EVENTS

WELCOME

Welcome to the Fourth edition of the Embedded Systems Australia newsletter in 2009. Embedded Systems Australia is a horizontally aligned, project-based national industry cluster. Our members are interested in developing embedded systems technologies and marketing smart products to global supply chains. The activities span the complete product life cycle of embedded systems development and deployment. These include Design: electronics, software, computer aided design and methodologies; Manufacturing & systems integration to create competitive smart products for vertical applications; and Marketing, sales and support of embedded systems product development.

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A Message from the Chair

Welcome to the Fourth edition of the Embedded Systems Australia newsletter in 2009. During this quarter, we have focussed on launching ESA activities in Victoria, events in NSW and growing our projects.

On November 17, we held the ESA Breakfast Seminar in Melbourne to launch ESA activities there. The event was organised with Jefferson Harcourt of Grey Innovation and Peter Lewis of Hydrix. It featured a plenary talk by Edwin Ho, Director Industry Policy Management for the Defence Materiel Organisation. The topic of the event was engaging ESA SMEs with Defence projects. In his talk, Mr Ho spoke about the importance of systems integration, with a substantial proportion of defence spending going into this area over the coming years. It is interesting that the challenges being faced by Defence (like the rapid development of very complex systems), are now becoming increasingly important in embedded systems development. The Empirical Software Engineering group at NICTA have recently launched a project to investigate new "non-V" development methodologies for embedded systems development.  Prof. Ross Jefferey and Dr Liming Yu are responsible for this project if you are interested in learning more. There is a follow up ESA project meeting planned for Victoria in February 2010.

On November 19th, we held the 2009 Engineers Australia Sydney Division Engineering Excellence Awards Finalists seminar session. The Software and Embedded Systems award category was proposed by ESA in 2007, is judged by representatives from several ESA companies and is sponsored by NICTA.

The seminar session was organised by Robi Karp, CEO of Fluffy Spider and award judge. The evening included presentations by Keith Walsh of Cochlear, Winner Software and Embedded Systems award, and Winner of Health and Safety. We then had Rustom Kanga of iOmniscient, Highly commended, Software and Embedded Systems and winner Small Business Ventures. This was followed by Andy Wyatt of Adaptronic, Highly commended, Control systems and communications and Bill Shui of NICTA, Highly commended, Research and Development. The final presentation was given by Brett Barnard of Ballistic Mobile, Highly commended, Software and Embedded Systems and winner, Product, manufacturing, Facilities and Process. At our December steering committee meeting, it was decided that ESA would promote the Software and Embedded Systems award category across other divisions of Engineers Australia with the aim of making it a National award category.

On December 2nd, we held the 2009 ESA Showcase event. This included a steering committee meeting, project meetings (including a microelectronics meeting), the main showcase event with presentations by Dr. Glenn Wightwick, Director of IBM Australia Development Laboratory, Nigel Poole, Executive Director of Commercial, CSIRO and Dr. Takayuki Kawahara, Hitachi Labs, Japan. The event had technology displays by BCS, Sage, Braemac, Advantech, and DirectTV. The event was followed by a dinner with the speakers, sponsors and supporters.

Dr. Wightwick spoke about innovation jam, an online crowd-sourcing mechanism created by IBM to colect ideas from 150,000 people in 67 companies. As a result, IBM invested $100M into 10 new business ideas. He also spoke about the smart planet initiative and the impact this could have on Australian infrastructure, transport, environmental mangement, education and even households.

Nigel Poole spoke about the CSIRO Wireless LAN patent (that led to the creation of the WiFi 802.11a/g standard - now deployed in hundreds of millions of devices around the world). Mr Poole outlined the court case that led to the CSIRO claiming hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties. Mr Poole also introduced the $150M CSIRO ICT endowment fund that will seed innovation in Australian ICT sector.

