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How does arobot choosewhich human tosave in a crisis?

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Sharp adviceInsights from the top ofwestern Europe’s tallest building

VOL. 2 NO. 11 DECEMBER 2016

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ENGINEERS AUSTRALIA | DECEMBER 2016 3

Cover storyBiomedical engineer Jordan Nguyen is giving kids with limited movements telekinesis-like abilities.

“It doesn’t really matter what level of disability they have, generally they have good control over their eyes, just because of the diff erent pathway from the brain.”

- JORDAN NGUYEN

36 CONTENTS

| THE JOURNAL FOR ENGINEERS AUSTRALIA | DECEMBER 2016

The journal for Engineers Australia

ENGINEERS AUSTRALIANATIONAL OFFICE11 National Circuit, Barton, ACT 2600Phone 02 6270 6555www.engineersaustralia.org.aumemberservices@engineersaustralia.org.au 1300 653 113

NATIONAL PRESIDENT: John McIntosh FIEAust CPEng EngExec NER IntPE(Aus) APEC Engineer

CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER: Stephen Durkin FIEAust CPEng EngExec NER IntPE(Aus) APEC Engineer

create is the offi cial magazine for members of Engineers Australia

Publisher: Mahlab

Managing Director: Bobbi Mahlab

Editor: Kevin Gomez BS

[email protected]

Senior Writer: Christopher Connolly BE

[email protected]

Chief Content Offi cer: Martin Wanless

Publisher: Stuart Singleton

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Kate Galea 02 9556 9122

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ISSN 2205-5983

Opinions expressed by contributors are their own except where they are specifi cally stated to be the views of Engineers Australia. Engineers Australia retains copyright for this publication. Written permission is required for the reproduction of any of its content. All articles are general in nature and readers should seek expert advice before acting on any information contained here in.

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Check out our weekly newsletter – your best resource for the latest news, events, policies, continuing education and career-related information.

Check out our weekly newsletter – your best resource forthe latest news, events, policies, continuing education and career-related information.

Engineers Australia6 PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE6 CEO’S MESSAGE7 LETTERS75 CALENDAR

NEWS9 ANU stops light in its tracks

12 Australian student designs origami robot for NASA

14 Getting to work on international fusion project

16 Understanding carbon capture and storage

18 New rainfall and runoff guidelines

MANAGEMENT22 Why engineers must step

up as thought leaders

INNOVATION24 Six remarkable engineers

from around the world off er predictions for 2017

32 A prominent engineer explains why living underground is the way of the future

36 COVER STORY: Biomedical engineer Jordan Nguyen is helping people with disabilities control technology with their minds

54 UC Berkeley’s Professor Jay Keasling is altering yeast genes to create medicines and fuels

TECHNOLOGY46 Is pumped hydro energy

storage the solution to fl uctuations in renewable energy supply?

76 Technology Watch: Four of the latest innovations

PEOPLE60 Professor Alan Winfi eld is

trying to make ethical robots

68 Bhupinder Singh believes web-connected sensors promise a fresh era of effi cient infrastructure

78 Standards Australia head Bronwyn Evans is in the create spotlight

ENGINEERS AUSTRALIAengineersaustralia.org.au

| THE JOURNAL FOR ENGINEERS AUSTRALIA

60

54

14 46

| DECEMBER 2016

CONTENTS

78

ENGINEERSAUSTRALIA.ORG.AU6

INSIGHT FROM ENGINEERS AUSTRALIA

I have thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of being

the National President of Engineers Australia,

and I am indebted to the many staff and offi ce

bearers who have assisted me in discharging my

many and varied duties.

I should add that the work of our CEO and

staff , as well as the Board and Offi ce Bearers,

is relentless. As an example, we are in the

process of fi nalising a new Strategic Directions

document that will act as the organisation’s

guiding document from July 2017 to June

2020. It is an extension of Engineers Australia’s

Strategic Priorities 2014-15 to 2016-17.

This document has been informed by

the thoughts and ideas of all our Senior

Offi ce Bearers, and I thank them for their

valuable insights.

As we bid farewell to 2016, on behalf of the

Board, I wish all of our members a safe and

joyous festive season and look forward to

continuing our work to advance the science and

practice of our noble profession.

We are in the process of fi nalising a new Strategic Directions document that will act as the organisations’s guiding document.”

Farewell to 2016 and best wishes for the year ahead

The news that Australia’s Chief Scientist, Dr Alan

Finkel, has been appointed to lead a review into

Australia’s National Energy Market has been

welcomed by Engineers Australia.

Having an engineer of Dr Finkel’s experience

head this review is welcome for the engineering

profession. Engineers play an integral role in

the design and upkeep of the National Energy

Market and its enabling infrastructure, so it is

critical that engineers have a seat at the table.

Energy security has been a central theme in

the debate following the recent South Australia

blackouts, and Engineers Australia has a strong

track record in this area following our 2014

report into Australia’s energy security.

With our spokespeople providing media

commentary after the blackout, it was pleasing

to see the views of the engineering profession

being heard on matters of national importance.

We look forward to working with Dr Finkel on

his review and remain strongly supportive of the

rigour and balance he will provide.

December is oft en a time of refl ection, an examination of our journey thus far, with the intention of setting goals that will inspire us in the years ahead.

Australia’s energy market is highly complex, and is the product of oft en competing policy aims that have been developed over a long period.

Engineers play an integral role in the design and upkeep of the National Energy Market.”

Finkel Review into National Energy Market welcomed

Stephen Durkin FIEAust CPEng EngExecNER IntPE(Aus) APEC Engineer, [email protected]

FROM THE PRESIDENT

FROM THE CEO

John McIntosh FIEAust CPEng EngExec NER IntPE(Aus) APEC Engineer, National [email protected]


YOUR SAY

Do you know of an exciting project we should write about? Is there an outstanding engineer in your midst? Do you wish to share with fellow members, the details of an innovative technology on which you are working? Are there engineers out there doing their bit to help the community? Do you want to comment on an article you’ve read in create?

Email [email protected] and we’ll be pleased to consider your suggestions.

welcomes feedback from the community

There is never any shortage of discussion among engineers in diff erent forms of media. Here are two recent letters we received.

LONG TRAINSFor more than 60 years I have been a regular traveller on the Belgrave train line into the centre of Melbourne. During this time, increasing the capacity of peak hour trains was achieved by initially increasing the number of trains running during peak hours. Then, when no more trains could run on the existing tracks, additional tracks were added at great expense and inconvenience to adjacent property owners.

Reading the August edition of create, I realised there may be another way of increasing the capacity of the Melbourne rail network – following the lead of the London Underground by introducing 200 m long trains. These would be almost twice the length of the trains presently in use and will require the extension of 30 existing stations and modifying others.

Hopefully, this novel approach may also prove feasible for the Melbourne train network in the near future. I would be pleased if a small team of railway engineers would explore this proposal in more detail.

TONY AITKENFIEAust CPEng (Ret)

DIVERGENT THINKINGIt is so refreshing to see such an article as that written by Dr David Cropley in create (August 2016).When we only reason our way towards a solution from a starting premise, we cut ourselves off from the rich vein of associative thinking that taps into our unconscious mind. It is much easier cognitively to do associative thinking than it is to do logical analysis.

Such associative thinking can generate multiple ways of looking at a problem, because when we think that way and turn off our critical facilities we can quickly generate many ideas.

And we do not have to be in a room with other people doing brainstorming to do this. We can be alone with nothing more sophisticated than pencil and paper.

We can alternate between associative thinking and logical analysis as we think about a problem. We can generate multiple views of a problem and then decide which view (or views) we will try to solve.

This mode of thinking is an art. When to think divergently and when to think convergently will be an intuitive judgement, which will become easier with practise at doing it. Like all art, it requires a combination of knowledge and mindful practise.

Dr Cropley is right on the money calling for engineering to begin to teach eff ectively the knowledge needed for divergent thinking and collaboration.

KEVIN BARRY

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ANU's Geoff Campbell and Jesse Everett with their experimental setup. Photo: Stuart Hay, ANU

Researchers at The Australian National University (ANU) say they have stopped light in an experiment which could bring quantum computing closer to reality.

Lead researcher Jesse Everett from the Research School of Physics and Engineering (RSPE) discovered the potential to stop light in a computer simulation and then created an experiment which created a light trap by shining infrared lasers into ultra-cold atomic vapour.

