control yourself: a major strength of engineering at unsw school

UNSW.ENGINEERS Issue 15/June 2007 �15ISS

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Control yourself: a major strength of Engineering at UNSW

School snapshots

Graduate profile: Greg Rose

� UNSW.ENGINEERS Issue 15/June 2007UNSW.ENGINEERS Issue 15/June 2007 �

UNSW Engineers is published by the Faculty of Engineering, UNSW.Phone +61 2 9385 4023Fax + 61 9385 5456Email [email protected]

EditorLouisa WrightLayout and Production ManagerMarjorie Fox-Owens

Printed byRostone Print

ISSN 1442-8849

[cover image] Open computer harddisk.

contents4 News

6 Achievements

6 Blast from the past

8 Control yourself: a major strength of Engineering at UNSW

14 School snapshots

20 Graduate profile: Greg Rose

UNSWENGINEERS

UNSW.ENGINEERS Issue 15/June 2007 �

A Dean reflects…It is a little over five years since I became Dean of this great Faculty of Engineering. The time has gone very quickly and yet we have achieved most of what I set out to do in my first strategic plan.

We have made a major revision to the curriculum with an increased emphasis on design and problem solving; we have introduced the very successful BE/BCom combined degree as well as a number of other combined degree programs.

We have improved the induction of research scholars and provided career development opportunities for them; we select our students more carefully through the Faculty of Engineering admissions scheme.

Soon we shall have a program for elite students and a new suite of Coursework Masters Degrees designed for practising professionals; we have strengthened our dialogue with industry through advisory committees, scholarship programs and partnerships to increase our collaborative research.

So what will I remember most? The excitement and activity of ENGG1000; the record-breaking run of JayCar Sunswift III; lunches with the graduates from 50 years ago; excellent dinners with our alumni in Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore; the Taste of Research Summer Scholarship poster presentations; the collegiality of the Deans Advisory Committee especially when on retreat; and the support of the excellent staff in the Faculty unit.

What will I not miss? Changes in budget model and administrative direction more or less annually; the awful management information systems but not too much else …

I joined an excellent Faculty, a few tweaks here and there have kept it that way. My best wishes to all.Professor Brendon Parker

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NEWS Dianne Wiley appointed Acting DeanAssociate Dean (Academic), Professor Dianne Wiley, has been appointed Acting Dean of Engineering, following the retirement of Professor Brendon Parker.

A chemical engineer, Professor Wiley is also a principal researcher with the UNESCO Centre for Membrane Science and Technology and with the Cooperative Research Centre for Greenhouse Gas Technologies (CO2CRC). Her former positions with the Faculty include Associate Dean (Education and Information Technology) and Associate Dean (Research Training).

“I am delighted to take up this appointment,” said Professor Wiley, who came to UNSW in 1986 as a tutor. “I will be working hard in the coming months to build on our position as Australia’s premier engineering faculty.”Vice-Chancellor, Professor Fred Hilmer, said he was pleased that Professor Wiley had accepted the appointment. “Professor Wiley is well regarded by her peers and I have every confidence that she will lead the faculty to continued success in 2007,” he said.

We’re number oneUNSW’s Faculty of Engineering has been ranked among the top 100 in the world by the Shanghai Jiao Tong University’s Academic Ranking of World Universities.

UNSW, the University of Melbourne and Sydney University were all ranked in

the top 100 for Engineering in the listing, which is part of an ongoing large-scale project to provide independent rankings of the research completed at universities around the world.

The Shanghai Jiao Tong ranking is just one of a number of recent acknowledgements of the Faculty of Engineering. UNSW was acknowledged as Australia’s top-performing Engineering discipline in the Melbourne Institute’s Discipline Ratings for Australian Universities in November last year. In 2005 UNSW was named as having the best engineering school in Australia and the 16th best in the world in the UK’s Times Higher Education Supplement World University Rankings. In 2006 it was ranked 2nd and 18th in the world, with Melbourne having a slight edge at 16.

Sunny skies for photovoltaic researchSuntech Power, the largest solar cell manufacturer in China, has donated

$1.5 million towards solar and renewable energy research at UNSW. Suntech’s Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Dr Zhengrong Shi, is a PhD alumnus of the solar photovoltaic research group at UNSW. Dr Shi describes the partnership between Suntech and UNSW as a step forward in the global quest to find renewable energy.

“Suntech’s research relationship with the University of New South Wales strives to make solar power an even more attractive clean solution to the world’s energy needs,” he said. “Through our unique collaboration, UNSW students and staff are involved in the complete technology development process, and we are able to transfer new technologies to commercial production in a relatively short time.”

Dr Shi, who received his PhD from UNSW in 1992, is a specialist in crystalline solar cell technology. Suntech’s contribution will fund the research and development of technology that increases the conversion efficiency of solar cells and decreases solar energy’s cost per watt.

Agreement strengthens dam-building skills at UNSWUNSW and the NSW Government have signed a memorandum of understanding to foster research in dam engineering.

“Through the five-year partnership that will fund a Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor of Dam Engineering, we are investing in future infrastructure to benefit

NEWS our community,” NSW Minister for Water Utilities, David Campbell, said. “This important position will add focus and strength to geotechnical engineering research and dam engineering within the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and encourage and foster learning of dam and civil engineering students.”

The relationship will increase UNSW’s ability to train future geotechnical engineers as well as contributing to the learning of dam owners such as the State Water Corporation.

The position will continue for five years, supported by the State Water Corporation with five annual payments of $50,000 to the UNSW Foundation.

IT community show of supportThe IT community has donated more than $100,000 to the John Lions Chair in Operating Systems, raised through the efforts of UNSW engineering alumni, Linux Australia and USENIX, which is a global association for advanced computer systems.

The Chair is intended to encourage an eminent academic to continue the John Lions tradition of insightful and inspirational teaching in operating systems. In 2005 global wireless communications giant Qualcomm donated US$500,000, which allowed the Chair to be established. The current donation is a significant step towards raising the $2 million necessary to

make the Chair ongoing. More information at www.cse.unsw.edu.au/JohnLions/. Also see interview with alumnus Greg Rose in this issue.

UNSW takes the lead on solar energyThe School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering will lead a project to build international expertise in solar energy engineering.

The UNSW project, for which in-principle funding of up to $4.6 million from the Federal Government has been approved, is one component of the AP6 (Asia-Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate) Renewable Energy and Distributed Generation Task Force. It will address the worldwide shortage of highly trained photovoltaic and solar energy engineers, particularly in the Asia–Pacific region.

Mirvac supports renewable energyThe Faculty of Engineering and Mirvac have announced the establishment of a scholarship to encourage high-achieving students to undertake studies in renewable energy.