Dr Kawahara gave a detailed presentation on advances in embedded systems silicon chip research at Hitachi labs. This included a multi-core embedded processor chip with individually controlled clock and voltage domains for minimising power consumption whilst achieving required performance. From Kawahara's talk, we learn that multi-core chips are going to be everywhere (and yet only 2% of the world programmers are trained in multi-threaded programming). Every embedded systems developer (either individual or company) needs a multi-core strategy.

On the project front, the Wireless Vehicle Communications via DSRC project with the RTA has made significant progress with many companies expressing interest in participation. This project aims to deliver a working prototype for the RTA in 2010 (hopefully with a State-wide deployment some time thereafter).

In 2010, ESA will continue to hold events, seminars, project workshops and training courses. We will grow our high school outreach activities and we are considering taking ESA to the Communicasia show in Singapore. ESA will be running two industry courses in 2010. One on rapid virtual prototyping and one on the ARM embedded processor family.

ESA Objectives for 2010 include:

• Supporting and growing our existing projects
• Launching a project in Victoria
• Growing our industry short course program
• Completing a successful embedded systems summer school at the National Computer Science School
• Representation at an international trade show

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our sponsors for 2009. Your support has enabled us to have a series of events, meetings, high school outreach activities and projects. I would also like to thank the Steering Committee, for helping us to organise several interesting events and activities this year. I wish you all a peaceful holiday season and a very happy New Year.

Sincerely,

Dr. Chris Nicol
Interim Cluster Chair
Embedded Systems Australia

Project Roundup

Here is a short update on some of ESA's projects...

Wireless Vehicle Communications via DSRC (Dedicated Short Range Communications)

NICTA and RTA have been in discussions regarding a proof-of-concept project to prevent over-height vehicles colliding with infrastructure, i.e. enclosed steel truss bridges, low overpasses and tunnels.  Some 15 ESA members have taken part in two information meetings regarding this project.  If the project goes ahead it will be truly collaborative and require considerable in-kind support from the final participants.  The project will be eligible for $100,000 special grant funding from ESA supporter Industry and Investment NSW (previously known as NSW Dept of State and Regional Development).

Contact: Neil [dot] Temperleynicta [dot] com [dot] au to learn more.

Assisted Living

The team are currently following up on an encouraging workshop held with a key State government Health Agency.  The Assisted Living team is Keep in Touch Australia, HETECH/Techome, NICTA with support from HL7 Australia and Industry and Investment NSW.

Project Goal: To apply smart ultra-ease-of-use technologies to reduce isolation and boredom and increase safety for elderly and disabled living alone or community care. 

Contact: Mark Steiner (HETECH/Techome) marktechome [dot] com [dot] au

OASIS (the project formally known as Funky Kiosk)

The goal of this project is to uniquely identify customers in a store and provide them with a personalised and improved shopping experience.  The project is currently exploring the potential of some NICTA technology to facilitate customer recognition.  If you are interested in this becoming part of this project please contact Bill Horton of Directtv billdirecttv [dot] com [dot] au.

Collaboration Underpins Competitive Advantage

The 2008 OECD Science Technology and Industry Outlook Report (www.oecd.org/sti/outlook) reveals some startling statistics regarding industrial innovation in Australia. For example, while 41% of Australian firms claim to be innovative, the OECD classifies most of this as incremental in nature. According to the report, only 7% of Australian SMEs innovate to bring new products to market. Furthermore, of the firms that do innovate, most is low-medium tech. In fact we rate second bottom (between Poland and Czech Republic) in the OECD for high tech innovation (with less than 40% of innovation in Australia qualifying as high-tech by OECD standards).

Do we collaborate?

Only 9% of Australian firms collaborate with an external partner in the process of innovation and this places us at the bottom of the OECD for collaboration. The definition of external partner includes both industry and academia. In Belgium, a whopping 60% of large firms collaborate with external partners in their process of innovation whereas in Australia this number is around 20%. No wonder it is so hard to get collaborative cluster projects up and running in Australia.