“It’s clear that the light is trapped, there are photons circulating around the atoms,” he said. “The atoms absorbed some of the trapped light, but a substantial proportion of the photons were frozen inside the atomic cloud.”

He said quantum computers based on light could connect easily with communication technology such as optic fi bres and had potential

Experiment where light is stopped has potential for quantum computing.

LIGHT STOPPEDIN ITS TRACKS

It's clear that the light is

trapped, there are photons

circulating around

the atoms."

applications in fi elds such as medicine, defence, telecommunications and fi nancial services.

“Optical quantum computing is still a long way off , but our successful experiment to stop light gets us further along the road,” Everett said.

Co-researcher Dr Geoff Campbell from RSPE said photons mostly passed by each other at the speed of light without any interactions, while atoms interacted with each other readily.

“Corralling a crowd of photons in a cloud of ultra-cold atoms creates more opportunities for them to interact,” said Campbell.

“We’re working towards a single photon changing the phase of a second photon. We could use that process to make a quantum logic gate, the building block of a quantum computer.”


The Vice Chancellor’s Research Fellowships – Women in STEM are designed to address the underrepresentation of women in STEM and are part of Swinburne’s gender equality strategy. They will off er women three years of dedicated research time before transitioning to standard research and teaching positions.

“We recognise that women are underrepresented in Australia’s STEM workforce, particularly in engineering and information technology,” said Swinburne Vice-Chancellor Professor Linda Kristjanson. “These fellowships are about making the optimal use of talent. We want to encourage

the best and brightest female minds to be part of advancing Australia’s competitive capability in science, technology and innovation.”

The fellowships in the university’s Faculty of Science, Engineering and Technology will be open internationally to qualifi ed female candidates.

Swinburne Dean of Science, Professor Sarah Maddison said it is well established that the percentage of women in STEM decreases with progressive career stages.

“Having the security of an ongoing research and teaching position at the end of the fellowship is a crucial element in ensuring we can retain our excellent women in STEM,” said Prof Maddison.

“It is important to provide women the opportunity to fully focus on their research early in their careers to help establish their research programs.”

Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne is off ering research fellowships for women in Engineering and IT, which it says is a fi rst for the Australian tertiary sector.

Photo: Sw

inburne

FELLOWSHIPS FOR WOMEN

We want to encourage the best and brightest female minds to be part of advancing Australia’s competitive capability in science, technology and innovation.”

ENGINEERING RESEARCH

Engineering research at Swinburne University of Technology.

NEWS


NASA'S PLAN FOR MARS

NOW. Testing technologies and people on the International Space Station on their readiness for long trips in space.NOV 2018. Three-week mission (without astronauts) beyond the moon followed later by a similar trip with astronauts.2020. Next Rover mission to Mars.2020s. Yearlong mission with astronauts into deep space, verifying habitation and testing readiness for a trip to Mars.LATE 2020s. Round trip robotic demonstration mission.2030s. Mission with humans to orbit Mars.

Working for an organisation like NASA is a dream

for many – talented people, advanced equipment,

and complex projects.

Chris Norman, a fourth-year mechatronics

student from Curtin University recently lived out

this dream during a six-month internship at the

NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), bringing

back with him some key skills.

Norman started the internship in Pasadena in

January this year, where he worked on a folding

robot with a pop-up feature that allows disposable

robots to move across the terrain of Mars. The

project, which is called PUFFER (Pop-up Flat-

Folding Explorer Robot) utilises origami-inspired

robots as a low-cost solution to navigating the

diffi cult terrain of Mars, comprising a collapsible

body and a ‘parent’ spacecraft.

“NASA is going to send 10 or so of these up

to Mars along with the next Mars lander robot,”

Norman said.

“When the rover drives around, there are a lot

of areas that are of really high science interest to

us, but we can’t actually get to them with a big

robot because there are rocks or it’s too steep or

just too narrow to be able to fi t a big robot.”

Deploying a series of smaller robots that fold

and un-fold themselves would give researchers

access to these areas.

A diffi culty of developing the robots was

designing the foldable aspect, said Norman, who

did some of the mechanical design.

“You couldn't position actuators or

components or any of the things that you’d

normally just put wherever you want … because

they would be in the way of this folding

mechanism,” he said. “I had to be really creative

about how I went about designing it to ensure

that the robot could still fold properly, but would

also still be able to drive around.”

He did this through iterating the whole design

using 3D software, then 3D-printing it.

An Australian university student designs an origami robot during an internship with NASA.

LIVING DREAM

Curtin University student Chris Norman.

THE

NEWS


Back in 1985, as the Cold War started to thaw,

the then presidents of the US and USSR, Ronald

Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, agreed to

collaborate to develop a fusion reactor for peaceful

purposes. The ITER project was born the following

year and the two superpowers were quickly joined

by the European Union and Japan and later by

China, South Korea and India. The new agreement

with Australia marks the fi rst time a non-ITER

member has been allowed on the project.

“This is a landmark day in the history of

nuclear science in Australia,” said ANSTO CEO

Dr Adi Paterson. “Fusion is the Holy Grail for

energy production and if achieved at a large-scale

would answer some of the world’s most pressing

questions relating to sustainability, climate

change and security.”

Other Australian participants include the

ANU, University of Sydney, Curtin University,

University of Newcastle, University of

Wollongong and Macquarie University. They will

work with international experts, determining

the feasibility of fusion energy as a large-scale,

greenhouse gas-free energy source.

“ANSTO will use its expertise in nuclear techniques

to measure the impact of the reactor vessel materials,

which are placed under extreme heat and radiation

inside the reactor,” said Paterson.

FUSION PROJECTOPPORTUNITY TO WORK ON

Australia's nuclear agency ANSTO has signed an agreement with the ITER international fusion energy organisation that will see it lend expertise on the ITER fusion project taking place in southern France.

Photo: ITER

The conditions for a fusion reaction to occur are extreme: ultra low-density ionised gas at temperatures of 100 million C or more. This requires a precise well-engineered vessel.

The current fusion power record of 16 MW is held by England's Joint European Torus (JET). However, the JET plasma is too small to produce a net gain in energy. The ITER should produce 500 MW, which is 10 times the energy needed to create the plasma.

WHY IS IT TAKING SO LONG TO BUILD A FUSION POWER PLANT?


NEWS

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A PROJECT AT THE END OF THE WORLD.

Bharati Research Station, Antarctica

© Architects: IMS Ingenieurgesellschaft / bof architekten / m+p consulting; Photographer: Rakesh Rao/NCAOR

The University of Melbourne and CO2CRC Limited recently opened new $7.56 million emissions reduction laboratories aimed at providing clean, effi cient and cost-eff ective energy for Australia. Professor Geoff Stevens, a project leader with CO2CRC and in the Melbourne School of Engineering said the laboratories will enable the safe and cost-eff ective capture and deep geological storage of carbon dioxide from power generation and industrial processes.

“Carbon capture and storage will provide 13 per cent of global emissions reductions by 2050,” he said. “It is the only technology that can be applied to energy intensive industries such as cement, steel, chemical and fertiliser production, and it can reduce

emissions from fossil fuelled power generation by up to 98 per cent.”

The process involves separating the emissions from industrial processes through technologies that capture the carbon dioxide (CO2). This is then cooled, compressed and transported so that it can be injected deep underground, where the carbon will settle and remain.

CO2CRC’s CEO Tania Constable believes that carbon capture and storage (CCS) has an important role to play in tackling climate change.

“If we are to have any chance of achieving COP21’s aims then we’ll need to implement a range of responses: renewable energy, greater energy effi ciency, fuel switching, and the use of carbon capture and storage as the major technology to curb industrial emissions,” she said.

“The International Energy Agency states that fi ghting climate change could cost 40 per cent more without CCS by 2050.”

Reducing the cost of implementing carbon capture and storage technologies will be the primary aim of new Melbourne laboratories.

Photo: Theresa H

arrison, Melbourne S

chool of Engineering

CARBON CAPTURE AND STORAGE

UNDERSTANDING

Researcher Guoping Hu using a stopped fl ow analyser to measure the reaction kinetics of a novel capture solvent in the new laboratory.

Carbon capture and storage will provide 13 per cent of global emissions reductions by 2050."

NEWS


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We provide free technical publications and practical assistance on all aspects of design, application, process, bolting, welding and painting of galvanized steel.

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The ARR Guidelines is one of the most infl uential

and highly-used documents employed by

local government engineers and consultants.