The Mirvac Undergraduate Engineering Linkage Scholarship will be awarded to a commencing student in 2007 for the Bachelor of Engineering in Renewable Energy Engineering.

Centres of ExcellenceResearch groups within the Faculty of Engineering were conspicuously successful in the renewals of Centres of Excellence announced by the

Australian Research Council (ARC) in March. Overall, UNSW received 25 percent of the Federal Government’s funding package, totalling $17.3 million in additional funding, for high-performing research centres following a positive review of the performance and future research plans of its ARC Centres of Excellence and ARC Centres.

The ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computer Technology has been awarded $10.1 million over the next three years and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Advanced Silicon Photovoltaics and Photonics has been awarded $7.2 million over the same period. Both Centres of Excellence have major research nodes at UNSW.

Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop described the ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computer Technology as a focal point for worldwide research in quantum computing. The Minister also noted that the ARC Centre of Excellence for Advanced Silicon Photovoltaics and Photonics at UNSW was positioned as a world leader in solar power research.

“The Centre holds the world records for the most efficient silicon solar cell and the most efficient silicon solar power module,” she said. “It has successfully commercialised, or is in the process of commercialising, eight solar power technologies.”

Professor Dianne WileyDean of Engineering

John Lions


achievements blast from the past

Gold star for teachingRichard Buckland from the School of Computer Science and Engineering is one of two UNSW academics recognised for contributions to student learning at the 2006 NSW Quality Teaching Awards.

Mr Buckland lectures in computer security, cyber crime and cyber terror, and has developed a number of programs to address teaching methods for gifted and talented students, as well as those with learning difficulties. Also in 2006, he received a Citation for Outstanding Contributions to Student Learning from the Carrick Institute of Learning and Teaching in Higher Education, one of nine such Carrick citations awarded to UNSW teaching staff.

World record for student solar carUNSW’s solar car, Jaycar Sunswift III, has beaten the world record for the fastest solar powered road trip from Perth to Sydney by three days, completing the journey in just five days.

The student-designed solar car left Perth’s Scarborough Beach on 10 January and rolled into Circular Quay around 3pm on 15 January 2007. The team of eleven engineering and industrial design students have worked on the car over two years, refining several key components in preparation for the world-record attempt.

Poster win for Petroleum PhDCarbon capture and storage (CCS) is a leading-edge technology with promise in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Injecting CO2 into coal seam methane reservoirs can enhance methane production because the CO2 preferentially adsorbs onto the coal and releases additional methane. Regina Sander, a PhD student in the School of Petroleum Engineering and the UNESCO Centre for Membrane Science and Technology, won the Best Poster Award for Economics of CO2 storage in coal – stand alone CCS project at the 2006 CO2CRC symposium.

2007 Dean’s AwardsDean of Engineering Professor Dianne Wiley and Mark Dimmock of Parsons Brinckerhoff, the evening’s sponsors, congratulated 118 students on their outstanding academic achievements at a ceremony in the Parade Theatre in front of proud family and friends.

More than a quarter of the night’s award winners had been across the stage a few times previously. Twenty students were collecting the prize for the third time and six for the fourth time. Among the repeat winners were students from every school in the Faculty, with a wide range of backgrounds and motivations.

Measuring up!

In the 1960s, students came to university in suits and ties. These surveying students didn’t have to worry about buildings cluttering up their line of sight. Standing where the Scientia building would later rise majestically on the UNSW skyline, this group is measuring the length of a line with a tellurometer, an electronic distancing measuring apparatus. Note existing Faculty of Engineering buildings on both sides of the picture. Do you know their names andanything about them? If you can shed some light, email us at [email protected].

Diary note:

The Faculty of Engineering Alumni Anniversary Dinner in celebration of the graduation classes of 1957, 1967, 1977, 1987 and 1997 will be held on Friday 14 September 2007 in the Roundhouse, UNSW Kensington campus.

Tickets are $75.00 per person (includes pre-dinner drinks, three-course dinner and wine/beer/soft drinks).

If you would like to contact your past classmates, please let us know and we’ll be happy to assist. There will be a prize of one dozen bottles of premium wine for the biggest group of graduates in a particular School and graduating year.

For inquiries please contact:Mr Luciano FerracinTel +61 2 9385 5364Email [email protected]

The Chief Internet Evangelist speaks at CSEOne of the founding fathers of the Internet and self-styled Chief Internet Evangelist

of Google, Vinton G. Cerf, visited the School of Computer Science and Engineering in March.

Dr Cerf’s title as one of the internet’s founders results from his key technical and managerial roles, with Bob Kahn, in creating the internet and the TCP/IP protocols. Outside his role as Vice-President of Google (since 2005), he is working with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the development of the Interplanetary Internet, developing standards to allow communication from planet to planet, using radio/laser communications that are highly tolerant to signal degradation. He told the CSE meeting that internet communication should be a reality between two planets – Earth and Mars – by the end of the decade and a wider reality by the end of the century.

He reiterated one of his strongest beliefs about the structure of the internet, which is the crucial advantage of the IP layer isolating the applications from the transmission layer underneath – unlike traditional broadcast mediums, which are inextricably linked to their transmission formats and are regulated through those formats. Dr Cerf argues that this separation, in which the transmission layer is unaware of the content of the packets being transmitted, has been critical in allowing experimentation. Without this structure, innovations such as YouTube, Amazon, eBay and many others may never

moreNEWS

have evolved. “It is the correct way to support continued innovation, to ensure ideas can be tried out free of charge,” he said.

He began his address, titled “Travelling to the Future via the Internet”, with sobering statistics: unlike ten years ago, the majority of internet users are no longer in North America but in Asia, a demographic which will shape the content and direction of the internet’s future. Equally influential over the future is the existence worldwide of 2.5 billion mobile phones, many of which are already internet-enabled. “Mobiles will have a very strong influence on the future development of the internet,” Dr Cerf said.

His list of social and economic effects of the internet ranged from the revolution in which users are both producers and consumers of information on the internet, which he described as a major transformation in information use. He also pointed to the democratic nature of information access and the opportunity to deliver lifelong education; the new business models now economically viable, such as “long tail” marketing to small, scattered markets; innovation “at the edge”; the need for localisation to deliver culturally specific services, and the impact of short messaging systems (“for the next generation who find email too slow”).

Dr Cerf said he had been “stunned” to see the range of equipment which is now potentially internet-enabled, including picture frames, surfboards, washing machines, refrigerators and personal weight scales. He predicted that “billions” of devices would soon be connected at the office, at home, in the car and in the pocket.

UNSW Engineering Alumni save up to $30 on books

Go to www.bookshop.unsw.edu.au/engalumni for special discounts on a number of best-selling engineering books.

