Melbourne School of Engineering

News Centre

New Professors in the Melbourne School of Engineering

September 2009

The Dean of Engineering, Professor Iven Mareels, is proud to announce the newly-promoted professors in the School:

 

Tall Poppy awards to the Melbourne School of Engineering

September 2009

Two Melbourne School of Engineering lecturers have won nationally celebrated Tall Poppy Science Awards for 2009.

Dr Elaine Wong (Electrical Engineering) and Dr Chris Manzie (Mechanical Engineering) were presented with the awards on September 17.

The Young Tall Poppy Science Awards were created in 1998 by the Australian Institute of Policy and Science. The awards recognise and celebrate Australian intellectual and scientific excellence and promote science as a career for younger Australians.

Melbourne School of Engineering’s focus on fostering leadership skills and industry collaborations – both in Australia and internationally – contributed significantly to the achievement of these awards.

Dr Wong is a Senior Lecturer in Electrical Engineering and her part in research into the safety of amplified laser light will potentially benefit every household in Australia as the National Broadband Network is rolled out.

She is deeply involved in community activities that promote greater understanding of the role of engineering and encourage potential students, particularly women. A frequent guest speaker at schools and public events, Dr Wong is a gifted communicator, able to explain technical engineering concepts and share her passionate commitment to her work with broad audiences.

Dr Manzie, Senior Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering, has worked across a broad range of research areas. His principal focus is control-system design for automotive and mechatronic systems. He has collaborated with industry partners including Ford Australia, BAE Systems, ANCA Motion and Pacifica Group.

He established the School’s annual Meridian Exhibition, which creates bridges between tomorrow’s potential engineers and their possible industry employers. The exhibition showcases the work of final-year students to industry and also gives school students and parents the opportunity to talk to current Engineering students.

Both senior academics speak of the advantages for their students of the School’s breadth model, which offers Engineering students the scope for greater choice in the range of subjects they can study, before they specialise in their chosen discipline.

 

The Melbourne School of Engineering congratulates the successful ARC Future Fellowship candidates for 2009


These fellowships are worth more than $6M in ARC funding to the School of Engineering over the next four years.

 

Frank Leahy awarded Doctor of Engineering

Dr Frank Leahy (BSurv, Melb, LS Phd FISAust), former Head of the Department of Surveying (now Geomatics), and former Deputy Dean of the then Faculty of Engineering, was awarded the degree Doctor of Engineering at a conferring ceremony in Wilson Hall on Wednesday 26 August for engineering graduands and graduating PhDs.

Dr Leahy also provided the Occasional Address at the ceremony. Frank is pictured here (right) being congratulated by Engineering's AD (Curriculum) Professor Alistair Moffat.

Frank Leahy and Alistair Moffat

Dr Leahy commenced studies at the University of Melbourne in 1956. Following his graduation, he worked for two years with the Victorian Lands Department and qualified as a Licensed (Title) Surveyor. He was subsequently appointed to the Commonwealth Department of National Development, working in geodesy and geodetic surveying, in which new technologies were making dramatic changes to old practices. This laid the foundation for his later career.

Frank was involved in the ancient practice of fixing position by astronomical means and computing using 7-figure logarithms on one hand, and with airborne electronic distance measurement, satellite geodesy and computer programming on the other.

In 1965, Frank returned to the University of Melbourne, this time as a lecturer, and for the next 40 years taught generations of young surveyors and pursued a research career focused on computer algorithms for geodetic computations. Through this work, he developed software packages for the adjustment of large geodetic networks and the establishment of Australia's maritime boundaries. The former is now used by Geoscience Australia and in most state geodetic agencies. The latter is used internationally, including by the United Nations Divison of Ocean Affairs and Law of the Sea.

A lifelong facscination with the expeditions of Australian explorers Burke and Wills ultimately led to Dr Leahy's much publicised-discovery of the instruments used by Wills.

