research | Paul Wallbank - Communications Professional

Bringing the IoT to Australia’s far north

James Cook University in the Northern Australian city of Cairns hopes to become a leader in internet of things research

In the tropical north of Australia, one university is looking at using the Internet of Things to expand the reach of its research and open new opportunities for the local economy.

On Monday James Cook University opened Australia’s first university IoT lab in Australia.

Based at the Cairns campus in Far North Queensland, the lab is part of the university’s new Internet of Things engineering degree and is supported by Chinese telco vendor Huawei.

The university, which also has campuses in Townsville and Singapore, boasts expertise in areas such as marine sciences, tropical ecology and tropical medicine, all of which are relevant to the IoT and made more relevant by Cairns being the main service centre for much of Australia’s remote Top End and the Torres Strait.

Part of a central mission

“The Internet of Things is based on something that is central to our mission in the Tropics: building greater connectivity between people, place and technology,” said the university’s Vice Chancellor Professor Sandra Harding.

JCU’s IoT degree, the first of its kind in Australia, combines the study of electronic engineering with internet technologies, wireless communications, sensor device, industrial design and cloud computing.

Currently the IoT faculty has 57 first year students, which the university hopes to grow to over 200. The head of the IoT faculty, Professor Wei Xiang, explained why the university decided to offer this course.

Economic drivers

“Primarily it’s driven by the economy, Australia is transitioning from a mining boom to a knowledge and innovation driven economy. So in the middle of 2015, JCU decided to offer an engineering degree in Cairns.”

“The IoT places nicely into traditional strengths at JCU in fields like marine science, marine biology and remote medicine, for example we can use the IoT for reef condition monitoring and our Daintree Rainforest project.”

An electronics Engineer himself, Professor Xiang sees the IoT as the future of industry and leapt at the chance to lead a course when the opportunity arose.

“In the middle of 2015 I thought, ‘this is what I want to do as this is where the future is.'”

Smartcity opportunities

Along with the remote health, marine science and agricultural aspects the City of Cairns itself offers smartcity opportunities. As a moderate sized town of 142,000 relatively isolated from the rest of Australia, Cairns has large tourist traffic coupled with weather extremes – the city gets nearly two meters (80 inches) of rain every summer. Making it a good test bed for new city technologies.

“Cairns Regional Council is very interested in smartcities, I’ve been working very closely with the city council and its innovation team,” says Professor Xiang. “We are also rolling out our smart campus.”

Part of the smart campus initiative is the university installing a NarrowBand-IoT base station provided by its program supporter, Chinese telecoms giant Huawei.

Along with supporting the IoT lab, Huawei also plans to offer JCU IoT students the opportunity to travel to Huawei’s global headquarters in China and its Australian headquarters in Sydney as part of its Seeds for the Future program.

“It gives our students and staff an experimental platform that conforms to the latest IoT international standard,” Professor Xiang said. “It means that as we design devices and sensor networks we can test and configure them using that standard.”

The university’s Vice Chancellor, Sandra Harding shares Professor Xiang’s enthusiasm. “From designing smarter cities, to growing precision agricultural systems, monitoring natural environments in real-time, and creating clever health solutions that work in remote communities,” she says. “We don’t want to be just a part of that future, we want to lead it.”

Paul travelled to James Cook University’s Cairns campus as a guest of Huawei.

Google scraps Project Ara

As predicted it seems Google’s Project Ara is about to be another victim of the company’s attention deficit disorder.

Project Ara, Google’s experimental modular phone, seems to be doomed reports Reuters.

Sadly this isn’t surprising as the indications of Ara’s demise have been around for a year.

In some ways this isn’t surprising as Google retreated from the smartphone market at the beginning of 2014 with its sale of the Motorola handset business, the company’s notorious attention deficit disorder wouldn’t have helped the project’s survival chances either.

Should Reuter’s report be true, then Google’s management will have shown again that the company isn’t prepared to stick with long term research projects and that journalists, not to mention researchers and developers, need to treat the company’s programs with some scepticism.

For the Ara team, they’ve no doubt learned a lot in developing this project and it will be interesting to see how that knowledge is applied to other products, few of which will belong to Google.

Rethinking cancer research

Can business software reorganise the way cancer is studied? Netsuite founder Evan Goldberg thinks so.

Netsuite founder Evan Goldberg hopes the lessons he’s learned from building a software company can help researchers find new ways to treat cancers.

