Engineers are pivotal to our economy Thursday, 11 February 2016

NSW Chief Scientist & Engineer Professor Mary O’Kane has been awarded the nation’s highest civilian honour for her service as a leading scientific expert and government consultant.

She was among 10 men and women to be appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia in this year’s Australia Day honours list.

Professor O’Kane, who is an Honorary Fellow of Engineers Australia, hopes her award will highlight the importance of engineering to a strong and robust economy.

“Engineering is not always seen for its very pivotal role in the economy as it is in certain other nations like China, where the leadership has a lot of engineers in the very top of the leadership of the country,” she said.

“Here, in Australia, that happens relatively rarely. I think it’s because engineering is not seen as a pivotal profession, and I think that’s really important.”

Born in Central Queensland, O’Kane is a pioneer in speech recognition technology. She is a former vice-chancellor and president of the University of Adelaide and has also been a member of several high-profile committees, including the Australian Research Council.

O’Kane has served as a board member a number of organisations, including CSIRO, and chaired major reviews for the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and the Co-operative Research Centres Program.

“I think one person in the scheme of things helps a little bit, but if you count up the number of engineers and the number of medicos recognised … I suspect you’ll find more medicos by and large in the system,” she said.

“I think it’s a relative phenomenon. I think (the Australia Day honours) help, but there’s more to do.”

O’Kane said while engineers have been working collectively to raise the profile of their profession for some time, she suggested they could engage more in public life – for example, by becoming involved in politics.

“And we certainly need more engineers speaking as business leaders,” she said.

O’Kane took up the position of NSW Chief Scientist & Engineer in 2008. Since then, there have been significant technological changes that have had a large impact on the engineering industry.

One area of significant change is automation, with many businesses taking advantage of new technologies to boost productivity. O’Kane pointed to Rio Tinto’s ‘mine of the future’ in the Pilbara as an example of intelligent technologies being deployed, such as autonomous haulage systems, automated drilling, and AutoHaul, a fully autonomous long distance railway system.

“We’ve also seen in that same period a lot of work in new materials, and that also affects many areas. It affects civil engineering, it tends to affect certainly materials engineering, manufacturing engineering, and lead to new processes,” O’Kane said.

“The combination of new materials in the intelligent ICT space also leads to some very new and exciting dimensions, and we’re going to see more of that.”

But as the industry moves towards newer and better technology, O’Kane said other challenges have arisen, such as how to educate the workforce on using new technologies effectively.

“(It’s about) making sure people really know what’s available, know how to get these technologies at what price and how to deploy them,” she said.

“So I think some of the challenges we’ve seen in some of Australia’s dropping productivity growth probably has to do with the fact that – if you look at analyses of international innovation indices – Australia’s not always good at the deployment of the very latest technologies.

“That’s not just an engineering phenomenon, but engineering is largely where technologies do get deployed. So that’s a big challenge for us.”

One reason why Australia is grappling with this challenge could be due to the country’s geographical distance from other nations, according to O’Kane. While Australia has been an early adopter of technology such as robotics and inventions such as WiFi, broadband speeds still lag behind other developed nations.

“We’re also a relatively small population and managing a very big continent and I think often just deploying technologies across the nation can be such a challenge if we don’t move on to the next technology first,” she said.

“Something like that would be like the roll out of the National Broadband Network. Even though we were good on early broadband, we’ve been relatively slow to go to ubiquitous broadband.”

However, O’Kane says Australia is well-placed when it comes to artificial intelligence – as evidenced by her own background in automatic speech recognition when she first started teaching computers to understand speech in the 1970s.

“The mining industry has picked up a lot of AI technology. We also see a lot of intelligent software being developed, particularly in our banking and finance sector,” she said.

[Image: NSW Chief Scientist & Engineer, Professor Mary O'Kane, at the 2012 Australian Museum Science Festival.]