 

 

IIT students in Melbourne

The Melbourne School of Engineering recently ran an internship program for high achieving undergraduate students of the Indian Institutes of Technology – IIT Kanpur and IIT Kharagpur. The successful applicants undertook a focused research project under the academic supervision of Melbourne School of Engineering researchers.

 

Connell gold medal goes to Professor Len Stevens

At a Engineers Australia lunch last week Professor Len Stevens, a former Dean of the Melbourne School of Engineering, was awarded the prestigious John Connell Medal for Excellence in Engineering. 

The award is for an eminent structural engineer who has made a significant contribution to the standing and prestige of the structural engineering profession, and is named after John Connell, principal and founder of John Connell and Associates, which practices throughout Australasia under the name of Connell Wagner Pty Ltd.  The citation for Prof Stevens’ award was read at the lunch by Connell himself.

Connell is considered to have made an outstanding contribution to the practise of structural engineering in Australia and to exporting Australian engineering skills to Asia in the 1970s and 1980s.

The winner receives a specially struck gold medal bearing the insignia of Engineers Australia and likeness of John Connell. The medal is mounted and framed with the recipient's citation.

Congratulations to Len on this prestigious award.

 

A New Look At Cheese

University of Melbourne Engineer Dr Sally Gras is passionate about cheese and dairy ingredients.

Her work focuses on taking a close look at cheese to learn how raw ingredients such as milk proteins, fat globules and starter bacteria are transformed to form cheese. The research also looks at how these ingredients, together with the cheese making process, determine cheese texture.

She is also researching new health promoting ingredients known as prebiotics.

These  two areas of food science and engineering have attracted much attention in the past decade but there are still many unknowns.

The results of her group’s research are therefore of intense interest to the Victorian dairy industry, which is always seeking to improve product texture, as well as seeking opportunities to turn lower value ingredients into foodstuffs that improve digestive health in children and the elderly.

Dr Sally Gras is one of six young Victorian scientists to win a prestigious 2009 Victoria Fellowship. She received the Fellowship on Tuesday 28 July at a gala function at Government House from the Governor of Victoria, Professor David de Kretser, AC.

The Victoria Fellowships, each worth $18,000, were first awarded by the Victorian Government in 1998 to recognise young researchers with leadership potential and to enhance their future careers, while developing new ideas which could offer commercial benefit to Victoria.

Her fellowship will take her to industrial and research centres in Ireland, the United Kingdom and Europe to learn about how they are progressing in the area of dairy product microstructure and functional food research. She will also present Victorian dairy research at the first international microstructure conference in Norway.

She hopes her fellowship will build Victoria’s capability in this area, ensuring that the Victorian dairy industry remains internationally competitive by boosting quality, decreasing waste and decreasing risk associated with manufacture.

Dr Gras is a lecturer in Metabolic Engineering at The University of Melbourne and also leads a bioengineering research group at The Bio21 Molecular Science and Biotechnology Institute. She works directly with several leading dairy companies and Dairy Innovation Australia Ltd. Her work is also supported through an Australian Research Council Linkage grant and an Indo Australia Biotechnology Grant from the Department of Innovation Industry, Science and Research.

Dr Gras is an early career researcher who has trained as both an engineer and biologist. She received her PhD from Cambridge University, UK in 2006. She lives in Kew.

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Assoc Prof Abbas Rajabifard assumes Presidency of Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Assocation

July 2009
Recently the 11th Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) world conference was held in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, between 15 and 19 June 2009.  At this year’s conference Associate Professor Abbas Rajabifard from the Department of Geomatics assumed the position of President of the GSDI Association for the next three years. The conference was one of the biggest international spatial sciences events ever, attended by over 1,200 delegates from 77 countries, and is the pre-eminent world gathering on spatial data infrastructures and is attended by the best scientists in the field.

Associate Professor Rajabifard, who is also Director of the Centre for SDIs and Land Administration, led a team of 5 of his researchers to the event, who presented 7 research papers and were co-authors of a total of 13 papers. During one particularly important session at the conference, SDI Future Perspective, Professor Arnold Bregt, Professor of Geo-Information Science at Wageningen University, The Netherlands, and a global authority on SDIs, made the following comment:

“...there are basically three research streams in SDI, a descriptive stream
exemplified by the work of Professor Ian Masser, a defining and framing stream taking place at the Melbourne School [the Centre for SDIs and Land Administration], and an assessment stream exemplified by the work at Wageningen University...”.