When Netsuite founder Evan Goldberg was contacted by his birth mother it was not all good news, she revealed to him she had one of the BRAC genetic markers, an hereditary trait that indicates a high risk of breast cancer.

A day before the official launch of the BRAC Foundation he has founded with a ten million dollar donation, Goldberg spoke to Decoding the New Economy at the Suiteworld conference in San Jose about how he believes he can help improve the treatement of cancers.

“How I think I can make a difference is applying some of the things we’ve learned at Netsuite,” he explained. “Netsuite has been all about breaking down silos, it’s not a system to run a department, it’s to run a business.”

“Much research and money is focused on a particular type of cancer – breast cancer, lung cancer, prostate cancer but it turns out from what we’ve learned from genetic research that cancers can be more similar to each other across different cancer types than to those in the same organs.”

“So in the same way we’re trying to break down silos between parts of a business, trying to break down silos between researchers, different institutions has sort of been a theme of mine.”

“What’s really interesting this notion of looking at where the cancer started, which is what we’ve been doing for a hundred years, looking at what is the mechanism underneath it is kind of how we’ve looked at business at Netsuite.”

“We’re supporting research in the BRCA Foundation from numerous different institutions and researchers that are looking at all different types of cancer. So bringing them together and cutting through all sorts of silos, these sort of artificial silos – some of which still have value in some ways – but fostering collaboration where there wasn’t any before.”

“It’s not a perfect analogy,” Goldberg admits, “but I do think that this notion of looking at cancer across different dimensions is similar to how we’ve been looking at business.”

“It’s a totally different world, the world of medics, research institutions, hospitals and clinicians, it’s a very different world to the businesses I’m used to deal with. Although there are still similarities in the motivations and the barriers to success.”

One has to hope BRAC Foundation will be successful however Goldberg is the first to admit the bulk of the work lies with the scientists. “The real hard work is done by the researchers,” he says. “Hopefully we can help them.”

Tracking seals across the Southern Ocean

Tracking seals with the IoT is making it easier to collect data on our changing environment

Tracking environmental changes across the oceans a huge undertaking. To deal with the scale of the task Australian researchers have started equipping seals marine animals with a maritime equivalent of a fitbit to monitor the effects of our changing planet.

One of the interesting case studies that came across my desk in recent weeks was the IMOS animal tracking program. The Integrated Marine Observing System is a consortium of research institutions lead by the University of Tasmania that collects data for the Australian marine and climate science community and its international collaborators.

The data is collected from ten different technology platforms including floats, ships, autonomous vehicles such as gliders and deep ocean probes, and by fitting tracking devices onto animals.

Along with sharks and fish, seals are one of the animals IMOS use to track water conditions, one of the benefits of using seals is they can transmit data to a satellite when they return to the surface to breath and they never get stuck under ice.

The tags themselves are made by a Scottish company and are designed to gather information on the depth, temperature, salinity of the seas the animals travel in. They are also useful for tracking the behaviour of the animals.

Along with research into conditions across the vast Southern Ocean, IMOS is also being used to monitor the effects of port development in the mining regions of Western Australia and other areas where environments are undergoing dramatic change.

Once the data is collected it’s open to use by the research community in their understanding the effects of a warming planet, that open data and the cloud storage it is based upon are critical to the program’s success as there’s little point in collecting the data.

We have the devices to collect a tremendous amount of data on our environment, whether it’s our personal fitbits, financial records or information on agriculture or wild animals. The challenge though is to use that data effectively.

In the case of a changing environment, understanding what is happening and the effects could be a matter of our survival. While the idea of a fitbit for seals seems cute, the data they collect could prove critical.

Reinvigorating Australia’s research sector

How an outward focus might reinvigorate Australia’s besieged research sector

Could Australia’s poor track record in commercialising research be turned into an advantage? Data 61’s CEO Adrian Turner believes so.

Australian research agency Data61 was formed last year following the science hostile Abbott government’s slashing of research budgets coupled with a merger of the National ICT Australia organisation (NICTA) with the long established CSIRO.

The intention behind Data61 was to create a world leading data research agency. At the time of the announcement then communications minister and now Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull said, “Having a single national organisation will enable Data61 to produce focussed research that will deliver strong economic returns and ensure that Australia remains at the forefront of digital innovation.”