It is also difficult for Australian academics to secure meaningful collaborations with Australian industry partners. This is a shame because Australian researchers actually punch well above their weight when it comes to research outputs that have impact.

The OECD report shows that Australian researchers publish over 2% of the world’s publications and rank 16th outright for impact. Alas when it comes to industry collaboration with Australian Universities, the OECD rank Australia bottom in the world (with less than 5% of large firms and about 1% of small firms collaborating with Australian higher education institutions). The report ranks Australia 2nd worst (slightly ahead of Greece) for industry collaboration with Government funded research institutions (like NICTA, CSIRO, CRCs etc).

To say that this paints a bleak picture for Australian innovation would be a huge understatement.

Why industry clusters?

At ESA, we aim to encourage firms to collaborate with each other and with Universities to develop new innovative products for international markets. We believe that the greatest opportunities come from the commercialisation of discontinuous innovation into global supply chains. We leverage our combined networks to understand and identify global trends where Australian industry can collaborate to create an unfair advantage. In the absence of Government funding schemes to provide incentives for collaborative activities, we must co-invest to fund these collaborative projects. While having Government funding would certainly help to stimulate greater levels of innovation, the co-investment model ensures that each investment is targeting a real return for ESA partners in a reasonable timeframe.

Thinking strategically about global opportunities.

In each of our projects, we think strategically about the global implications of a project’s success. In most cases, we can identify substantial export opportunities for project collaborators. For example, Australia has some strategic assets in the road transport space upon which we can leverage competitive advantage. In New South Wales the Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) are collaborating with ESA to develop innovative systems based on Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communications. Via distribution networks, the RTA have deployed the SCATS traffic control system across some 130 cities in 30 countries. By developing innovative V2I applications, we may be able to take advantage of the SCATS international customer base to deploy our ITS systems globally. For this reason, our collaboration with the RTA is very important and strategic.

Lessons from our 2009 Showcase.

Anyone that attended the 2009 showcase might have taken away the following relevant messages:

1. Global business opportunities come from open innovation models (like the Innovation Jam that IBM run to identify areas for new business activities).
2. Intellectual Property can be extremely valuable if properly secured (as per the CSIRO Wireless LAN patent).
3. Collaboration with Universities can deliver discontinuous innovation and enable companies to achieve amazing results. (The Hitachi presentation included details of collaborations with several Japanese Universities).

What can we do better?

I end this article with a few questions for you to consider:

1. What more can we do to leverage the talented researchers in our Universities and Research Institutes? Can we utilise the support available from the Researchers in Business program?
   http://www.enterpriseconnect.gov.au/Manufacturing/AssistancetoImplementC...
2. What are we doing to leverage each other’s capabilities to grow supplier strength in global supply chains? Let’s identify these opportunities and create collaborative projects to go after them. ESA will support you.
3. Can we be more open with each other about ways we can work together to unlock value from our strategic resources?

Chris Nicol
Chair, ESA

What's New on the ESA Website?

Jobs

ESA sponsors can now post vacancies on ESA's website at no cost.  The relevant link is www.embeddedsystemsaustralia.com.au/jobs.  We are also experimenting with ad posting for individuals who are seeking employment.

Images

Do you have images that you own, that we could add to our website to give it more pizzazz!  Images of Embedded Systems applications would be ideal.  Please email these to adminembeddedsystemsaustralia [dot] com [dot] au

Sound Bytes

"If we all worked on the assumption that what is accepted as true is really true, there would be little hope of advance."
— Orville Wright (1871 - 1948)

"I intend to live forever.  So far, so good."
— Steven Wright (1955 - )

Contact

General Enquiries	adminembeddedsystemsaustralia [dot] com [dot] au
Dr Chris Nicol	Chris [dot] Nicolnicta [dot] com [dot] au
Neil Temperley (ESA Secretary & Editor)	Neil [dot] Temperleynicta [dot] com [dot] au

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