It features reliable and robust estimates

of fl ood risk, and information for locating

new developments in safer areas, as well as

appropriately designing new infrastructure.

Engineers Australia released the fi rst ARR

in 1958 with the aim of providing Australian

designers and analysts with the best available

information on fl ood estimation. It has been

updated three times since 1958. The third of these

revisions was initially published in 1987 and then

published in a modifi ed form in 1997.

Revising the guidelines was identifi ed as

a priority in the National Climate Change

Adaptation Framework. Funding for the revision

came from the Department of Climate Change

and Energy Effi ciency, the Bureau of Meteorology

(BoM) and Engineers Australia. It has been

developed jointly by Engineers Australia and

Geoscience Australia (GA) over the past few years.

As part of the revision, 24 projects focusing

on aspects of fl ood estimation were completed.

These projects considered topics such as the

hydraulics of urban drainage systems, spatial

and temporal patterns of rainfall, channel loss

models and blockage of hydraulic structures.

The outcomes of the projects assisted the ARR

editorial team to compile, write and edit chapters

of the ARR Guidelines.

Ownership of the product has been transferred

from Engineers Australia to Geoscience Australia

on behalf of the Australian Government. This

arrangement means the Guidelines will be

publically accessible free of charge.

The ARR document, software and datasets are

available for download at arr.ga.gov.au

The document is available in a web format or as

an Epub, an open e-book format that can be read

through many devices, such as iPads and Kindles.

A range of datasets are available for download

and various organisations have produced enabling

software to support the guidelines. Links to this

can be found on the GA website, although they

state this doesn't constitute either endorsement or

recommendation of that material.

The Australian Rainfall and Runoff (ARR) Guidelines have been updated fully for the fi rst

time in nearly 30 years.

EXPLAIN THE RAIN ON THE PLAIN

... reliable and robust estimates of fl ood risk, and information for locating new developments in safer areas."

NEWS


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New invention uses sonar to detect sharks.

WHO'S A

The NSW Government is collaborating with researchers from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) to roll out and trial the capabilities of a shark-spotting sonar technology.

The sonar system, called Clever Buoys, are developed by Shark Mitigation Systems. They use sonar to detect the distinctive movement patterns made by sharks, and transmit a signal to alert lifeguards, who can raise the alarm warning beachgoers and swimmers.

The technology is being tested as part of the NSW Government's Shark Management Strategy, a $16 million scientifically-driven program combining the use of advanced shark mitigation techniques.

The Clever Buoy technology will be used together with aerial surveillance, drone surveillance, shark tagging and mobile apps, in a bit to reduce the incidence of shark bites on the NSW coast.

The test the Clever Buoy, the trial will situate the system about 1km offshore, in about 10m of water. Positioned nearby will be an array of underwater stereo video camera, that will record for up to five hours each day. The captured images will be

compared to the information received from the Clever Buoy to visually verify sharks that the sonar system has detected.

The Clever Buoy will also be fitted with a VR2 receiver, which will record information about any sharks nearby which have previously been tagged.

According to marine biologist and head of the UTS School of Life Sciences, Professor Bill Gladstone, this is an opportunity to rigorously and independently test the capabilities of the Clever Buoy system to detect sharks under real-world conditions.

The results from the test will enable the government to determine whether to, and how

to deploy sonar systems in any given environment, in order to provide the best available protection.

“We know from our previous research using aerial surveys that the Hawks Nest

area is a nursery for juvenile white sharks. This presents us with a perfect opportunity

to test the performance of the Clever Buoy in detecting white sharks, as well as the other species of sharks that occur there,”

Professor Gladstone said.

Following a recent increase in shark attacks, the NSW Government is investing in technologies such as the Clever Buoy.

This presents us with a perfect opportunity to test the performance of the Clever Buoy in detecting white sharks."


NEWS

The fi rst engineer whose name is known to history is said to be Imhotep, who oversaw the construction of the Step Pyramid in the Ancient Egyptian city of Memphis. At the time, it was the largest building ever constructed, at more than 60 m high.

So great was Imhotep’s creation that he was worshipped as a god for the next 3200 years.

We could say that the engineering profession doesn’t stand on a pedestal quite that high today. It is very easy to take the people who put the planes in the sky and the electricity in the grid for granted.

And yet I would be very surprised if Imhotep wouldn’t trade his pedestal for the power he might enjoy today, if he could have his time again.

So many of the Pharaohs of the third millennium are engineers: from Jeff Bezos at the helm of

Amazon, to Sundar Pichai at the helm of Google, to Xi Jinping, President of China.

In my vision for 2025, the Master of Engineering is the equal of the MBA, if not the premier qualifi cation that head-hunters for corporate boards want. Engineering concepts are applied with the same fl uency in Parliament and the media as economic jargon is today. And engineers are encouraged and supported to step up as thought leaders in business and government alike: knowing how to make their knowledge useful at the decision-making tables.

Aft er all, we’re Imhotep’s descendants. We’ve got monuments of our own to leave behind.

Chief Scientist Alan Finkel wants engineering to be the language of decision-makers in Australia.

It’s not in an engineer’s nature to sit in a traffi c jam and not emerge with a prototype urban congestion plan."

WHY ENGINEERS MUST STEP UP AS

THOUGHT LEADERS


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INSIGHT

From robot taxis and advanced 3D structural modelling to needle-free vaccinations and safer artifi cial intelligence, 2017 promises to be a year of

tremendous change. Simon Lawrence taps into the minds of six remarkable engineers from around the world to get a glimpse of the future.

CRYSTAL GAZING


Robo-taxis. Cheaper sensors. Ethics. nuTonomy’s Karl Iagnemma talks about the future of cars.

YOUR RIDE'S NEARLY HERE T

he next decade, according to Ford

Motor Company’s CEO Mark Fields,

“will be defi ned by the automation of

the automobile”.

The same month as Fields said this –

committing the iconic American car maker

to a fully-autonomous vehicle by 2021 – a

world-fi rst trial began in Singapore.

Software start-up nuTonomy began

an app-based service (with engineers

accompanying passengers on the free trips)

in Singapore’s tiny one north business park.

It aims for a driverless fl eet sooner than

you might expect. “We will be conducting

expanded pilots that take us much closer

to our goal of launching a wide-scale

‘robo-taxi’ service in 2018,” co-founder and

CEO Dr Karl Iagnemma tells create.

Iagnemma, also director of the Robotic

Mobility Group at Massachusetts Institute

of Technology, has been researching

autonomous vehicles for two decades.

He believes that we “will see progress

in the area of vision-based autonomous

navigation” over the year. The company’s

vehicles use six lidars and two dashboard

cameras, as well as radar.

Lidar cost has been an area of concern

for those wanting to take self-driving

vehicles forward. In 2012, Google

disclosed that the Velodyne system on its

driverless cars cost US$70,000.

For Iagnemma, 2017 will involve

expanding the Singapore trial, and

dealing with each unknown as it appears.

“I view bug-fi nding as a sign of progress,

since once a bug is detected it can generally

be fi xed,” he says. “It's the unknown bugs

that keep me up at night! With that said, we

have encountered many strange scenarios

while driving in Singapore – a man

dressed in a chicken suit recently gave our

detection algorithm a bit of diffi culty.”

Vehicle autonomy has long been

pitched as benefi cial due to the removal

of human error, but there is also the topic

of ethical decisions, yet to be tackled by

companies like nuTonomy.

A man dressed in a chicken suit

recently gave our detection algorithm

a bit of diffi culty.”

KARL IAGNEMMACEO nuTonomy


A needle-free vaccination delivery platform developed by Mark Kendall is challenging the 160-year-old hypodermic needle.

NO MORE NEEDLES A

mechanical engineer by training,

Professor Mark Kendall moved

to Oxford post-PhD, and was

instrumental in developing a novel 'gene

gun' vaccine delivery system. Since 2004

(and moving back to Australia in 2006),

he has been researching, developing

and commercialising the Nanopatch,

a potentially disruptive needle-free

vaccination delivery platform, challenging

the 160-year-old hypodermic needle.

The company commercialising the

Nanopatch, Vaxxas – which Kendall

founded in 2011 – is an example of what

Australia needs more of. The Nanopatch’s

technological promise is for needle-free

delivery of dry vaccine, requiring a tiny

fraction compared to the syringe method.

This has seen Kendall receive honours

including Technology Pioneer at the

World Economic Forum in 2014 and a

coveted Rolex Laureate Award in 2012.