Having been in the role for six month and now, in his words, having his feet finally under the desk, Data61’s CEO Adrian Turner met with the media last week to discuss the directions he intends to take the organisation.

Business in a data rich world

Coming from a corporate Research & Development background and having spent over a decade in Silicon Valley tech businesses, Turner is conscious how industries are being changed in a data rich world.

For corporate R&D model shifting as industries are changing he says, “their challenge is they can’t hire the digital and data talent that they really need.” Turner sees one of the opportunities for Data61 in providing access to the high level expertise large companies are struggling to find.

Giving Data61 is global focus is Turner’s main objective with an aim of capturing a tenth of one percent of the world’s private sector R&D budget, describing how he will sell the organisation’s scientific expertise to global corporations, “we can plug them into the Boeing and GMs of the world and introduce them to the people to short circuit the sales process.”

“We’re going to go around the world where corporate R&D dollars get allocated and convince these companies that Australia is a place where primary R&D can take place,” Turner continued, “we’ve got the talent and we’ve got the capabilities to do the research.”

Good at the basics

Turner highligthts an ongoing problem in Australian science and industry. The nation historically has been good at basic research but poor at getting those developments to the marketplace, something the World Intellectual Property Organisation’s Global Innovation Report has regularly flagged.

While Australia ranks at 17 overall in the 2015 WIPO report, the nation’s business community flounders at 38th in the world for its collaboration with researchers and 39th for knowledge and technology output. Put bluntly, Australian businesspeople are not very sophisticated or research orientated.

Adrian Turner puts that down partly to the nation’s being weak at product management, “I think it’s a function of global companies seeing Australia as a sales and marketing outpost so we don’t have the product development expertise.”

Inward looking locals

The nation’s inward looking local corporations are also part of the problem, “for us to succeed as a country we have to have a global mindset. We can’t have the zero-sum mindset that I win if you lose in the domestic market,” Turner continued. “In that sense what we’re doing is creating a product marketing function.”

So to meet Data61’s objectives of meeting its own financial performance targets, developing an R&D ecosystem and having an impact on the nation economy, Turner sees the organisation having to go overseas for most of its partnering with private sector researchers.

Sparking the startups

All is not lost though for Australia with Turner believing Data61 has a role in helping the local startup community develop. “We don’t have the infrastructure in place to support the entrepreneurs to go out and build new business,” he says.

“In Silicon Valley over decades you have this infrastructure, you have this workforce, you’ve got the legal infrastructure, you’ve got capital, all of these things that have built up organically over decades and they stack the odds in favour of the entrepreneurs.”

Data61 was born out of an unfortunate period of Australian politics where for the first time the nation was lead by a government that was genuinely hostile to science. Now the political winds have changed and the organisation has a global focus, it may be possible to reverse the long-term neglect of Australian research and build a new business culture.

Israel and the long term tech view

A unique combination of factors coupled with a long term view is what’s driven Israel’s tech successes. Other places could learn from the taking that longer perspective.

Things are going crazy in the Israeli startup scene as investors and multinationals and startup pile into the country’s tech sector.

In order to understand what’s happening I spent the morning at The Bridge, an Israel Australia Investment Summit staged by the Israeli Trade Commission and Invest in Israel.

Of the morning sessions, the two panel segments gave the most insight into what’s driving the Israeli tech sector with Nimrod Kolovski of Jerusalem Venture Partners emphasising the industry-g0vernment-academia collaboration, military spending and tight personal networks.

“In Israel we can make two phone calls – to someone who was with them in the army and to someone who they worked with at the last company. You don’t get a chance to repair your reputation in Israel,” says Kolovski of those tight personal networks.

Kolovski also highlighted an important part of venture capital culture – just as much in the US as Israel – is the willingness to admit failure, “if you don’t then you’ll lose credibility”.

The broad message from the morning’s sessions is that the Israeli tech sector happens to have the combination of factors that aligns with the Silicon Valley and US corporate view of the world coupled with a strong underpinning of high level, defense led research and personal networks forged to a large degree during National Service.

For a long time I’ve been skeptical of the Israeli and Silicon Valley model being replicable in other countries, particularly Australia, and the morning’s sessions only confirm that view. There is more to this which I intend to explore in some future blog posts.

The lesson for other countries though is that personal networks, research and access to capital matter in creating new industry hubs. The challenge for each country or region is to find the combination that plays to their society’s and industry’s strength.