If you can’t find what you’re looking for, you can always call 02 9385 6689 (business hours) or email [email protected] and we’ll be happy to help you. And, you get a 10% discount on almost all books, whether you drop into our campus store or order online.

It is the correct way to support continued innovation, to ensure ideas can be tried out free of charge


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Control yourself: a major strength of Engineering at UNSW >

As we become more precise about the nature of control practised within engineering, we can trace relationships to the underlying mathematics, and particularly optimisation. The School of Mathematics and Statistics has a strong research and teaching interest in optimisation, which together with supporting disciplines within mathematics offers a highly supportive environment for control at UNSW.

If we retain our definition of control as decision-making and optimisation, usually based on an underlying model or description of the process to which it is applied, then many groups within engineering practise control in various forms. However, it is particularly the mode-based optimisation of process performance which defines the discipline that most would associate with the field of control. This is practised directly in the School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications (EET) by the Systems and Control Group, supported by others in related theoretical areas of signal processing, and by those who apply control to equipment such as electrical machines and drives or the generation of electrical energy. For many years, Systems and Control has included biomedical engineering (instrumentation and control of physiological systems), collaborating with the Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering. Mechatronics, in Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering (MME), is a fusion of mechanical design and the application of control,

electronics and embedded computer systems to that which is designed – frequently robotics, manufacturing systems or aerospace systems. Process control is the specific application of control theory to process engineering, practised by the chemical engineers.

Engineering at UNSW is particularly strong in control, perhaps lacking only the final step of drawing together this expertise into a research centre. What then are the particular strengths at UNSW?

The distinctive strengths in EET are in biomedical engineering (Branko Celler), hybrid dynamical systems (Andrey Savkin), stochastic systems (Victor Solo), optimal, robust and nonlinear control and control applications (all staff), supported by interests in real-time and embedded systems. The group’s capabilities and interests overlap with those of similar groups around Australia, but are augmented by distinctive strengths.

The Intelligent Machines Group in MME has very visible projects in robotics, and particularly with autonomous vehicles for agricultural applications, although applications include automotive systems and micromachining. Control and embedded system design also find outlets in aerospace, although this may not be the primary focus.

Process control (and process modelling) is the forte of the Process Modelling, Control and Optimisation Group in Chemical Sciences and Engineering. Modelling and optimisation are applied to a variety of chemical reactors and processes, including those in the food and bioprocessing

industries. Membranes have always been a focus in the School, which hosts the UNESCO Membrane Centre. Robust, decentralised control and optimisation provide the underlying theory, and there is collaboration with groups such as those in EET.

As is true for much of engineering, control practice is dependent on computers for computation and simulation but particularly for implementation with real-time and embedded systems. While this expertise is spread around the Faculty, it resides in force within Computer Science and Engineering (CSE), with strong research in artificial intelligence, embedded systems and operating systems, and longstanding involvement in Robodogs and related work, including collaboration with the Field Robotics Centre.

Tim Hesketh

Control is a ubiquitous discipline which is found throughout the University in many guises. In its broadest sense, it may be regarded as a numerate form of decision-making, and as such it is practised in areas such as business and psychology in addition to engineering.

Control practice is dependent on computers for computation and simulation but particularly for implementation with real-time and embedded systems

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Autonomous control of Unmanned Aerial VehiclesThe research group led by Tomonari Furukawa addresses control issues involving autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The UAVs are intended to keep human pilots away from danger caused by system failures or operational mistakes, as well as in missions such as bushfire fighting and marine search and rescue.

In addition, Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs), which are defined to be significantly smaller than standard model aircrafts, are intended for missions in narrow spaces where ground vehicles cannot be effectively used, such as surveillance in urban areas or search and rescue operations in collapsed buildings.

The primary research challenge of the group is to develop a control strategy that enables multiple aerial vehicles to coordinate and achieve missions efficiently. If the control strategy is scalable, the cooperation of a large number of aerial vehicles will result in a performance which can never be achieved by manned aerial vehicles. Since the operation of aerial vehicles in a natural environment requires sensing with uncertainties, the group develops this control strategy in a stochastic framework.

The work of the group is not limited to theoretical developments and covers various software and hardware developments. Under development, sponsored by the US Air Force, are a team of autonomous model helicopters and their simulator. The model helicopters with a rotor diameter of 1.5 m will be used to demonstrate the efficacy of the developed control strategy at a reasonably large scale. The simulator, uniquely developed with multiple PCs and monitors, can show views from multiple aerial vehicles simultaneously. Being linked to Google Earth, it is also possible to virtually locate aerial vehicles on Earth while their configurations are shown three-dimensionally at a zoomed scale.

The group also has projects on the control of MAVs. The group is currently teamed up with the University of Sydney and is preparing for a MAV competition to be held in India in 2008. The challenge, sponsored by the US Army, is to locate

victims in a building by releasing MAVs (of less than 30 cm in any dimension) in an outdoor field. Analysis and synthesis of an MAV with flapping wings is another MAV project that the group is intensively developing. Due to its small size, the creation of additional lift forces by forming vortices is an essential technology for successful flapping flight. The project is developing a system that visualises and quantifies the flapping motion and surrounding air flow to determine the most efficient flapping motion.

Tomonari Furukawa

Robust control theory@ADFAARC Australian Professorial Fellow, Scientia Professor Ian Petersen is a member of the Control and Control Applications research group within the School of ITEE at UNSW@ADFA. This research group includes two other members of Academic Staff, A/Prof Himanshu Pota and Dr Valeri Ougrinovski. The group currently includes nine PhD students and one postdoctoral fellow.

Professor Petersen’s main research activities are in the area of robust control theory and its applications. In particular, his research interests include robust nonlinear control and state estimation using integral quadratic constraint methods and quantum control theory and applications. His applications research also includes vibration control using piezoelectric actuators and the control of atomic force microscopes.

The research in robust nonlinear control and state estimation is concerned with developing computationally

tractable methods for the design of robust nonlinear feedback control and filtering systems. This involves using methods from linear robust control theory including minimax LQG control, H-infinity control and integral quadratic constraint methods to synthesise the linear part of a nonlinear controller or filter. The nonlinear part of the filter or controller will duplicate the nonlinearity in the process model or be derived from it.

Professor Petersen’s research in quantum technology is motivated by a need for robust feedback control design

Control yourself (cont.)

The primary research challenge of the group is to develop a control strategy that

enables multiple aerial vehicles to coordinate and achieve missions efficiently

methods for quantum systems that are capable of achieving desired performance while compensating for the detrimental effects of uncertainty, decoherence and noise, and taking into account the fact that measurements affect the dynamics of quantum systems. Standard control methods do not take into account the special features of quantum systems; these features, however, are critical to the operation of these systems and provide opportunities beyond those available in classical systems.