The NanoPatch, through Vaxxas, also

attracted $25 million in its series B venture

round last year. It uses thousands of

micro-projections on a 1 cm square piece

of silicon, placed to the outer layer of the

skin, where populations of immune cells

are much more abundant than in muscle.

This means an immune response to much

smaller doses compared with a needle.

Especially for developing countries, it

also has the potential to do away with the

expensive, and often unreliable, cold chain

required to transport and store vaccines.

He says it's hard to predict the

future two decades from now but the

fundamentals won’t change. The ability

to probe fresh areas with confi dence, ask

the right questions, and apply the right

principles “to learn what you need to

learn” will always matter

"It’s a credit to the engineering degrees

that Australia has been producing,"

Kendall says. "If we continue that kind of

thinking and commitment, I believe we

should be well-placed to tackle whatever

comes our way 20 years from now.”

Thousands of micro-projections on a 1 cm square

piece of silicon are placed to the outer layer of the skin.”

INSIGHT

MARK KENDALLProfessor, Uni of Queensland


Via six years spent literally helping

redefine London’s skyline, structural

engineer Roma Agrawal got a good

look at the future of construction.

It’s probably no surprise that the industry

is being driven by a need to build things

quicker and safer. Though – as with the

60 m spire that Agrawal helped design at

the top of 306 m The Shard – the trend of

construction taking its cues from factories

might come as a surprise.

The spire was designed in sections, built

off-site, and light enough to transport and

crane to the building’s top, where they were

assembled. Modularity boosted efficiency,

speed and safety.

“I can see this trend continuing: we’re

seeing apartment buildings and student

dorms being built from shipping containers

or factory-made units, and there will be

more of that to come,” Agrawal tells create.

“We’re seeing a big push on

sustainability. How to reduce the carbon

emissions associated with concrete? We’re

recycling huge amounts of steel and using

more timber.”

Agrawal is also trying to correct what she

calls engineering’s 'image problem'. “I love what I do and it upsets me

when young girls, and even boys, think

engineering is messy, uninteresting

and irrelevant to their lives when

nothing could be further from the truth!”

she says. “My aim is to highlight the

creativity that engineering entails, and

make people think more deeply about

how the human-made world around

them came to be.”

The future of construction will involve boundaries between professions dissolving, says Roma Agrawal.

A FUTURE MODELLED

BY BIM

It’s only a matter of time before the 3D printing of

buildings will become more common.”

Photo: N

icola Lyn Evans Photography

ROMA AGRAWALDesign Manager, Interserve


INSIGHT

Things will continue to be messy on the

road to a future that could go either way.”

Disruptive is a term thrown around

liberally nowadays. One domain where

it is inarguably appropriate is to describe

an autonomous car future. Exactly when

self-driving cars will arrive on our roads, how

quickly they become commonplace, and

how they will change our lives are all unclear.

However, there are both positive and

negative implications, and there’s an

important role for governments to play.

This is the opinion of Lauren Isaac,

Manager of Transportation Sustainability at

engineering and professional services fi rm

WSP | Parsons Brinckerhoff , and author of

the recent paper Driving Towards Driverless.

Her focus is on what can be done at the

local and state levels to make sure the

positives are accentuated.

“People might be less willing to take

public transit because if they own a driverless

vehicle, they might be happy to just do a lot

of trips in the driverless vehicles that they

perhaps wouldn't have otherwise taken

because they're no longer driving,” she tells

create. In a do-nothing scenario, a lack of

proper regulation could see urban sprawl

worsen, zero-occupant (errand-type) trips

become normal, and vehicle kilometres and

greenhouse gas emissions increase greatly.

“People might be willing to live farther

from where they work because they can be

in their vehicle and playing with their kids, or

doing work, or watching TV,” explains Isaac.

The dialogue needs to switch from the

private sector leading government to the

other way around.

Much of the coverage related to autonomous vehicles concerns technology or societal implications, but Lauren Isaac spends a lot of her time trying to get the word out about another important topic: the role of governments.

CHARTING A COURSE FOR DRIVERLESS VEHICLES

LAUREN ISAACManager of Transportation Sustainability at WSP | PB


DR ROMAN V. YAMPOLSKIY Associate Professor of Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Louisville

Progress in artifi cial intelligence (AI) has been impressive in recent years, but there are concerns about what it’ll eventually be capable of. Dr Roman Yampolskiy wants the issue of AI safety to be as well-known as global warming.

PROCEED WITH CAUTION

Computers have beaten the best

humans in chess (1997), Jeopardy

(2011), and, in 2016, in Go.

According to Dr Roman Yampolskiy,

Associate Professor of Computer

Engineering and Computer Science at

University of Louisville, the latter was a

standout achievement for the year in AI,

coming a decade ahead of predictions.

For all the progress, there is a huge

neglect of safety considerations, believes

Yampolskiy, who also heads the Speed

School of Engineering’s Cyber-Security Lab.

While there are thousands of papers

written on safety engineering in the

fi eld, it was only this year that one was

written on how to make a malevolent AI

(by Yampolskiy and Federico Pistono).

Compare this to the cybersecurity

world, where there’s a healthy, well-

established ecosystem balance, established

by hackers and security experts.

There’s also the problem that in the

burgeoning fi eld of AI, there are about

10,000 experts worldwide, though only

100 safety specialists. “Current AI safety

mechanisms are about 20 years behind

current AI systems and the gap is only

getting bigger,” Yampolskiy tells create.

Part of what concerns him about the

future is the development of an artifi cial

general intelligence (AGI), as opposed to

regular AI, good at a narrow set of tasks. He

is not alone, and fi gures including Bill Gates,

Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have

shared fears AGI could jeopardise humanity.

According to some, a superintelligence’s

danger is due to its lack of human goals, and

the single-minded pursuit of a task would be

a danger to any person in the way.

Within his fi eld, Yampolskiy expects

2017 to bring great progress in deep neural

networks and “in particular applications to

self-driving cars.”

Meanwhile, he will continue – as he was

years before superintelligence became a

hot topic – arguing the case for caution as

our machines get smarter and smarter.

Current AI safety mechanisms are about 20 years

behind current AI systems and the gap is only getting bigger.”

There’s still time to land an exclusive rate

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INSIGHT

ALEX KINGSBURYInnovation Centre Director, CSIRO

Alex Kingsbury reckons 2017 may well be a pivotal year in the fast-growing use of metal 3D printing.

PEDAL TO THE METAL F

or many reasons, there’s a lot of

excitement in the world of metal-

based additive manufacturing (AM)

going into 2017. Growth in metal AM has

been recent and sharp. According to the

annual industry bible, the Wohlers Report,

the number of machines (by units sold)

increased 54.7 per cent in 2014.

A pioneering industrial application,

GE’s production of its LEAP engines (each

created with 19 3D-printed nozzles) is

ramping up signifi cantly. They plan to

be producing over 40,000 such nozzles

annually by 2020. Also within the world

of aerospace, Alcoa this year started

producing titanium 3D-printed fuselage

and engine pylon parts for Airbus.

Alex Kingsbury, Innovation Centre

Director at the CSIRO, calls 2012 a tipping

point for metal AM, but 2017 could really see

things step into high gear. Slow, expensive

and tricky to get right, the various methods

of metal AM could do with serious resources

to bring them closer to mainstream use.

The CSIRO scientist is hoping that

the year ahead sees improvements in

the size and speed of machines, both

important to more widespread adoption.

It’s been said that industrial use has been

especially slow to catch on in Australia,

though there have been world-fi rst medical

implant applications here, notably in

collaborations involving Kingsbury’s Lab 22

and Melbourne’s Anatomics.

Personalised healthcare is an area

of particular promise. With implants,

for example, process costs increase

with the critical nature of the end part,

biocompatibility of titanium alloys, and

complex geometries achievable.

And she is looking forward to the

proposed Innovative Manufacturing

Cooperative Research Centre, which has

been in limbo since 2015.

“Everyone in the industry is keen to

see it get moving," says Kingsbury. "But I

think 2017 will be the year we see all that

stuff really start to take off ."

There is hope that Australian

companies can start investing more in

their own production machines soon.”

There is evidence of people living in caves hundreds of thousands of years ago. Today you can fi nd people living in underground houses from Cappadocia in Turkey to Coober Pedy in South Australia. And one prominent engineer believes it is the future of big cities.


