Information scientists are figuring out how to make search engines better at listening, so they can give us search results before we even ask.
Quizzing Siri or Alexa on the weather forecast or latest football results is common these days. But if we’re going to have fluent and intuitive conversations with future search engines, they will need to be built differently.
A PhD student at The University of Melbourne has discovered a technique that can improve the resolution of bionic eyes for people who suffer from retinal conditions such age-related macular degeneration and retinitis pigmentosa.
“Implants are really limited in how much resolution they can provide. I’m trying to improve that,” says Kerry Halupka, who works with the Bionics Institute. Continue reading Sharpening vision in bionic eyes→
Flocking birds and schooling fish are the inspiration for creating a swarm of drones that can pilot themselves, and relay critical information to combat soldiers when other communication channels aren’t available.
Defence researchers are building the software to make this a reality, as part of the Self-organising Communications and Autonomous Delivery Service project.
Assessing ageing bridges just got safer and easier, thanks to a high-tech radar device that fits inside a suitcase.
Developed by Dr Lihai Zhang of The University of Melbourne as part of a collaborative research project supported by The Australia-Indonesia Centre, the IBIS-S radar technology can scan a bridge in 15 minutes from a kilometre away with an accuracy of 0.01mm, quickly assessing its condition and stability.
Your smartphone’s Wi-Fi connections are fast and reliable thanks to the work of Australian astronomers in the 1990s.
Today, your phone is also being protected from cyberattacks by Australian software that works within the kernel of the phone’s operating system to protect it from hacking and software faults. The kernel is the most fundamental part of an operating system. It acts between the hardware and the applications.
Now Australian researchers are working to secure America’s growing fleets of autonomous machines, with ‘microkernel’ software known as seL4.
The new software is built on the work of researchers at the University of New South Wales and National ICT Australia (now CSIRO’s Data61 Group).
Understanding why red blood cells get out of shape during storage could help improve the effectiveness and safety of blood transfusions.
So, Marie-Anne Balanant and Sarah Barns are combining biological and engineering expertise, to create a model of how different parts of ageing red blood cell membranes react when a force is applied.
They hope to propose strategies to improve blood storage practices and create better transfusion outcomes for patients.
Access to affordable, reliable energy transforms communities. For most Australian and Indonesian families and businesses, that energy still comes from national grids—the networks of power lines that connect users to power suppliers.
But about 67 million Indonesians—almost a third of the country’s population—are not on the grid. They either rely on expensive, non renewable sources of power—often diesel—or they have no access to power at all. That poses a critical challenge for sustainable development of Indonesia—a nation of islands. To meet the Government’s goal of 90 per cent electricity coverage by 2020 the country’s electricity generation must grow by nine per cent per year.
From 2016 a specially-equipped standard railcar will be rocking and rolling along the tracks of East Java. It will have carefully positioned sensors to detect its movement during normal operation, including its displacement and vibration.
The railcar instrumentation has been designed by Monash University’s Institute of Rail Technology to provide data on the condition of the track. This will allow engineers to accurately estimate safe loads and running speeds.
Port cities can be lively, vibrant hives of activity—the hub of a nation’s economic health—if they’re planned well.
Indonesia’s busiest port, Tanjung Priok, has roughly two and a half times the container traffic as the Port of Melbourne. But it also has a reputation as one of the least efficient ports in Asia. Indonesian President Joko Widodo has recognised the need to transform the nation’s ports and plans to develop 24 new ports by 2019. One recently established, state-of-theart port is Teluk Lamong in Surabaya.