According to the Chair of the Advisory Committee of the Centre for SDIs and Land Administration, Peter Holland, “This is important international recognition of the excellence of research taking place at the Centre and the fundamental importance of this research to the global understanding of SDI. The recognition also highlights the vision and drive of Professors Ian Williamson and Abbas Rajabifard in particular who have built the Centre up to the pre-eminent global position it now occupies.”

Papers presented at the GSDI 11 conference can be found at http://www.gsdi.org/gsdi11/

 

Innovation award to Professor Stan Skafidas

July 2009
Electrical Engineering researcher, Professor Stan Skafidas accepted the Innovation Excellence Award for project, Gigabit Wireless Transceiver on CMOS. The Next Big Thing Award celebrates and promotes new Australian innovations with the potential to be 'the next big thing' and was presented by the Hon. Richard Marles, Parliamentary Secretary for Innovation and Industry, of the Australian Government.  The guest of honour at the award ceremony was the Governor of Victoria, Professor David de Kretser AC.  

Professor Stan Skafidas led a team that developed the world's first integrated transceiver on CMOS at 60 GHz, capable of delivering up to 5 Gigabits per second wireless transfer of data in an indoor environment, which is 100 times faster than today's most commonly used wireless technology.  This breakthrough will transform the way information is managed and used in the office and the home of the not-too-distant future.  

The achievement  of Professor Skafidas and his team  in developing a tiny radio  on a low cost integrated circuit opens the possibility for applications in new areas, such as medical bionics, where these devices are implanted in the human body to monitor performance and in some cases replace a specific function.

 

WhereIs Tells You To Where To Go Using Landmarks

July 2009
Why is it easier to follow directions when they are explained through a series of landmarks instead of street names? According to the research by the University of Melbourne’s Geomatics Department and whereis.com, when your mate says “turn right at the post office” he is actually tapping into your spatial cognitive recognition to give you a better understanding of how to get where you’re going.

Armed with this knowledge, and equipped with what is said to be a world first landmark selection system, whereis.com has incorporated a range of Australian landmarks into its map directions, finally providing users with real-life navigational context for their chosen routes.

Commercial Manager of whereis.com Fred Curtis says the addition of this tool will help the whereis.com mapping site remain at the forefront of Australian mapping by improving the experience people have when requesting directions on the site.

“We continue to find new ways to build upon the already market-leading Whereis.com user experience. Current trends in technology all point to increased functionality alongside ease of use, so that’s the direction we’re heading,” he says.

Dr Matt Duckham, Senior Lecturer in Geographic Information Science at the Department of Geomatics says what makes this addition to whereis.com different from existing navigation systems is that it identifies the most suitable landmarks based on cognitive principles.

“Deciding which landmarks are most useful is really based on the uniqueness of the landmark, and this can be determined by three main things; the landmarks meaning, its visual salience and where the landmark is located, relative to the decision point on the route,” he says.

“While computers can work out how far it is to the next interaction, humans find it much easier to use instructions that refer to places with meaning and that we can easily identify.”

“It really is an exciting time for researchers in this field. The unique partnership between our researchers and Whereis.com has opened the doors for a new generation of systems that provide mapping data and navigation instructions based on your location. As far as we know, nowhere else in the world is this kind of user experience available that delivers detailed landmark and geometry information to consumers”.

Mr Curtis concluded that, “being an Australian mapping company, it was important our whereis.com team worked with local experts to investigate the potential of incorporating the new landmark feature to our site. Melbourne University’s Geomatics team certainly fit the bill.”

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Success with Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage Funding

June 2009

The Melbourne School of Engineering announces recent success in the ARC linkage funding with five staff members and their collaborators sharing around $1.6 million dollars for their research projects.
 