In addition to these research activities, the research being carried out within the group includes robust stochastic control theory, robust control and state estimation for hidden Markov models, decentralised robust control of electrical power systems, nonlinear control of robots and agricultural machinery, and robust, gain-scheduled and nonlinear control of missiles and aircraft including UAVs and hypersonic vehicles.

Ian Petersen

From theory to application: EETSystems and control deals with the study of dynamic systems, that is, systems that change with time. In engineering, the emphasis is on physical systems but the methodology is widely applied elsewhere, for instance in macroeconomics, finance and actuarial studies.

While it has a core concerned with the development of basic theory and algorithms and design, systems and control is fundamentally a cross-disciplinary activity with applications drawn from any discipline where dynamic systems are relevant.

Although individual academics set their own research agendas, a number of themes may be discerned in the research activities in EET. This work includes collaborative activity with a range of colleagues both domestic and international.

Theory• Dr David Clements works on equivalence properties of

linear systems and modelling of nonlinear control systems.• Professor Andrey Savkin has a wide range of interests,

including stability theory, hybrid systems, vision and control, communication limited control and robust filtering and control.

• Professor Victor Solo’s work includes stochastic stability, averaging theory, system identification and ill-conditioned inverse problems.

• A/Professor Tuan Hoang pursues a convex optimisation- based approach to address fundamental challenges in analysis, design and online implementation.

Standard control methods do not take into account the special features of quantum systems; these features, however, are critical to the operation of these systems and provide opportunities beyond those available in classical systems

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Control yourself (cont.)

Algorithm development analysis and design• Dr Clements has done fundamental work on the

development of reliable, accurate and efficient numerical algorithms for control design.

• Dr Ray Eaton works on algorithms for nonlinear control.• Professor Tim Hesketh is interested in multi-variable and

nonlinear systems especially adaptive control and sliding mode control.

• Professor Savkin’s work includes missile guidance algorithms and control of mobile robots.

• Professor Solo’s work includes adaptive control, adaptive signal processing, system identification and ill-conditioned inverse problems.

• Professor Tuan investigates an efficient convex optimisation framework capable of handling large-scale problems in multi-carrier communication and signal compression.

Implementation and design• Dr Clements works on the interfacing between physical

plant and control software and on robust control design.• Professor Hesketh has worked on real-time implementation

and computer-aided design.

Applications• Dr Clements works on chemical process control with the

Faculty in Chemical Engineering.• Dr Eaton works on automated farming jointly with

colleagues in Mechanical Engineering.• Professor Hesketh has longstanding interests in steel-

making.• Professor Savkin’s activities include biomedical engineering

and medicine, in collaboration with colleagues in Biomedical Engineering, missile guidance, control of mobile robots, control of mobile radio systems.

• Professor Solo works on functional magnetic resonance imaging and signal processing for brain machine interfaces with colleagues in the USA.

• Professor Tuan’s applied work concerns applications in telecommunications.

Victor Solo

Process Control in Chemical SciencesSupported by ARC Discovery Project grants and the Faculty Research grants, Dr Jie Bao and his Process Control research group in the School of Chemical Sciences and Engineering have been working in the areas of fault-tolerant control, plant-wide process operability analysis and control applications.

With the increasing reliance on automatic control systems, fault-tolerant control becomes an important issue in the process industries. At present, most fault-tolerant control systems are built with significant redundancy. Based on the concept of passive systems, research on fault-tolerant control has led to new design approaches which require zero or minimum level of redundancy and achieve more cost-effective and reliable control.

The control system is becoming an indispensable part of any modern chemical plant. This leads to a new paradigm of modern process design which integrates process design and control design to deliver the optimal performance. A key issue is to develop the operability analysis tools which can be used to determine the best achievable performance and identify possible controllability problems for process designs. Using the concept of dissipative systems, a new framework for the operability analysis is being developed for nonlinear process systems and process networks. The outcomes include the new insights into the link between dissipativity and process operability and operability analysis tools that can be used in the early stages of process design.

Advanced control applications have been developed through research collaborations. Professor Dianne Wiley (UNSCO Centre of Membrane Science and Technology), Dr Jie Bao and Dr David Clements (Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications) have been collaborating on system dynamics analysis and advanced control for pressure-driven membrane systems, which has led to new insights into fundamental understanding of membrane process operation and design. Dr Jie Bao and Professor Aibing Yu (Centre for Simulation and Modelling of Particulate Systems, School of Materials Science and Engineering) have been collaborating on the development of soft-sensor techniques for milling processes using discrete element models.

Jie Bao

While it has a core concerned with the development of basic theory,

algorithms and design, systems and control is fundamentally a cross-

disciplinary activity with applications drawn from any discipline where dynamic

systems are relevant

The control system is becoming an indispensable part of any modern chemical plant. This leads to a new paradigm of modern process design


SCHOOLsnapshots�� UNSW.ENGINEERS Issue 15/June 2007

Health and medical technologies formed the basis of the Faculty’s recent Think Ahead Forum, the first in a series based on cross-Faculty areas of research interest. Each forum, designed to stimulate discussion between researchers and potential industry partners, is focused on the future, encouraging multidisciplinary approaches to research and innovation.

Guest speaker for the Think Ahead Forum on Health and Medical Technologies was David Williams, Professor of Tissue Engineering at the University of Liverpool (UK), and director of the Liverpool–Manchester UK Centre for Tissue Engineering. He outlined four international collaborations between universities and industry, which have created significant outcomes in training, investment, politics and interdisciplinary research.

After addresses from Head of the Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering, A/Professor Anne Simmons, Dr Gary Rosengarten (Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering) and A/Professor Andrew Dempster (S&SIS), the group broke into individual dialogue between researchers and representatives of medical technology companies such as Cochlear, ResMed, Ventracor and Portland Orthopaedics. NewSouth Innovations (NSi), the University’s wholly owned commercialisation entity, was also represented.

The stimulus for launching the Think Ahead Forum series was to encourage researchers to engage with industry and to jointly explore opportunities to innovate through

research. Dr Steve Brodie, who joined UNSW in early 2007 as the Director of Industry Partnerships for the Faculty, describes himself as located at the ideas end of the commercialisation spectrum. He is keen for the Forum series to dispel concerns about some of the perceived pitfalls of collaboration, including the vexed question of ownership of the intellectual property generated through the collaboration and the professional management of projects.

“How do good ideas happen?” Dr Brodie asked rhetorically. “How are good opportunities recognised? Everyone engaged in research needs to think about the opportunities to innovate; to apply their research to create value. This Forum series will generate conversations to identify those opportunities and build long-term relationships.”