For Israel, it’s hard to see how their tech sector isn’t going to continue to thrive in the current climate however it’s the result of long term focused investments, research and policies. Taking the long view is probably the most important lesson of all.

Researching the next generation of wearables

The Obama Administration teams with industry to develop a Silicon Valley based wearable tech hub

The Obama Administration teams with Apple, HP, Boeing and others to develop a Silicon Valley based wearable tech hub with $170 million in funding reports Venture Beat.

Over $17o million will be invested by the US government and its private sector partners in hybrid flexible electronics manufacturing research that may well underpin the next generation of wearable and embeddable devices.

For the US, its success in the electronics industry is based upon its strong research sector. Making the investments today will help the nation compete as the technology landscape evolves.

Dealing with the biggest of data

The CERN research project generates huge amounts of data however the human touch is needed to analyse and manage the information

How do you deal with the biggest data sets of all? Bob Jones, a project leader for the European Organization for Nuclear Research – commonly known as CERN – described how the world’s largest particle physics laboratory manages 100 petabytes of data.

The first step is not to collect everything, ““We can’t keep all the data, the key is knowing what to keep” says Jones. This is understandable given the cameras capturing the collisions have 150 million sensors delivering data at 40 million times per second.

Jones was speaking at the ADMA Global Conference’s Advancing Analytics stream where he was describing how the project manages and analyses the vast amounts of data generated by the huge projects.

Adding to Jones’ task and that facing CERN’s boffins is that data has to be preserved and verifiable so scientists can review the results of experiments.

Discovering the Higgs Boson for instance required finding 400 positive results out of 600,000,000,000,000,000 events. This requires massive processing and storage power.

Part of the solution is to have a chain of data centres across the world to carry out both the analytics and data storage supplemented by tape archiving, something that creates other issues..

“Tape is a magnetic medium which means it deteriorates over time.” Jones says, “we have to repack this data every two years.”

Another advantage with a two year refresh is this allows CERN to apply the latest advances in data storage to pack more data into the medium.

CERN itself is funded by its 21 member states – Pakistan is its latest member – which contribute its $1.5 billion annual budget and the organisation provides data and processing power to other multinational projects like the European Space Agency and to private sector partners.

For the private sector, CERNs computing power gives the opportunity to do in depth analytics of large data sets while the unique hardware and software requirements mean the project is a proving ground for high performance equipment.

Despite the high tech, Jones says the real smarts behind CERN and the large Hadron Collider lie in the people. “All of the people analysing the data are trained physicists with detailed, multi year domain knowledge.”

“The reason being is the experiment and the technology changes so quickly, it’s not written down. It’s in the heads of those people.”

In some respects this is comforting for those of us worrying about the machines taking over.

Daily links – the future of Google, Silicon Valley’s name and how startups die

The future of Goodle,,how the name ‘Silicon Valley’ came about, why solar power is getting cheaper and how some startups die.

On many measures Google are in trouble, but one analyst thinks we’re panicking and his view is the lead of today’s links of the day. We also look at how the name ‘Silicon Valley’ came about, why solar power is getting cheaper and how some startups die.

Does Google’s future lie in R&D?

“Google is down but it’s not out” is the warning of this analyst’s report on the company’s earnings and strategy. Interestingly Google outspends Apple by $4bn a year on research and development, but both of them are dwarfed by Microsoft’s spending, which indicates R&D investment doesn’t guarantee success.

The origins of the name ‘Silicon Valley’

Last Sunday marked the 44th anniversary of the first time the label ‘Silicon Valley’ appeared in print. The US Computer History Museum looks at how the name came about and no-one will be surprised it was a marketing person who coined it.

Why does solar power keep getting cheaper

A few years ago putting solar cells on a building was expensive, now in many parts of the world the price of PV panels is becoming competitive with mains power. Vox Magazine looks at the factors driving the price drops and finds that economies of scale are now the main factor affecting the falling cost of installed solar power systems.

RIP Urbanspoon

One of the earliest food review platforms was Urbanspoon which was founded on the basis it would only grow as a bootstrapped company. In 2009 the founders sold out to a larger company who have now sold it onto an Indian business who is going to shut the name down.

Startups who’ve fallen off the map

Business Insider lists 17 formerly hot businesses who’ve fallen out of the public view this year, while some of them haven’t disappeared, it’s a list that reminds us that most new businesses, particularly tech startups, fail.