The successful staff members were: Dr John Provis and Dr Peter Duxson from the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Professor Marcus Pandy, Dr Peter Lee and Dr Kay Crossley from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Professor Rao Kotagiri from the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Associate Professor Andrew Western from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Associate Professor Abbas Rajabifard and Professor Ian Williamson from the Department of Geomatics.
 
In addition the School congratulates Associate Professor Sandra Kentish (Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering), Professor Bill Moran (Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering), and Professor Priyan Mendis (Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering) and Professor Rao Kotagiri (Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering) who were successful as collaborators in four separate non-lead grants through the University of Melbourne and other institutions.
 
A special mention goes to Professor Priyan Mendis who will be involved as a collaborator in the project ‘Airports of the future' - a lead project at Queensland University of Technology, which received one of the largest linkage grants ever awarded, 2.4 million dollars. With 23 partner organisations including major airports, government departments and security services, the project will enhance the capabilities of airport operators in the design and management of complex airport systems.
 
Finally, a special mention goes to Tim Peterson, a PhD student from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering who was a recipient of an Australia Postdoctoral Fellowship for Industry (ADPI). Only five ADPI fellowships were awarded in Victoria and Tim received one of three awarded to the University of Melbourne.

 

Queen's Birthday Honour for Professor Peter Joubert

June 2009

Emeritus Professor Peter Joubert has again been recognised for his achievements, recently having been made a Member of the Order of Australia. 

Announced in the Queen’s Birthday Honours, the citation for Professor Joubert’s Australian Honour, was "for service to engineering through research in the field of fluid dynamics, particularly in relation to submarine design and education".

This comes on top of an OAM in 1996, a Centenary Medal and the AGM Michell Medal from the College of Mechanical Engineers in 2001, and an Honourary Doctorate from the University in 2005.

First appointed as a lecturer in mechanical engineering at the University of Melbourne in 1953, Professor Joubert is these days regarded as one of the elder statement of academia in Australia.  Specialising in fluid mechanics, he visited MIT as a Fulbright scholar in 1954 where he built and tested high-speed catamarans in a towing tank. He became a well-known yacht designer and raced in the Sydney to Hobart race 27 times, surviving the massive storms of 1998 when his yacht turned upside down before being righted.  In more recent years, he has advised the Australian Government on how to overcome design problems associated with the Collins class submarine.  He continues this activity designing better shapes for the Collins replacement.

Professor Joubert was a World War II fighter pilot and while on active duty in New Guinea, he personally experienced how important seat belts can be in saving lives.  He went on to be a leading road safety researcher and was a major player in the introduction of compulsory seat belts in Victoria in 1970 – the first state in the world to do so.

Retiring from full-time lecturing in 1989, Professor Joubert continues to play an invaluable research and advisory role with Melbourne School of Engineering.  Sincere congratulations go to him for another well-deserved honour and recognition of his academic and engineering achievements.

 

Australian Leadership AwardsJonathan Manton

May 2009
Electrical Engineering researcher and Future Generation Professor Jonathan Manton has received an Australian Leadership Award. The Award recognises his achievements and ability to contribute to a vision for Australia’s future.

 

Neural Engineering Funding

May 2009
When Electrical Engineering researcher and Future Generation Professor Jonathan Manton returned to the University of Melbourne just under a year ago, his mission was to establish a research centre which would bring together researchers from the Faculties of Engineering, Medicine and Science, in line with the world-wide convergence of the physical sciences and the life sciences.  A significant milestone was reached last week, when the Federal Budget allocated $17.5M in infrastructure funding to the Centre for Neural Engineering.

Combined with the University of Melbourne's contribution, the total amount of infrastructure funding is $34.2M, which has been earmarked as follows:


The Centre for Neural Engineering will take a systems engineering approach to the study of how networks of biological neurons work. The fundamental research conducted by the Centre is expected to enhance our abilities to:

More information

 

Battle of the brains

Informatics students compete against the top 100 in the Battle of the Brains

23 April 2009
The 33rd ACM International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC), also know as the Battle of the Brains, challenges students to solve real-world computer programming problems within a five-hour deadline.
The World Finals were held in April 2009 in Stockholm. The University of Melbourne team finished in (equal) 20th place, correctly solving 5 out of the 10 contest problems. This year 100 teams competed in the World Finals, and over 7000 teams competed in the qualification rounds. All of the Melbourne team members are in their second year of New Generation degrees, and they competed against students from all levels, including Postgraduates.