INNOVATION

E arlier this year, AECOM’s Dr John Endicott

was invited to Australia to speak at the Vivid

Sydney festival. The venue, a newly-built

cavern under the newly-built hill that is

Barangaroo. The topic, ‘Subterranean Sydney’, or

more specifically the idea that we should consider

building underground.

“If you look outside and think about doubling

the size of the city, do you really want 80-storey

buildings closer to each other so there’s no space

in between?,” he asked the crowd.

“Underneath Sydney, there’s some fantastic

sandstone and the opportunity to create space

down there which can be occupied. That vision

can be realised in this space. If you look around

you, can you tell if you’re six floors down or 16?”

Endicott says the heart of Sydney is like other

big cities, intensely developed and set to double in

population in the not-too-distant future.

“That doubling of the population means you

need to double the floor area,” he says. “You need

to double the parkland area. You need to double

the amenities. You need to double the Sydney

Opera House. You need to double the number of

schools, the number of hospitals, the number of

supermarkets and how do you double this area?”

The answer is either out, up or down.

From Britain originally, Endicott has spent

the past 40 years living in Hong Kong, working

on many projects both there and in Singapore.

Both cities have large populations and are highly

developed, with only limited room to expand

further. So the idea of going down has become

more appealing.

“It’s part of the 50-year strategic plan for

Singapore,” he says.

The problem is, right now, most people find the

idea of living underground unappealing. But he

says, in both Hong Kong and Singapore, people

already spend a lot of time underground.

“People travel to work below ground,” he says.

“They go shopping below ground. They park their


“People travel to work below ground. They go shopping below ground. They park their cars below ground.”

An artist’s impression of an underground development in Singapore. Image: JTC

Pho

to: G

etty

Imag

es N

ews;

Mar

k K

olbe

/ S

taff

cars below ground. One

of the hospitals is partly

below ground.”

Endicott says the concept

of interconnected basements

is being developed in Montreal

because people don’t want to

go out in the winter cold.

In Norway, there is an

ice hockey arena capable of

seating 65,000 built inside a

hill. It makes sense because

you don’t need a view of

the outside world in an

entertainment venue.

He feels it is only a matter of

time before the idea becomes

more acceptable. But when

that time comes, we will need

to have done the planning

to prevent the space below

ground being the same hodge

podge of development that we

fi nd above ground.

Getting the planning rightThe space immediately below

ground in cities is already

cluttered with utilities, rail

lines, roads and basements

and even more things

being considered.

“Right now in Hong

Kong, we’re designing

an underground sewage

treatment plant for a million

people. That means that the

existing treatment works can

be used for something which

needs daylight,” says Endicott.

“If we go further forward, in

a very congested area, things

that will likely go below ground

are those things which don’t

need to have open air. They

could be warehouses. They’re

already planned in Singapore

with interconnecting dedicated

tunnels for goods. They could

be offi ce buildings. Many offi ces

don’t have windows.”

Endicott says there are

legal issues which need to be

Top: New York’s proposed subterranean space, the Low Line. Photo: Road StudioBelow: John Endicott speaking at the Vivid Sydney event.

How do you get light into spaces below ground? In New York, a group of designers and architects are looking to create an underground park in a disused tram terminal under the Williamsburg Bridge connecting Lower

Manhattan to Brooklyn. The one-acre site has been vacant since 1948. The idea to convert into

a park was hatched in 2009 by James Ramsay, the owner of design firm Raad Studio.

Inspired by the High Line, a former elevated rail line which was converted into an urban park in 2009, the project is dubbed the Lowline.

Ramsay proposes a ‘remote skylight’ which allows sunlight to pass through a glass shield above the parabolic collector, be reflected and gathered at one focal point, then directed underground.

There, the sunlight is transmitted onto a reflective surface on the distributor dish, which then transmits that sunlight into the underground space.

He says the technology would transmit the necessary wavelengths of light to support photosynthesis, enabling plants and trees to grow. During periods of sunlight, electricity would not be necessary to light the space.

The team has built a demonstration site for the technology called the Lowline Lab, two blocks from the proposed site and they hope the actual Lowline project will be opened to the public in 2021.

THE LOWLINE


INNOVATION

considered too regarding who owns the land

under other properties and for how far.

This issue is currently being explored in

Singapore where legislation is under consideration

which will clarify that, defining land ownership

as down to 30 m below ground. Beneath that, the

land can potentially be redeveloped by others.

Life underground“I’ve always had a fascination with below ground. I

recognise that some people don’t like the idea,

but maybe they don’t know what they’re missing,”

says Endicott.

“It’s a matter of what you’re brought up with. If

your mum and your dad and your granddad used to

go out the back and light the barbecue, you want to

take your kids out and do the same.”

However, it’s also a matter of what you’re

prepared to put up with. People already weigh up

the lifestyle cost of room to live versus distance to

work and affordability.

He says many of his staff in Hong Kong still live

with their parents because they can’t afford a place

of their own.

“Living in London is also almost impossible for

a new graduate. But you get two or three graduates

sharing the same flat or even sharing the same bed

in order to keep the accommodation cost down.

They’ll do that because they want to live in the heart

of the city where the entertainment is, where the

activity is, where their work is. It really is a matter of

value of life and way of life.”

That leads to the question of the value of

airflow and natural light, which he believes can

be introduced.

“Natural airflow below ground is limited. Airflow

for an underground mine or railway is planned

and designed and it’s enhanced by fans and so

you need shafts for intake and shafts for exhaust

and planning a railway, you have to find a location

for those shafts. In this system at a grand scale,

the air would be on supply like water is,” he says.

“There’d be facilities to produce air enough for the

development which would then be tapped into.”

“I recognise that some people don’t like the idea, but maybe they don’t know what they’re missing.”

Life for biomedical engineer Jordan Nguyen involves

giving kids telekinesis-like

abilities, learning from out-of-body experiences, and mind-controlled

vehicles – all enabled by technology.

By Simon Lawrence.


COVER STORY

Photos: Studio Commercial

po

At just 31, Dr Jordan Nguyen’s CV is already

impressive. He has been involved in

numerous high-calibre projects, including

in academia, as a speaker, and in eff orts to

improve the lives of those with disabilities.

To this he recently added a nomination as a

NSW fi nalist for the 2017 Australian of the Year,

and a well-received debut TV documentary.

His enthusiasm for “a new era in human

evolution”, through intelligent machines

is a big part of his message. Cutting-edge

technologies will force us all to think

diff erently about ourselves, even things as

seemingly mundane as our posture.

“We had a camera rig of 84 cameras all

the way around, and then we did some

incredible number crunching where

we had basically four terabytes of data

for one minute of footage,” an excited

Nguyen says of a recent experiment

with the volumetric capture

technology of Humense, a company

he was an early investor in.

“We triangulated all the pixels in

three-dimensional space and had

a very dense point cloud of me...

Once we fi nally got through that,

I was able to put on a virtual

reality headset and stand in

front of myself, face-to-face.”


wer


COVER STORY

WHO IS JORDAN NGUYEN?

Seeing a super-real version of himself – which

he compares to an out-of-body experience – made

him realise what he knew but didn’t give proper

mind to: one of his legs is shorter than the other.

All this computation-on-steroids told Nguyen he

needs shoe inserts.

Chuckling at how ridiculous it might seem,

he quickly adds there’s a serious note, and such

virtual reality applications could help us overcome

issues with how we’re wired, unable to properly

imagine ourselves in the world.

“This will potentially change things in eating

disorders as well. When you look into a mirror you

generally don’t see what you would see if you were

looking at another person,” he says. “But when you

meet a copy of yourself ... I’m fascinated by how

technology can make us self-refl ect.”

>> Biggest infl uences: He credits his mother for his extroverted and artistic tendencies, and his father, a UTS Professor of Electrical Engineering, for introducing him to his current fi eld of expertise. Prof Hung Nguyen has worked in biomedical engineering and artifi cial intelligence for more than 20 years. Nguyen Snr’s proudest invention is HypoMon, a non-invasive hypoglycaemia monitor for young Type 1 diabetes suff erers.

>> Background: Aft er earning fi rst class honours in electrical engineering at UTS, Jordan Nguyen completed his PhD in biomedical engineering. He has worked as a soft ware engineer with Resmed and technology research manager for the Cerebral Palsy Alliance.

>> Current position: Founder and CEO of Psykinetic, creating futuristic technologies to improve the quality of life of people with disabilities.