Professor Simmons has no doubt about the value of academic collaboration with industry. “There are so many advantages when universities work with industry – we are in an ideal position to innovate and industry has the expertise to take the ideas to market. It’s a positive outcome for everyone,” she said.

Graduate School of Biomedical EngineeringBrainstorming with industry

A recent meeting of international polymer scientists in Hobart was given glimpses of the biomedical future, in which a nanobot – dubbed an artificial sperm, because of its propulsion system – may be able to navigate the blood vessels of the future, delivering drug therapy direct to malignant tumours or cleaning out diseased cardiac arteries.

UNSW’s Professor Christopher Barner-Kowollik is the Chairman of the Polymer Division of the Royal Australian Chemical Institute and chaired the institute’s 29th Australasian Polymer Symposium in Hobart in February. Among the speakers in Hobart were Professors Anthony (Tony) Ryan of Sheffield and Craig Hawker of UCSB, two leviathans of the polymer field.

Professor Ryan’s “artificial sperm” had the audience spellbound with a wriggling motion caused by changing the pH value of the solution surrounding a strip made of two back-to-back combined polymers. Using the bimetal principle, the strip curled and released with the change in pH environment. The resulting motion would permit independence of motion, unlike targeted therapies which rely on blood circulation to reach the target. Although Professor Ryan’s work is presently at the level of millimetres, he believes it can be transferred to a nanoscale.

Professor Hawker’s work on polymers of highly complex and well-defined architecture for the preparation of nano-particles specifically addresses biomedical issues, particularly cardiovascular disease.

School of Chemical Sciences and Engineering

Brave new world of polymers

UNSW.ENGINEERS Issue 15/June 2007 ��

Polymers with high-technology applications, such as drug delivery, tissue engineering and optoelectronics involve highly complex manufacturing processes which result in significantly value-added products – unlike the bulk polymers in common use such as credit cards, computer casings and the ubiquitous shopping bag. The field of high-tech polymers has emerged in conjunction with advances in biological sciences, which has allowed polymer research to incorporate biological functions into the polymer surfaces. An example is the inclusion of growth factors in the material used for artificial skin, leading to the burns patient’s ability to grow new skin. The meeting further highlighted major advances in the understanding of the fundamental processes governing polymer formation and the use of cutting-edge analytical techniques – such as high resolution mass spectrometry – to polymer science.

Professor Barner-Kowollik leads a large research team at UNSW’s Centre for Advanced Macromolecular Design (CAMD), located in the School of Chemical Sciences and Engineering.

With dam levels in NSW approaching 30 percent in February this year, the State Government instructed Sydney Water to construct a desalination plant to supply about 13 percent of Sydney’s water by 2015. Expressed environmental concerns included the return of highly concentrated levels of salt water back into the ocean.

The Water Research Laboratory (WRL) at Manly Vale, a facility of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, has been working for several years with Sydney Water on issues arising from desalination works. “If we use properly engineered structures to dilute the seawater concentrate streams, we can minimise the environmental impact,” said Brett Miller, WRL manager and part of the desalination diffuser project team (other members are Drs Bill Peirson, Wendy Timms and Will Glamore).

Research on the location and design of the diffuser for the proposed Sydney desalination plant was undertaken at WRL. The crucial engineering component in returning highly concentrated saltwater (the by-product of desalination is typically 65 parts per thousand (ppt)) back to seawater (typically 35 ppt) is to do so in a way that ensures that the brine is fully mixed within about 50 metres of being released on the ocean bed, to avoid causing environmental stress to marine life.

Because a plume of brine is denser than seawater, the hydraulic planning for the Kurnell plant is to jet the water

upwards from the bed of the ocean, like an undersea fountain, at a speed of about six metres per second. The amount of dilution around the diffuser depends on the depth of the water, the nozzle orientation, the exit velocity and the difference in density between the brine and the surrounding seawater. An optimisation process involved balancing the hydraulic head required to discharge at higher speeds, assessing the dilution achieved and the expense in constructing the diffuser. Ideally, the energy used in high exit velocity is balanced against the environmental benefits.

WRL is the home of Australia’s largest hydraulics laboratory facilities, and testing was undertaken to confirm internationally published methods and to extend the knowledge base for discharges into moving current fields. UNSW has been at the forefront of assessing and designing diffusers for the discharge of brine to the ocean. This leading-edge research has shown that such discharges can be achieved with minimal impact, although the need for specifically designed diffusers is crucial.

School of Civil and Environmental Engineering

A salty tale



Undergraduate CSE/GSBmE alumnus, and current PhD student, Andrew Botros has been named Engineers Australia’s national Young Professional Engineer of the Year. Andrew, whose work at auditory implant maker Cochlear Limited forms a bridge between computer engineering and research, received the award for high-level achievement and involvement in engineering and community affairs.

Andrew, now 27, enrolled in the combined computer engineering/biomedical engineering course in its first full year of delivery. It was a relatively unknown course, at a time when little was understood about biomedical engineering in the wider community. “To someone with a deep interest in technological sciences, the human body offers the intrigue of a sophisticated machine,” Andrew said. “But my grounding was definitely in computing, a field of study with enormously wide application; soon after beginning at CSE, I knew I’d made the right choice.”

Andrew took a broad approach, completing his undergraduate thesis in the School of Physics with a project that built computer simulations of woodwind instruments. He remains a part-time researcher in music acoustics at UNSW, where he is modelling clarinets and saxophones for the benefit of performers and composers. (The Virtual Flute, his undergraduate project, won the 2002 Siemens Prize for Innovation and the 2003 Australian Acoustical Society’s Excellence in Acoustics Award.)

Andrew’s doctoral research, now in its second year, addresses research opportunities stemming from his work with automated systems at Cochlear. He was a chief designer of AutoNRT™, an intelligent system that automatically measures neural activity in the auditory nerve with the Nucleus® Freedom™ implant. The system can be used either during or after implant surgery to simplify clinical procedures. “With AutoNRT, I applied techniques from machine learning to automatically recognise auditory nerve responses. In my undergraduate days, I did similar things when analysing the responses of flautists. The PhD project hopes to go a step further and learn how the auditory nerve response corresponds to perceived loudness. This would help ease the difficult and subjective process of implant configuration.”

Andrew completed the Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Engineering and Master of Biomedical Engineering at UNSW in 2001, receiving the University Medal. He went on to complete a Master of Engineering Science at UNSW in 2004.

School of Computer Science and Engineering

National award for Andrew Botros

When EET students Simon Blythe and Kelly Poole won an international competition in February this year for work produced in their joint thesis, their success heightened attention on the role of embedded systems, which have the potential to act as a unifying research concept throughout the work of the School.

