Published on the 25/11/2014 | Written by Beverley Head
National ICT Australia has announced another joint laboratory with a leading university as it shores up its education and industry links ahead of the loss of its federal funding from 2016…
NICTA and RMIT University last week opened the doors of a joint data analytics lab. The organisations have valued the collaboration at more than $1 million and there are industry projects in the pipeline which they claim are worth up to $500,000.
For NICTA this is the latest in a long line of labs forged in association with universities which ensure access to the nation’s brightest young technology graduates and also establish a focus for industry looking to engage on joint research programmes.
Other labs include the NICTA/Australian National University lab working on computer vision, machine learning, networking, optimisation and software; a joint software research and development lab with Swinburne focused on software engineering, cloud computing, mobile, information visualisation and software security; and last year NICTA and Monash established an optimisation research team intended to provide computer modelling tools to support disaster management, future energy systems, logistics and supply chains.
In May NICTA also became the first organisation to join the Telstra Research Partnership Programme and will work with the telco on network media strategy, predictive network demand modelling, data trust and security and desktop as a service.
The newly announced data analytics lab teams NICTA’s machine learning research group with RMIT’s Computer Science and Information Technology school. It will be home to 18 PhD students and four postdoctoral researchers and will focus on data, user and text analytics relevant to industries including health, logistics, urban development, transport, environment and security.
Hugh Durrant-Whyte, CEO, NICTA, said: “The impact of data analytics across Australian industry sectors will be measured in many hundreds of billions of dollars.”
One of the first industry partners for the lab will be online recruitment business SEEK, with Google and Westfield also expected to leverage the skills of the lab.
Industry partnerships will be critical to the survival of NICTA, which learned in the May budget that it would lose federal funding from 2016 despite producing around a quarter of the nation’s ICT PhDs.