SuperpowersWorking at the Cerebral Palsy Alliance, Nguyen

met Riley Saban, a 13-year-old with severe cerebral

palsy, who was being assessed for an eye-tracking

device (through which he communicates).

Aired in May, the two-part Catalyst

documentary, Becoming Superhuman,

chronicled a project where Nguyen’s company

were able to devise a solution to give the

teenager superpowers.

Filmed over a month, the team worked

to harness Riley’s most reliable voluntary

movements – those from his eyes – to allow the

boy to turn electrical objects on and off.

Using electrooculography (EOG), Riley’s

brain activity corresponding to four different

eye movements was detected, transmitted to a

Electro-oculography sensors convert eye movements into electrical signals.

We’re on the brink of being able to seriously

extend our abilities, with human limits gazumped

by technology. There’ll be a serious need to

reconsider what makes us as we are.

But there are lots of reasons to be excited.

Another giddy digression about how cool

technology is and Nguyen apologises,

unnecessarily, as he was in the middle of a riveting

anecdote about trying to give a boy with cerebral

palsy remote telekinesis abilities like the X-Men’s

Dr Xavier, and explains that he barely slept the

night before. As ABC Catalyst viewers have seen,

getting as much done in a 24-hour day – sleep be

damned – is a regular part of the young man’s life.

“For me, I’m constantly working out where

my time is best spent that’s going to go towards

improving as many lives as possible,” says Nguyen.


“For me, I’m constantly working out where my time is best spent that’s going to go towards improving as many lives as possible.”


COVER STORY

“They’re thinking of Riley as the superhero that they’re trying to mimic!”

computer, interpreted by artifi cial intelligence, and

used to control the devices.

Inspired by Riley’s mother’s recollections that

the boy used to try and turn lights off using the

power of his brain, the team made it a reality.

“The cool thing that’s come since then is I’ve

heard many stories from parents and school

teachers that now there’s been kids who have been

caught sitting there staring at lights or staring at a

TV trying to make it change,” enthuses Nguyen.

“They’re thinking of Riley as the superhero that

they’re trying to mimic!”

For the second of the program’s two nights, the

team decides to go one better and try to get Riley

to control a car.

For help, they turned to Darren Lomman, Chief

of Innovation and Design, Ability Centre, which

supports around 2000 people right across WA,

with a dedicated Country Resource Program.

Lomman is, says Nguyen, “practically a

mechanical engineering version of me”.

The West Australian was also pointed towards

his current fi eld by chance, when he rode his

motorbike into a hospital car park. A conversation

struck up with a wheelchair-bound former

motocross champion led to a third-year project.

Looking for an inspiring project before

graduating and chasing mining work in the thick

of the resources boom, he found what he was

looking for: a hand-controlled motorbike for

paraplegics.

“We’ve now been operating for 13 years, and

worked on over 1000 projects here in WA, and

formed a team of people, and lots of corporate

sponsors and partners,” he adds. “Jordan’s [also]

gone off and done his little thing.”

The two young engineers, who were born a

couple of weeks apart, hit it off at an assistive

technology conference in Queensland.

About six months before the documentary

aired, they fi nally got the chance to collaborate.

Nguyen called looking for a vehicle for Riley

and a half-built buggy was found, from a project

that ran out of funding.

“It had a roll cage that opens up so you can

get in and out, and diff erent supports, and we

started making it joystick-controlled so people

in wheelchairs could operate this buggy, which

meant we already had all the actuators in place

behind the throttle and the breaks,” Lomman

tells create.

“We put in motors to control the steering wheel

and all that sort of stuff . For us to adapt that was

not a quick process, but we just had to adapt our

system to work with his mind-controlled interface.

And before you know it, we had a mind- controlled

buggy that was featuring on a TV show!”

The buggy got off a truck – in need of a

tightened bolt or two after the cross-country

trip – eight days before deadline.

Racing towards the fi nishEye control was tricky: if Riley wanted to watch

where he was going, he couldn’t be using his eyes

to steer.

Jordan Nguyen with Riley Saban. Photo: The Feds

MAKING MUSIC


“W hat’s the one thing you’d like to be able to do?” is a question that can

produce a tricky challenge. When Jessica Irwin, a professional photographer who also suff ers from high-level cerebral palsy, was asked it, she replied that she’d like to play music. “To be able to play music aft er you have been dreaming about it for so long is just magical,” she told the ABC’s 7.30 Report in July.

With the help of Jordan Nguyen, a long-time friend, Irwin made her debut at the Sydney Opera House’s Utzon Room, performing with the Australia Piano Quartet, the Ensemble In Residence at UTS.

She accompanied the quartet for a piece called Whispering Pectoriloquy, co-written by the group’s Rebecca Chan (who is also an MD) and Nguyen.

Using eye-controlled devices, she needed to focus her gaze purely on the task at hand. This made sheet music out of the question.

“You don’t have the luxury of looking down at a piece of paper to jog your memory,” she explained.

How was it done? Nguyen tells create that, “Basically the music tool is a piece of soft ware we created at Psykinetic that combines with an off -the-shelf eye tracker and a tablet PC to allow a person to play music with their eyes.

“The operation works by the person looking at the keys they would like to press and then blinking to select.

“We worked with the Australia Piano Quartet and Jess Irwin to create the tool, and this allows many types of sounds to be looped, layered, and played as individual notes.”

The screen features a dial with 12 keys each of which can be selected through blinking. Irwin could also select to loop what was played and play over the top of that, just by using her eyes.

Jessica Irwin was able to perform music by looking at the numbers on this dial.


COVER STORY

The eventual design got around this by an

echolocation-inspired idea of using Riley’s skin to

sense, attaching vibration motors to his arm to let

him know an obstacle was approaching.

To drive, eye movement signals were picked up

by electrooculography (EOG), amplified and sent

by cloud to a laptop at the buggy’s front.

The laptop was connected via USB to control

the motors, and lidars on the front of the vehicle

scanned the area in front.

“That was feeding information back into the

tablet PC, up over the cloud, down to the box

that Riley had next to him. That box was feeding

vibration information to his arms.”

The last week was filled with all-night

troubleshooting efforts. If it sounds like it went down

to the proverbial wire, then that’s because it did.

“We took it to the park and tested it at about

fourin the morning to make sure that we could

take control of it. Then we are calibrating like mad

that next morning, after 45 minutes sleep – a quick

Myo muscle sensor for EMG (electro-myography) acquisition and use in virtual reality tests.

Psykinetic vibration bands for alternate information sensing.

HTC Vive virtual reality headset.

45 minutes sleep on the couch. About six in the

morning, we got up and went, all right, let’s get

back to it.”

Mind and actionIt’s difficult to find an article on the bioengineering

whiz that doesn’t mention his university pool

accident. Enjoying some summertime high-jinx, a

diving board became loose and the

third-year electronics engineering student

tumbled awkwardly into the pool. He heard

a sickening crack, and, after getting out, was

immediately unable to hold his neck upright.

After being completely unable to move –

thankfully only for a day – Nguyen rethought his

future. It would now be spent striving to improve

the lives of those who don’t enjoy the mobility of

the average person.

“It was from almost breaking my neck 10 years

ago,” he says of his shift, which included a focus

on the AI and biomedical subjects that would be

needed to learn about enabling

technology. He also started working

harder, saying he was scraping by

with a pass average before finding

his purpose.

His final-year degree project

involved building on the long-time

smart wheelchair project his father

has led at University of Technology

Sydney (UTS).

“I have quite a number of PhD

students and colleagues working

on the wheelchair,” Professor

Hung Nguyen tells create of the

wheelchair, which is now back

at UTS.

“This is quite a diverse

performance we’re looking at, with

Jordan working on a few angles.”

Nguyen Junior’s work was

featured in eight annual conference

proceedings of the IEEE’s

Engineering in Medicine and

Biology Society between 2007 and

2013. His 2012 PhD thesis presented

a complete technical solution

for control and navigation of the

electric wheelchairs.

Demonstrated in real-time

experiments and semi-clinical trials, the thesis’s

significance earned it a place on the Chancellor’s

List. Supervisor Dr Steven Su, writing in his

recommendation, said he was astonished by the

work “since it is very rare for a PhD to develop a

complete solution of a challenging engineering

problem not just in theory, but also in practice.”

“We used two cameras to see the relative

distance and detect how far away is the subject,”

Su tells create of the use of the stereo camera for

depth perception. He adds that the system was

based on a combination of stereoscopic and

spherical vision cameras.