Blythe and Poole, who publicly thanked EET academics for technical guidance and professional development in creating their Dynamic Feedback System, had already won the Australian Technical Presentation Prize in 2006, qualifying them to participate in the Institute of Engineering & Technology’s (IET) Present Around the World competition. They have gone on to commercialise the system, designed to give real-time feedback in a teaching environment using a wireless communication protocol with low-power consumption and ad hoc networking. The Faculty was their first customer, buying a hundred units to be trialled in electrical engineering classes during 2007.

Head of School Tim Hesketh can picture an approach to research in the EET area in which embedded systems

School of Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications

A unifying framework at EET


provide a consistent framework for all the major research areas. Telecommunications, micro-electronics, photonics, energy and power all have major applications for embedded systems. Even those areas of research which are not directly working on embedded systems are working on applications which will be used as part of an embedded system. Professor Hesketh cites the example of work in photonics which is looking at a light-based data storage device.

Professor Hesketh believes engineering research of the future will take the embedded system as the starting point rather than a component, and use it to draw much of the work together. The School is making a new appointment in embedded systems, and Professor Hesketh sees the potential shift in research perspective as offering a pathway through which UNSW researchers can collaborate more closely with NICTA.

He believes this move will be dictated by the increasing application of embedded systems throughout daily life. “As soon as you have a computer without human interfaces and a dedicated application, you have an embedded system,” he said. “Traffic lights and traffic networks will soon all have an embedded system. Forty percent of the work on the A380 aircraft was on embedded systems. The new Lexus has 80 different computers onboard and five different networks.

“Embedded systems will be increasingly important to all levels of engineering and I can see a time, not that far distant, when they form the unifying framework of everything we do.”

Work on fluids and issues of heat transfer traditionally belong in the School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering. However, the School’s recently completed Microfluidics lab has little traditional equipment, and nothing of tradition attaches to the lab’s innovative research.

Microfluidics, in which fluids are channelled through minute spaces, have applications in the biomedical field as well as in energy needs. Dr Gary Rosengarten spent last year establishing the lab in the Mechanical Engineering’s Wills Annex building. A list of essentials for microfluidics includes the equipment needed to be able to work at that scale, such as a fluorescent microscope with 100 nanometer resolution, micropumps to control the very low flow rates through channels measuring as small as 1 micrometer (100 times smaller than the diameter of a human hair), and micro-manipulators to permit the very fine movement of wires and (biological) cells.

Because the work is overwhelmingly cross-disciplinary, Dr Rosengarten is working with researchers from photovoltaics, electrical engineering, chemical engineering and chemistry. “A lot of the hot topics in research are related to micro, nano and bio,” Dr Rosengarten said. “This field has to be multidisciplinary.”

One project, with Professor Armin Arbele from Photovoltaics, is developing a micro-lens focused on microchannels, designed to address a central problem for solar cells: the hotter they grow, the less efficient they

become. The model places the silicon solar cell on the floor of the channel, with fluid flowing across. This cools the solar cell and also heats the fluid, which in principle could then create even more power.

In the biomedical area, Dr Rosengarten’s work (which contributed to UNSW’s recent success in the CSIRO’s Flagship grant program) is looking at the mechanism used by marine diatoms, single cell organisms whose silica shells are made up of nanopores, to filter water. This use of biomimetics, or copying nature to formulate solutions, is directly applicable to membranes used in the desalination process.

Dr Rosengarten is also collaborating with Dr Robert Nordon of the Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering on efficient and controllable methods of growing stem cells in microreactors. Using microfabrication technology they can accurately design a microreactor mimicking the environment in the human body to optimise cell growth. They expect initial results by mid-2007.

School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering

Hydraulics on the microscale



A groundbreaking initiative in the education of mining engineers got underway this year with the introduction of a national program for third and fourth-year mining engineering students. Mining Education Australia (MEA) is a national school of mining engineering created and hosted by UNSW, Curtin University of Technology and University of Queensland, with funding from the Minerals Council of Australia (MCA). MEA’s inaugural Executive Director is UNSW’s Head of the School of Mining Engineering, Professor Bruce Hebblewhite, who points out the advantages in a national curriculum.

“The program was developed from scratch,” Professor Hebblewhite said. “Every course has a course coordinator and team from each of the three mining schools, so all students are getting the best available.” This pooling of expertise is designed to upgrade the quality of mining education and of graduating mining engineers, hence the funding from the industry’s peak body. For a mining school already at a high level of quality, such as UNSW, the benefits accrue in areas such as students’ access to thesis supervisors and niche elective subjects.

A second objective is to increase the numbers of graduates, to address the global shortage of minerals professionals. Industry was brought into the partnership to work on curriculum development, leading to the same courses in the same semester in each partner university. MEA’s three

partner universities produced 99 mining engineering graduates last year. All three mining schools have capacity to increase their numbers, and it is hoped that the enhanced national curriculum will also improve the completion rate of entering students. The national target for the MEA program is to achieve about 180 graduates a year.

MEA’s third potential benefit is to underpin the economic viability of university mining departments. By marketing internationally and nationally, MEA expects to increase the number of students enrolling in the program. Discussions are underway with RMIT, Central Queensland University and the Universities of Newcastle and Tasmania to provide Associate MEA status. This will see an alternative pathway for academically qualified students who have done two years of a civil engineering program transferring into the final two years of a mining program at an MEA institution, to receive an MEA mining degree.

School of Mining Engineering

A national program digs in The rapid revitalisation of the photovoltaic industry, stemming from a growing international hunger for renewable energy, led to a reorganisation in September 2006 of the ARC Photovoltaics Centre of Excellence, located in the School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering. Because the Centre’s work includes commercial and collaboration partnerships, a commercialisation group was established with Dr Allen Guo as Deputy Director for Commercial Technologies.

Companies seeking to work with the Centre come through NewSouth Innovations, the UNSW commercialisation arm, or directly to the Centre. In addition to existing collaborators, including BP Solar, Suntech-Power and CSG Solar, the commercialisation group has entered into collaborations with three companies in the six months since it was established. They are E-ton Solar from Taiwan and mainland Chinese companies Nanjing PV-Tech and JA Solar. Both mainland Chinese companies have senior officers – CEO and Chief Technology Officer respectively – who are graduates of UNSW’s photovoltaics PhD program.

Collaborating companies pay to fund research and to license the Centre’s technology, and once the new techniques have matured sufficiently to be produced economically, the Centre receives royalties on the sale of each unit. Importantly, these companies also provide industry experience for post-doctoral fellows, PhD and fourth-year students, who work on research questions arising from the combination

School of Photovoltaic and Renewable Energy Engineering

Riding the wave


of the Centre’s licensed technology with the company’s own solar cells.

