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ADVANCES IN MEDICAL BIONICS RESEARCH

29 March 2012

The pacemaker and bionic ear (cochlear implant) were the first medical bionic devices to be used successfully in humans. On the horizon there is the prospect of a neural prosthesis capable of operating prosthetic limbs, a bionic eye, as well as other devices for the restoration of body function. These developments are crucially dependent on successfully connecting the device to cellular tissue. The development of organic conductors (conducting polymers and carbon nanotubes) is contributing to achieving that success. This seminar highlights the medical bionics research being undertaken in our laboratories using organic conducting materials to regenerate damaged nerves and muscle as well as deliver therapeutic drugs. In addition an overview of the world class research facilities available at our the research institute are presented.

Associate Professor Simon Moulton is the Associate Program leader for the Bionic Research Program within the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science (ACES) at the University of Wollongong, and a QEII Fellow of the Australian Research Council. His research area is the development of novel conducting biomaterials for use in tissue engineering applications such as spinal cord and muscle regeneration, as well as drug delivery. His research is focussed on development of the next generation Bionic devices.

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ADVANCES IN GLOBAL MINING TECHNOLOGY

26 April 2012

Maptek is an Australian high technology company that provides a range of sophisticated products for the global mining industry designed to deliver operational, efficiency, safety and accuracy benefits, including 3D modular visualisation software for geological modelling and mine planning, and highly accurate laser scanner technology for mine survey and measurement. This presentation outlines the technologies underpinning Maptek’s suite of products as well as the engineering, management and cultural foundations which Maptek uses to underpin all of its work. The presentation includes a recent case study on how Maptek’s products were used in the rescue of 33 miners at the San Jose Mine in Chile.

Peter Johnson is a Mechanical Engineer with 13 years experience in designing and delivering technology for mining. In 1999, Peter began developing long range 3D Laser Scanners. He led the award winning R&D team which developed Maptek I-Site Laser Scanning products for 5 years before taking on Global Product Manager for Maptek I-Site hardware and software. I-Site products are manufactured in Australia and sold to mining operations worldwide. In 2006 Peter was appointed General Manager of Maptek, Australia and is responsible for the delivery of all Maptek solutions and services to Australasian markets. Peter has overseen design, delivery and commercialisation of new software and technical solutions.

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Health Informatics to Improve Patient Safety

31 May 2012

Health informatics (or e-health), has significant potential to enhance and accelerate the quality, safety and effectiveness of health services, and is attracting multi-billion dollar investments internationally. While much focus is on the development of generic technology infrastructure, much less attention is being paid to engineering end-user systems that support decision-making in clinical and consumer settings. Yet these e-health implement­ations, while bringing many genuine benefits, are now understood to have their own risks, and there is growing concern about the safety and quality of e-health itself. This presentation highlights the current challenges and opportunities in engineering e-health technologies to improve patient safety.

Dr Farah Magrabi is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Health Informatics within the Australian Institute for Health Innovation at the University of New South Wales. Farah leads the Centre’s research program on Patient Safety Informatics, which focuses on the safe and effective use of information technology. She has a background in Electrical and Biomedical Engineering, and is passionate about ensuring the safety of information technology in healthcare through good design and the appropriate application of the technology.

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 Advances in Bionic Eye Research

28 June 2012

The development of bionic vision technology aims to restore the sense of vision to people living with blindness and low vision. Work towards an Australian visual prosthesis, including both engineering approaches and results from in vivo and in vitro experiments will be discussed. The implanted components comprise a split system with a behind the ear unit akin to a cochlear device used to receive power and data from a transcutaneous wireless link, and a two-wire connection to a second implant that is located near the eye and which has a 98 electrode array that is surgically implanted behind the retina. This presentation highlights recent developments in bionic eye research.

Professor Nigel Lovell is currently at the Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering University of New South Wales, Sydney where he holds a position of Scientia Professor. He has authored 500+ refereed journals, conference proceedings and abstracts. His research work has covered areas of expertise ranging from cardiac modelling, telehealth technologies, biological signal processing, and visual prosthesis design. He has commercialised a range of telehealth technologies for managing chronic disease and falls in the older population and is also one of the key researchers leading an R&D program to develop an Australian bionic eye.

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 ASKAP Video

 The Square Kilometre Array Telescope

26 July 2012

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) is a $A2.5 billion radio telescope to be deployed in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa with construction starting in 2016. SKA will consist of thousands of radio-wave antennas all linked together by high bandwidth optical fibre. The antennas will work together, acting as a single large instrument with a collecting area approximating one square kilometre. The telescope aims to address fundamental questions about the evolution of the Universe including the formation of black holes, the origins of the first stars and the generation of magnetic fields in space. The huge increase in the scale and ambition of this project demands a revolution­ary break from traditional radio telescope design. The Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) is CSIRO's technological and scientific precursor to the SKA. Currently being commissioned at the Australian SKA core site in the mid-west region of Western Australia, ASKAP incorporates novel receiver technologies and leading-edge ICT systems which will become part of the SKA. This presentation overviews ASKAP and SKA in terms of their science, technical drivers and also presents a summary of the recent SKA siting decision.