Pictured left to right: Victor Lei, Christopher Chen and Angus McInnes (Picture courtesy of MUSSE)

 

Long-sighted funding aids bionic eye reality by 2011

22 April 2009
It is almost three decades since a team at the University of Melbourne developed the bionic ear, and Electrical Engineering Professor Tony Burkitt says a similar multidisciplinary approach - using biomedical engineers, clinical experts and neuroscientists from Vision Australia - will have similar success in the development of a retinal implant.
“We have the team of experts to compete with anyone in the world,” he says.

The bionic eye is one of nine projects to be developed as part of the Government’s response to the 2020 summit.

Media coverage of the announcement:

 

Raj Buyya wins IEEE Medal

16 April 2009
Computer Science and Software Engineering Associate Professor Rajkumar Buyya has been awarded the 2009 IEEE Medal for Excellence in Scalable Computing in recognition for his significant contribution and high quality research to the scalable computing community.

He was awarded the medal for pioneering the economic paradigm for utility-oriented distributed computing platforms such as Grids and Clouds, and serving with distinction the scalable computing community as the foundation Chair of the Technical Committee on Scalable Computing.

Earlier this year Associate Professor Rajkumar Buyya also won an award for Excellence in Research which is a testament to all his hard work in this area.

As part of the award, Associate Professor Buyya will present the opening keynote at the CCGrid 2009 Conference, May 18-21, in Shanghai, China.

 

Ford Australia launches $20M Research Facility partnering with EngineeringOpening of ACART Research Facility April 2009

15 April, 2009
Ford Australia, Melbourne School of Engineering and the State Government of Victoria officially opened of the new Advanced Centre for Automotive Research and Testing (ACART) Environmental Laboratory test facilities at the Ford Proving Ground.
(L-R) Professor Iven Mareels, Dean of the School of Engineering, University of Melbourne, Ford Australia President and Chief Executive Officer, Marin Burela, and Hon. Gavin Jennings MP, Minister for Innovation, opened the new facility.

 

Wireless video using GiFi chip successfully demonstrated

21 February 2009

GiFi demonstrationElectrical Engineering Professor Stan Skafidas successfully demonstrated a transmission of wireless video using the world-first Gigabit Wireless (GiFi) technology. The demonstration, attended by Victorian Government Minister for Innovation, Gavin Jennings, is the first time it has been on public display.

In the future, Gigabit wireless technology will be used to show DVD movies on High Definition Digital TV without a wired connection and for very fast downloads of content from devices such as PDAs, games consoles and wireless digital cameras.

 

Google Research Awards to CUBIN  

USA$40K has just been awarded to Darryl Veitch and Julien Ridoux of CUBIN for a research project: Taking the Negatives out of Latency: dealing with path asymmetry

This work is part of the RADclock project which aims to provide the next generation clock synchronisation infrastructure for the Internet. This grant focuses on the complementary problem of exploring and managing the path asymmetry problem, which creates dangerous ambiguities in clocks over a network, for example it can make path delays seem to be negative!
 
This is the second grant recently awarded from Silicon Valley companies on delay measurement. In 2007 Darryl Veitch was awarded USD$54K from Cisco Systems to support research on delay measurement in routers.
Veitch and Ridoux also recently won a best paper award for work under the RADclock project:
IEEE Symp. Precision Clock Synchronization for Measurement, Control and Communication (ISPCS’08) 2008 Best Paper Award, for ‘The Cost of Variability’ by Julien Ridoux and Darryl Veitch.
This paper showed the importance of building in robustness to delay variability into synchronisation algorithms.

 

View earlier news on the archive page