“After being completely unable to move – thankfully only for a day – Nguyen rethought his future.”

Subpac audio processing to vibrations for experiments in both rehab and alternate sensory input.


INNOVATION


COVER STORY

The monoscopic spherical vision camera

created a panoramic range of vision for obstacle

detection around the wheelchair.

The system’s confi guration was biologically

inspired by a horse – able to detect predators over

a large fi eld of vision while grazing, with only small

blind spots at areas on its nose and posterior.

The semi-autonomous control is modelled on

riding a horse. Having to control all movement

using the pilot’s brain could be mentally quite

draining, explains Nguyen.

“It would avoid the object in the way, it would

avoid the people, autonomously,” he adds. “Kind of

like riding a horse: if you ride it towards a tree, it

probably won’t go into it. It’s that kind of idea.”

Work on the wheelchair gained a lot of attention

in newspapers and news websites, and on TV

programs such as The Project.

Up until this year, the smart wheelchair was

being developed at Nguyen’s social business,

Psykinetic, but it is now back with his father.

The focus of Psykinetic (a combination of

mind and action) is on eye-controlled

technology. It might not be as ‘glitzy’ as anything

mind-controlled, but it’s more practical.

“Really, the common thing that I fi nd across

most of the people I meet is it doesn’t really matter

what level of disability they have, generally they

have good control over their eyes just because of

the diff erent pathway of control from the brain,”

says Nguyen. “That’s high level spinal cord injury,

high level cerebral palsy, motor neuron disease,

many, many others that I’ve gone through, quite

often the level of control over the eyes is still great.”

Nguyen has other documentaries planned.

Meanwhile, he’ll continue to focus his biomedical

projects on eye-controlled technology while

not appearing on TVs and stages and reminding

us that the future will bring with it some pretty

cool superpowers.

“A lot of advances are making us think about

what it means to be human, but also what it is, who

we are, who we want to be,” he says.

“And I love that.”

“Across most of the people I meet, it doesn’t really matter what level of disability they have, generally they have good control over their eyes.”

Jordan Nguyen and Riley Saban go for a drive with Riley in control. Photo: The Feds

PUMPEDGET

According to the Clean Energy Council,

the peak body for Australia’s clean energy

industry, more than 35,000 GWh of renewable

energy was generated in Australia last year,

representing just under 15 per cent of the nation’s

electricity generation.

Tasmania leads the way with close to 100 per

cent of its energy renewable, mostly derived from

its extensive hydro-electric system. Second is South

Australia with 41.3 per cent of its energy coming

from renewables and this is primarily wind and solar

photovoltaics (PV).

South Australia’s increasing reliance on wind

and solar, both of which have fl uctuations in supply,

means the state is having to consider storage to

smooth out these fl uctuations. In August this year,

AGL Energy announced the launch of what it

described as the world’s largest virtual power plant

(VPP), ultimately involving 1000 connected batteries

installed in homes and businesses in South Australia,

providing 5 MW of peaking capacity.

However, a Canberra academic suggests there is a

better storage alternative, pumped hydro, where the

technology is well established and understood, and

the costs are a fraction of batteries.

What is pumped hydro? Professor Andrew Blakers is the Foundation

Director of the Centre for Sustainable Energy

Systems at the Australian National University. He

says pumped hydro is a storage technology that has

been around for a hundred years or so.

“Everyone understands hydroelectricity generation,

which is water going down a pipe from

Is pumped hydro energy storage the solution to fl uctuations in

renewable energy supply?



TECHNOLOGY

Germany’s Hohenwarte pumped hydro system has a head over 300 m.

2016

Engineering House,


PEOPLE

an upper reservoir to a lower reservoir through a

turbine creating electricity,” says Blakers.

“You could include a pump, or make the turbine

run backward to push the water up the hill through

the same pipe. This means that when you have

excess electricity, you can store energy in the form

of water at an elevation and when you need that

energy back again, you allow the water to come

back down through the turbine. The round trip

effi ciency of this is 80 per cent.”

Blakers says, to be cost competitive, the system

should have modern high-quality turbines 10 MW

in size or greater, and the head between the upper

reservoir and the lower one should be at least 100 m

and preferably 400-900 m.

There are existing systems in Australia, such

as the Wivenhoe Dam in Queensland, and the

Shoalhaven and Tumut 3 Dams in NSW. However,

he says these aren’t currently being used for

renewable energy but for load shifting. They are not

as big as they ideally should be and they are what

he calls ‘on-river’ which he considers not as ideal as

‘off -river’ systems.

“In a river-based pumped hydro system such

as the Tumut-3 Power Station, water fl ows along

the Tumut river into a series of reservoirs and is

released through a series of power stations until

eventually the water fl ows on into the Murray River,”

he says. “The upper reservoir is necessarily within

the river valley, the same river valley as the lower

reservoir. This means the head cannot be large.

In the case of Tumut-3, which is the biggest

pumped hydro system in Australia, the head is

only 150 metres.”

Off -river optionsHe says, with off -river pumped hydro, you can

access much larger heads because the upper

reservoir can be built on top of a hill and the head

can easily be 500 m or more.

There is an off -river system currently being

built in Queensland on the site of the old Kidston

“There’s been a truly remarkable reduction over the past two or three years in the cost of both PV and wind.”

gold mine about 270 km west of Townsville. The

site has two large adjacent pits which will act as

the upper and lower reservoirs for the project. The

initial phase of the project will have a bank of solar

photovoltaic cells with a capacity of 50 MW with

the potential to power more than 20,000 homes.

Combined with the pumped hydro storage, the

system will be like a power station, capable of

providing electricity to suit the demand at any time

of day or night. If the fi rst phase is successful, the

second phase of the project will triple the capacity.

Blakers said the head on the Kidston project is

above 200 m, bigger than Tumut, and could be

increased further with a turkey nest dam.

“The reason why the head is important is that if

you double the head for the same size of reservoir,

then you double the energy and double the power,”

he says. “The costs don’t scale with head. That

means that the bigger the head, the lower the actual

cost of energy storage.”

He feels former mines like Kidston have a lot of

potential for pumped hydro because there is

already reasonable infrastructure connected to the

mine site such as roads, power supplies and, of

course dams.

“Some of them have quite spectacular heads,”

Blakers says. “For example, the Kalgoorlie Super

ANU’s Professor Andrew Blakers.

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TECHNOLOGY

evaporation minus rainfall,” he says. “When you

do the sums, it’s really a small amount of water

compared to say operating a coal fi re station which

uses a lot of water.”

Renewable competitivenessAccording to Blakers, solar photovoltaics and

wind turbines are now both fully competitive with

new-build coal and gas power stations

“The cost of wind and PV is now in the $70-$90

per megawatt hour range,” he says.

Pit I believe is going down now a kilometre or so.

When the gold is mined out of that, it could become

quite an interesting pumped hydro site.”

However, he says we don’t need to wait for

mining activities to cease, as there are so many hills

in around Australia with excellent heads.

He is less enthusiastic about coastal systems

using the ocean as the lower reservoir for a couple

of reasons.

“First, you have salt water instead of fresh water

which means you use more expensive materials,”

he says. “The second is you will not fi nd very many

sites which have a good head and are outside a

national park near the sea. You must not have a

long pipeline because pipelines are expensive.

This really restricts you to a linear map around the

edge of Australia most of which is either national

park or fl at. Whereas, if you go inland you can fi nd

hundreds of times more excellent sites that are not

in environmentally- or culturally-sensitive areas.”

He says one reason that people think that

seawater would be good is because it is so plentiful.

However, the amount of water needed to operate a

1000 MW off -river pumped hydro system is not as

great as you might think.

“You need an initial amount of water to charge

the system and then you need a small amount of

annual top up which is the diff erence between

“If you double the head for the same size of reservoir, then you double the energy and double the power.”

PUTTING PUMPED HYDRO TO THE TEST

The Kidston Pumped Storage Hydro Project in northern Queensland has been designed to support 1500 MWh to 2250 MWh of continuous power generation in a single generation cycle

(250 MW to 450 MW of peaking power generation over a fi ve-to-nine-hour period). Power generated will be sold directly into the National Electricity Market.

A concrete lined pressure tunnel will connect the upper reservoir to the underground generation powerhouse. A concrete lined tailrace tunnel will, in turn, connect the powerhouse to the lower reservoir. A shaft from the surface will connect the underground infrastructure to a surface power control room, which will be connected to a transformer station located on an existing pit bench.