Dr Ilana Feain received her PhD in 2006 from the University of Sydney for research into the formation and evolution of massive galaxies and their supermassive black holes. Her PhD research included the detection, with the Australia Telescope Compact Array, of molecular gas (carbon monoxide) some 12.5 billion light years away in the most distant known radio galaxy in the Universe. In 2006 she was awarded a CSIRO Bolton postdoctoral fellowship at ATNF and continued studying the role that black holes play in galaxy formation and evolution. In 2007, Ilana was awarded one of four InAugural L'Oreal Australia for Women in Science Fellowships. Since 2008 Ilana has been the Project Scientist for the Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP), the Australian technological and scientific precursor of the Square Kilometre Array. Ilana currently supervises 2 PhD students and 2 Postdoctoral Fellows working with her on various aspects of black hole evolution research and ASKAP system and science commissioning.

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  The Quest for the Higgs Particle

30 August 2012

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN located on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva has been running now for around 3 years, colliding protons together at unprecedented energies in order to search for new particles and phenomena, including the elusive Higgs boson which is believed to be related to the question of why particles have non-zero mass. This year has seen a breakthrough in this quest, with the discovery by the ATLAS and CMS experiments of a particle which looks very much like a Higgs boson should. In this talk the LHC and its giant detectors are described, along with the motivation for the LHC programme and the story of the exciting discovery which has captured the imagination of both the scientific community and the general public.

Associate Professor Kevin Varvell is the Director of the University of Sydney Node of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Particle Physics at the Terascale. After being fascinated by the subatomic world as an undergraduate in Perth, he obtained a DPhil in the subject in the UK and has since then been chasing the secrets of the fundamental building blocks of matter through experiments at CERN, Fermilab and KEK. His research group is involved with the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, recently in the news for the discovery of a particle resembling the Higgs boson, and the Belle and Belle II experiments at KEK in Japan.

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 Advances in Prosthetics

27 September 2012

This presentation gives a brief history outlining prosthetic developments throughout the years to modern day technology. This includes the move from hand-made wooden components, changes in socket design, advancement to modular systems, the development computerised knee and ankle elements and advances in material allowing amputees to compete at high level sporting events. It touches on the impact war has had on prosthetic development, and includes a discussion on Osseo integration and Neuro integration and where the future for amputees may lie.

Peter Spooner-Hart is a Certified Prosthetist/Orthotist (CPO-AOPA), a Member of the International Society for Prosthetics and Orthotics, and Accredited Prosthetist with New South Wales Department of Health, and Australian Silicon Partner of Dorset Orthopaedic, England. Peter is a keynote Lecturer at the annual Lower Limb Prosthetic Course at Prince of Wales Hospital. Peter’s interest in Prosthetics began at the age of 10 when both his parents became amputees in separate traumatic incidents. His career started with a prosthetic government facility in Sydney, 1978. Peter then joined a private company, Southern Prosthetics and Orthotics in 1981 where he became Managing Director in 1998 to present.

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Transport Through Single Atom Silicon Transistors

25 October 2012

Technology has reached a level of miniaturization where we can realize transport through a single dopant atom in commercial transistors. At the same time, atomic-scale engineering has reached the level where a single-atom transistor can be fabricated in a controlled manner. We can probe the atomic orbitals and the interaction of the atom with the environment in a single atom transport experiment. This interaction with the environment in a nano-device alters the dopants properties, such as the level spectrum and the charging energy, from those of the bulk. The system discussed here is a gated donor in a top-down or bottom-up silicon field effect transistor. Electronic control over the wavefunction of dopants is one of the key elements of quantum electronics. This talk focuses on the properties of single dopant atoms as well as coupled dopants atoms and the impact on classical and quantum electronics. This reaches from variability due to the discreet nature of the dopant atom, single electron transport, and quantum control over a single spin. Furthermore, it discusses the opportunities to use light to manipulate the quantum state of a dopant atom. A first milestone has just been demonstrated, resonant single-atom photoionization by means of charge detection.

Professor Sven Rogge received his PhD in Physics from Stanford University (USA) in 1997. Thereafter he moved to the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and become a faculty member in 2003. During his time in Delft he was awarded a fellowship from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in 2000. In 2010 was awarded an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellowship and moved to the University of New South Wales (UNSW, Australia) in 2011. At UNSW he is a Professor at the School of Physics and a Program Manager at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computer and Communication Technology.