Links of the day – redesigning the car and South China Mall.

Interesting links include Mercedes’ vision of a driverless car, an analysis of the ill fated South China Mall’s flaws and how Amazon is reorganising its R&D efforts after the failure of the Amazon Fire.

The CES extravaganza continues in Las Vegas with a wave of announcement, most of which I’m ignoring, however the motor industry continues to show off new developments with Mercedes displaying their vision of how a driverless car will look.

Other interesting links today include an analysis of the ill fated South China Mall’s flaws and how Amazon is reorganising its R&D efforts after the failure of the Amazon Fire.

Mercedes redesigns the car

A little while back I suggested that we could do better in redesigning the driverless car – Mercedes have gone ahead and done it.

Mercedes’ redesign of the driverless car indicates just what can be done when we rethink what passengers will need in the vehicles of the future.

Ford recalls a vehicle for a UI upgrade

Ford has recalled its Lincoln MKC SUV models for a software upgrade after discovering drivers were shutting down the cars by accident.

What’s notable with this story is how software changes are now one of the main reasons for recalling vehicles and how design flaws in an automobile’s computer programs are relatively quickly discovered and resolved.

We will probably find in the near future car manufacturers will carry out the upgrades remotely rather than ask owners to bring their vehicles into dealerships.

A long running security flaw is exposed

In August 2013 a security researcher warned UK online greeting card vendor Moonpig that its system exposed up to six million users’ account and financial details. Until Monday the company had ignored him. This is a tale of classic management disregard for customer security and one area where business culture needs to dramatically change.

Rumours of an AOL – Verizon merger

It’s a speculative story but if a merger between US telco Verizon and former internet giant AOL goes ahead it may mark another wave of telcos moving into content services, although it’s hard not to think that Verizon could spend its money more wisely.

After a flop, Amazon restructures its R&D

The Amazon Fire was by all measures a miserable flop as a smartphone however it seems the company learned some important lessons from the device’s market failures. Instead of abandoning its research efforts, the online behemoth is increasing it’s R&D budget and reorganising its development division.

Design fails of the South China Mall

South China Mall just south of Guangzhou has been the poster child of Chinese malinvestment during the nation’s current boom. In a blog post from 2011, a shopping mall expert visits the development and points out the major design faults in the complex which may well have doomed the project from the beginning.

David Cameron and the Internet of Things

Britain’s Prime Minister backs the nation’s move into the Internet of Things

Last year I interviewed the CEO of London and Partners, Gordon Innes, on how Britain’s capital is making a bid to become Europe’s Silicon Valley.

At the opening of CeBIT last night, UK Prime Minister David Cameron increased the country’s bid with a plan on building Britain’s capability in the digital industries.

Cameron portrayed the moves as being a partnership with Germany. This may be partly because he was being gracious towards his host and also because the Brits might not see Germany as being a competitor in these fields.

The fields that Cameron highlighted are deploying 5G networks, more efficient use of spectrum and increasing research into the Internet of Things.

A research boost is a notable as it may give the Brits a foothold in an area that’s evolving rapidly as the Internet of Things raises a whole range of security, privacy and governance issues.

While there’s still a sniff of Harold Wilson’s 1963 White Heat of Technology speech in the Cameron government’s policies, at least the British government is articulating policies for the 21st Century.

It may well be that Cameron’s digital revolution will be no more successful than Wilson’s technological revolution fifty years ago, but at least it will be a brave attempt.

“He looks like a geek”

The media scrum around alleged Bitcoin founder Dorian Nakamoto is based on some flimsy thinking

The unseemly media scrum around alleged Bitcoin inventor Dorian Nakamoto has not been the press’ finest hour.

What’s more worrying though is a Business Insider interview with Sharon Sargent a ‘forensics analyst’ who was part of the Newsweek investigative team.

A systems engineer by training with experience in computing security, military protocol analysis, and artificial intelligence, Sergeant said everything she found converged on an individual with a background apparently similar to hers — and who ended up sharing a name with Bitcoin’s creator.

“I said, ‘I think I know this guy — he wears a pocket protector, he has a slide rule, he comes from that genre,’ which was very different from other characterizations,” she told BI by phone Friday.

He wears a pocket protector and uses a slide rule? Hell yeah, not only did he create Bitcoin but he’s probably a witch as well.

One hopes Newsweek have found the right man.

Picture courtesy of forwardcom through sxc.hu