resources and will revolutionise the way scientists gather data.”

The organisation has developed the technology in close collaboration with the Open Geospatial Consortium, developing a set of improved OGC specifications to provide access to multiple sources of geospatial information to assist in decision making.

With a keen eye on commercialisation opportunities in recent years, the CSIRO has point to the water monitoring application as a technology with broad potential across the globe.

More generally though, CSIRO ICT the geospatial technology that backs WRON can be applied to a vast range of different applications.

Both CSIRO and National ICT Australia (NICTA) – the country’s other flagship tech researcher – are both expected to use future parc to introduce specific commercial initiatives.

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