This gives the students, whose enrolled numbers have also risen dramatically in recent years, vital practical research and development experience outside the theoretical framework. They bring their research skills to the benefit of the commercial product and receive practical skills in return, often working as project managers under confidentiality agreements. They also learn essential lessons about the tradeoff between efficiency and production costs per unit.

Ly Mai, a senior PhD student in the commercialisation group, won the 2006 Suntech Technology Innovation Award for her work on “semiconductor finger” technology, which provides an innovative approach to overcome the limitations of the conventional screen-printed solar cell that have limited its performance for the last 30 years. This technology was developed as part of collaborative research between UNSW and Suntech. Dr Guo points to Ly’s experience as an example of the win/win outcomes of the Centre’s collaboration arrangements with companies working in solar cell manufacture.

Sana Ullah Qaisar and Jinghui Wu, PhD students in the School of Surveying and Spatial Information Systems, with the help of A/Professor Andrew Dempster, have succeeded in acquiring both the GPS L2C signal and the Galileo E1 signal from GIOVE-A, using the UNSW Namuru receiver.

2005 was a landmark year for GNSS: the first satellite carrying the new GPS L2C signal was launched in September and the prototype GIOVE-A satellite was launched in December, to transmit Galileo signals for the first time.

Namuru means “to see the way” in the Eora language of Sydney’s original inhabitants. The Namuru GPS L1 receiver was developed by Peter Mumford and Kevin Parkinson of the School of Surveying and Spatial Information Systems in collaboration with NICTA. It was designed for the GPS L1 signal and so did not cover the full bandwidth of the Galileo E1 open service (OS) signal, and was tuned to a different carrier frequency to L2C.

Sana Ullah Qaisar’s task was to acquire the L2C signal at UNSW’s Satellite Navigation and Positioning (SNAP) laboratory. The upconverter translates the incoming L2 band into L1 band, which is input to the Namuru and processed to generate samples of the received satellite signal.

The L2C signal consists of two separate codes. This new signal structure required a different approach to acquisition. One period (20-ms) of

replica code, containing the CM chips with CL chips replaced by zeros, is generated. Once the match is found, the original CL chips are replaced to improve the strength of the acquired signal.

Jinghui Wu faced different challenges in acquiring the GIOVE-A signal during satellite-tracking experiments at the SNAP lab between October 2006 and February 2007, using E1 PRN code from the Cornell group’s website for best results.

The achievement of acquiring the GIOVE-A satellite E1 OS signal by using the Namuru front-end is an important milestone for the future Galileo receiver design. The research at UNSW into the new satellite signals has been significantly boosted by the work of these students in acquiring the L2C and GIOVE-A E1 signals. Although the work is a long way from a complete receiver, the first, possibly most significant milestone – finding the signal to exploit – has been achieved.

School of Surveying and Spatial Information Systems

Loud and clear: receiving the GPS L2C and Galileo signals

�0 UNSW.ENGINEERS Issue 15/June 2007UNSW.ENGINEERS Issue 15/June 2007 ��

Greg Rose’s journey has taken him from being one of the earliest students enrolled in computer science at UNSW (an enrolment which would culminate in the University Medal) to seeing his software security encryption used in hundreds of millions of mobile phones around the world. In between, he has ridden the wave of computer

science in Australia and the US, been at the forefront of work on crypto-algorithms, and joined hands with a group of other early UNSW computer students to promote the establishment of the UNSW John Lions Chair in Operating Systems.

Now Vice-President of Product Security for the San Diego-based QUALCOMM Incorporated and an internationally recognised expert in stream ciphers, he consults company-wide on projects with security implications. Greg is the holder of 19 patents in the United States, with dozens more pending, most of them in the field of cryptography.

As a teenager he was determined to be a commercial pilot – and now holds a private pilot’s licence and owns a quarter-share of a Cessna 177 – but he finished high school just as Qantas curtailed its training program. He turned instead to the new-fangled area of computers, and enjoyed the mathematical and problem-solving aspects of the discipline. From very early days he became involved in the programming side, writing a stand-alone monitor for a PDP11/10 to control high voltage switching apparatus in real time, and developing device drivers. He was the shift- work operator of an IBM 360/50, to which he added some programming just for fun. This included PL/1, Cobol and IBM 360 Assembler.

But the revelation came with the UNIX operating system following its introduction to UNSW in 1974. “It was serendipitous to be in a place where UNIX became part of the mainstream much earlier than in other places,” he said. Greg wrote device drivers and made extensive changes to the operating system kernel, leading to significant improvements in performance and greater system capability, and included the first profiling of the UNIX kernel and the subsequent introduction of hashing techniques to the disk

Graduate profile >Greg Rose

buffering strategy. From 1977 he was a part-time tutor for subjects such as introductory computer science, programming methodology, operating systems, and compiler design.

“UNIX came along at a critical time, not just for academic computer science but for the whole world,” Greg said. “John Lions became the father of UNIX in Australia and, some would say, father of the open source movement worldwide.” Greg had already made Lions’ acquaintance, first by being among first-year students pushing for greater access to resources, and later by taking Lions’ third-year operating systems course, in which Greg was both student and tutor, helping set up the teaching environment.

Lions was a revolutionary of his time, teaching programming not only by having students write their own but also by showing them what well-written programming looked like – and using the full source code of UNIX as the example, complete with bugs and interesting problems to solve. He understood that they needed to be hands-on and he lead a seminal fight to shift computer teaching off the mainframes and onto cutting-edge machines in the Electrical Engineering labs, with the then-astonishing capacity of 7.5 MB disk drive and 128K memory!

After Greg completed his Honours year with John Lions, they stayed in touch socially and through the Australian UNIX Users Group (AUUG), an informal network later formally incorporated with Lions as founding president and Greg Rose as founding secretary. Lions’ reputation was cemented with his two books, the virtual scriptures of UNIX, including the source code and a commentary on the material. UNIX was also to form the core of Greg’s work for the next decade.

Greg was always interested in issues of security – he describes himself jokingly as having an “evil mentality”, looking for the surveillance camera black-spots in stores. He spent a year’s sabbatical in the early 1990s at IBM Research in New York to research issues of network security. “Security is a holistic thing,” he said. “It’s not good enough just to have a strong front door. What are your windows like? Is there a basement that is vulnerable? You have to look at the whole structure.”

In 1996 he founded the Sydney office of QUALCOMM as a senior staff engineer, in part to analyse network security issues, particularly around mobile phone protocols in the North American cellular system. QUALCOMM is the world’s biggest fabless (non-manufacturing) producer of chips for mobile phones, shipping nearly a quarter of a billion units annually.

The appointment led to Greg’s professional “Eureka moment”, in which QUALCOMM allowed him access to

some secret algorithms for encrypting short messages (after complying with export control issues arising from being “a goddamn foreigner”). He broke them with ease and his work in cryptography was underway. His expertise in stream ciphers, a field of cryptology, has coincided with a resurgence of interest in this highly efficient way of encrypting information by combining data with generated noise to prevent interception.

Through Greg’s connection, QUALCOMM has been a key donor to the fundraising for the Chair in John Lions’ name. Initially, a group of friends including Steve Jenkin, Chris Maltby, John O’Brien, and Peter and Lucy Chubb organised the John Lions prize through AUUG, awarded just once before Lions died in 1998. The prize notion expanded to a scholarship, and money was easily raised in the heady days of the dotcom boom, so much so that the scholarship evolved into an endowed Chair at UNSW.

Once the boom was bust, however, fundraising became tougher. Greg approached QUALCOMM’s corporate giving department, which made a key donation of half a million US dollars, partly matched by the University. “I am proud to be with a company that does so much good work in the world,” Greg said recently in Sydney, on a visit home which incorporated interviews for the inaugural John Lions Chair in Operating Systems. The QUALCOMM donation also paved the way for a further donation from the IT community, raised through the efforts of UNSW engineering alumni, Linux Australia and USENIX, a global association for advanced computer systems.

Greg’s sense of achievement comes from doing something which no-one else has ever done – like that crypto-algorithm moment in 1996. “The intellectual challenge is the reward,” he said. “And knowing that you have contributed something. There are hundreds of millions of cell phones running code I wrote, that’s a chuff.

“I’ve had a lot of luck – but some of it has been self-made luck.”


The Golden Boys: the graduates of ‘57

More than half the class of 1957 returned to UNSW for a day of celebration for the Golden Jubilee of their graduation – as one speaker joked, probably a higher attendance than for many of their lectures. From young matriculants to those on cadetships to older

men back from the war, plus mid-career engineers who took one of the early Masters degrees, they came together at the then-named NSW University of Technology in the sixth year of engineering enrolments.

Their experiences told the story of a generation. From the names of the major employers to reminiscences of CMF and jungle training camp at Canungra, these were engineers whose professional lives meshed with a time of enormous construction and expansion around the country.

The group, which included three Emeritus Professors, a retired Member of Parliament and a sprinkling of OAMs, spent the day on a very different Kensington campus from the one where they graduated, hosted by a group of present students and including a mini-bus tour of the recent improvements to campus buildings. The day culminated in a formal lunch in the Scientia building, complete with speeches from a representative of each of the four engineering disciplines.

John Higgins said his group, which included civil civils and uncivil civils, had a social life at university dominated by two factors: the female students enrolled in food and nutrition, and playing card games such as pontoon and 500 during every free moment outside classes.

John Orlovich, who like many of the group described the early lectures at the Sydney Technical College in Ultimo, told of the day that 30 mechanical engineering students piled into the College’s lift, which had a clear sign stating the maximum capacity was ten people. As the lift descended, it was unable to stop at the ground floor and went at least a metre further, where they then waited for the fire brigade to come and get them out. “It’s a wonder so many of us completed our degrees,” he joked.

Harry McKay recalled that the chemical engineers of the time were part of the Faculty of Science, not of Engineering. The advantage was sharing laboratory space with the food nutritionists at Sydney Technical College.

The electrical engineering group at the Golden Jubilee day was the smallest of the four disciplines and Ernie Page OAM, the former Member for Coogee, named and described them all, as well as others not present, such as the University’s first rugby union blue, Lance Fennell. A great hit at the lunch was the 1957 year book, which Ernie had copied for each attendee.

Some of the graduates from 1957 at the Golden Jubilee Luncheon with Emeritus Professor Al Willis (front, second from left), the Dean of Engineering fifty years ago.


The Honourable Jack BealeJack Beale held a Master of Engineering and Honorary Doctorate from UNSW, with which he maintained a close association throughout his working life. The annual UNSW Jack Beale Lecture on the Global Environment is just one of the legacies of his commitment to environmental change.

Jack Beale worked internationally as a consulting engineer for 20 years before becoming the NSW Minister for Conservation. In that role, he initiated advanced legislation in air and noise pollution, waste disposal, water conservation, and national parks and wildlife. Most impressive was his new State Pollution Control Commission, which was later renamed the Environment Protection Authority. In 1971, he became the first Environment Minister for NSW.

Jack helped establish comprehensive environmental control systems for the whole of the Australian continent and contributed towards the development of the United Nations Environment Programme. He also served as executive chairman of the Water Research Foundation of Australia, and was instrumental in establishing UNSW’s Jack Beale Chair of Water Resources in 1989.

The International Biological Centre in Cambridge listed Jack among the 2000 Outstanding People of the 20th Century for his contributions to humankind living in harmony with the environment, as well as among the 2000 Outstanding Scientists of the 20th Century, for his contributions to water resources and environmental sciences.

Jack Beale remained active in the environmental movement, both as a businessman and benefactor all his life including significant support for the Faculty’s scholarship program. In particular, he endowed a fund bearing his name to provide a scholarship in Civil Engineering.

Emeritus Professor Harold BrownEmeritus Professor Harold Brown, the first Dean of Engineering at UNSW, has died at the age of 95.

Professor Brown was instrumental in the design and development of the University.

Born in Marrickville in 1911, Professor Brown attended the University of Sydney, where he graduated with a combined Bachelor of

Science/Bachelor of Engineering degree in 1934.After holding various posts in the field of electronics

and electrical engineering, Professor Brown became a principal scientist with the CSIRO during the Second World War. He was awarded a Master of Engineering degree in 1945 for his work on radar physics.

In 1947 he was appointed coordinator of planning and research in the NSW Technical Education Department, where he undertook the initial planning work for the new University of New South Wales. Professor Brown was also responsible for preparing the first of the University’s legal charters. In developing UNSW, Professor Brown worked on the design of the first buildings, ordered equipment, selected staff and organised the first courses.

In 1949, Professor Brown was appointed Foundation Professor of Electrical Engineering and Assistant Director of the University. He later became Dean of the new Faculty of Engineering. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Science by the University in 1974.

Following his departure from UNSW in 1951, Professor Brown held numerous positions with government and private sector entities, including a long tenure as Technical Director of Philips in the Asia–Pacific region.

When asked about the University in a 1997 interview, Professor Brown said: “I’ve seen the University from both ends: first building it, then employing people and now watching it grow. I’m very proud of it. I remember when I stood with Wallace Wurth, both of us looking out at the empty campus. We said, ‘One day there will be a university there and it will be covered with buildings.’ And now I see it today, fifty years later. People must be very proud.”

OBITUARIES

Worth talking about.. .

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