During peak power demand periods, water will be released from the upper to the lower reservoir, passing through reversible pump/generators acting in generation mode. During off -peak periods, water will be pumped back from the lower to the upper reservoir with the pump/generators acting in pumping mode.


TECHNOLOGY

“There’s been a truly remarkable reduction over

the past two or three years in the cost of both PV

and wind. Initially, PV and wind could just go in

without worrying about storage, but as you push up

towards the 50 per cent that South Australia has got

to, then eventually storage is needed.”

He feels that the take-up of wind and solar is

likely to accelerate as the cost declines and Australia

could realistically reach 100 per cent renewable

electricity by 2030.

“The current annual deployment rate of PV

and wind is about a gigawatt per year each and

that would need to continue up to 2020 at least

to meet the current renewable energy target,”

Blakers says.

“If that was extended to 2030, by then half of our

electricity would be PV, wind. If we wanted to get to

100 per cent renewable electricity by 2030, and this

will be about 90 per cent wind or PV and 10 per

cent hydro or biomass, then we would need to

increase the deployment rate to about 2.5 GW per

year each. It’s really not very hard, there’s nothing

to invent.”

Cost benefi tsBlakers says pumped hydro is around a quarter or

fi fth the cost of batteries and this cost advantage

will likely see it adopted widely.

“Pumped hydro comprises 98-99 per cent of all

energy storage around the world, simply because it

is so cheap compared with everything else,” he says.

“Water is very cheap. It’s very cheap to build

reservoirs. The technology is beautifully refi ned after

150 odd years of development. There are no other

storage technologies that are in the game really.”

He expects early renewable/pumped hydro

systems would be smaller, like Kidston, in the 10 to

100 MW sizes.

“The risk is obviously much smaller if you build

fi ve 100 megawatt systems one after another rather

than try to start up and build a 500-megawatt

system in one go,” he says.

He believes it is not diffi cult to fi nd hundreds of

potential sites with heads in the 400-900 m range

that are outside national parks, and river valleys.

THE VIRTUAL POWER PLANT

AGL Energy has launched what it calls the world’s largest virtual power plant (VPP) in South Australia. Ultimately it will combine

1000 connected batteries installed in homes and businesses in South Australia.

“This project is the world’s largest, the fi rst of its kind and an innovative solution to both help customers manage their energy bills and at the same time contribute to grid stability,” said AGL Managing Director & CEO Andy Vesey.

“The virtual power plant will be capable of storing 7 MWh of energy, with an output equivalent to a 5 MW solar peaking plant. We believe it will demonstrate alternative ways to manage peaks in energy demand, contributing to grid stability and supporting the higher penetration of intermittent, renewable generation on the grid.”

The $20 miliion project is being done in partnership with the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), and US-based energy storage and management company, Sunverge.

It will be rolled out in three phases over about 18 months. Customers participating in the project will be able to purchase a discounted 5kW/7.7 kWh energy storage system.

South Australian Treasurer and Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis, said “The State Government congratulates AGL for looking at innovative ways to use batteries to increase the penetration of renewables.

“We encourage others in the private sector to also consider how dispatchable renewable energy technology can be used to deliver electricity around-the-clock.”

“There are no other storage technologies that are in the game really.”

BREWING UP

Available at supermarkets for a few bucks

and existing since before recorded history,

brewer’s yeast is too commonplace to

excite most people.

Routinely used to make bread and ferment

alcoholic beverages, saccharomyces cerevisiae has

long been a dietary staple, and has been studied

extensively as a model organism.

University of California, Berkeley biochemical

engineer Professor Jay Keasling is excited about

yeast. He has spearheaded high-impact research

on the microbe, tweaking its innards so it can

With precision tools, synthetic biology methods offer hope against some of the major global challenges. Simon Lawrence spoke to UC Berkeley’s Professor Jay Keasling about altering yeast’s genes to create medicines and fuels.

Synthetic biology has reached a point where the DNA of an organism can almost be edited at will.

BREAKTHROUGHS


INNOVATION

digest sugar and excrete what eventually becomes

antimalarial treatment. This could potentially save

countless lives.

“Over 15 million people have gotten access to

those treatments produced using the engineered

yeast,” he tells create, nominating the work as the

most satisfying he has been involved in.

S. cerevisiae and other microbes, through the

application of synthetic biology, can be made to

produce all kinds of useful things.

They’re like “little chemical factories”, believes

Keasling, and their metabolic pathways able to be

altered to serve numerous ends. In a world with

an increasing strain being applied to its finite

resources, manmade microbial strains could be

crucial in solving many of our biggest problems.

One leading synthetic biologist, Harvard’s

Pamela Silver, has suggested that biology,

rather than anything else, is the technology of

the 21st century. Does Keasling agree?

“Of course it’s the technology of the 21st

century! Why not?,” he declares, almost sounding

insulted by the question. “It’s going to have

enormous implications.”



INNOVATION

Synthetic biologyThe definition of synthetic biology – a mix of

biology, computer science, engineering and other

disciplines – is elusive, and depends on who you ask.

“Genetic engineering on steroids” is one

attempt, and Keasling has suggested it’s simply

“engineering biology to do things it wouldn’t

normally do.”

The title goes back to the mid-70s, around

the time genetic engineering was emerging,

though its principles began to be articulated early

this century.

Leaders such as Keasling, George Church and

Drew Endy stressed the electronics engineering

paradigm as a model. The ability to build circuits

“I’d like to see us turn brewer’s yeast into something known to be a hydrocarbon overproducer.”

from standardised parts and devices, and

consistent improvements in technology enabled

by this, are cited. The goal was to borrow from the

approach of planar process manufacturing.

Early problems addressed by the field have

been in areas such as diagnosis, chemical

manufacturing, and biofuels.

Though synthetic biology hasn’t

led to affordable, renewable fuel for

all, the discipline has gotten much

more sophisticated.

An iteration – in which new life

is literally designed and created – is

now only weeks in the making, where

it might’ve formerly taken years.

Biofoundries see life sketched out in

CAD software, designs sent to a robot

in another room to assemble, and

machine learning applied to the results.

“It’s changed dramatically since

I started my career!,” Keasling offers

enthusiastically.

“When I started, the tools were so

rudimentary and it took so long to get

through the design, build, test cycle – it

might change an entire PhD thesis to

get around it.”

Machine learning is becoming

“really hot”, and while it’s still early

days, Keasling sees it as having huge

potential in terms of learning from

successes and failures.

Are things getting nearer to the

predictability levels in electronics

engineering, though?

“It’s getting closer all the time but

we’ve got a long way to go,” answers

Keasling. “But that’s good. It keeps me

in business.”

Fuels and the future In July 2014, a Boeing 737 flew from

Orlando to Sao Paolo on 10 per cent

farnesane (produced using genetically

engineered brewer’s yeast) blended with

jet fuel.

Biofuels aren’t competitive with

low-margin diesel or petrol, but this is

less the case for aero fuels.

“I think right now, because the price

of oil is so low, it’s very hard for

anything to compete with oil,”

offers Keasling, who is also

CEO of the US Department

of Energy’s Joint

BioEnergy

Institute.

“We’ll have the best chance of

competing with bio fuels within the

area of jet fuel because it’s a higher

priced thing.”

Keasling’s work concerns drop-in

hydrocarbon biofuels, rather than

ethanol, which he likes to say is good

“for drinking, not for driving”. Ethanol

cannot use the existing infrastructure

used by the fossil fuel industry (such

as pipelines and tanker trucks) or be

substituted in vehicles.

Early synbio companies such as

LS9, Solazyme and Amyris (which

Keasling co-founded) set out trying

to produce sustainable fuels within

their little chemical factories, but

success was elusive. Several of them

ended up changing course to produce

higher-margin specialty chemicals

for industries such as cosmetics or

food manufacturing.

Amyris’s second project after

antimalarial medicines was farnesene,

sold under the name Biofene. The

company describes this as a “renewable

hydrocarbon building block”, made out

of cane sugar by the reprogrammed

yeast. Hydrogenated, it makes a diesel

drop-in fuel (farnesane), and has

been approved to be used as a

blendstock in jet fuels.

The production cost of

farnesene has come

down considerably

since the

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INNOVATION

In 2005, the World Health Organisation recommended artemisinin-based combination therapies as the best way to treat malaria.

Previously treated by quinine and chloro-quinine, the malaria parasites have long since become tolerant to these. Combination therapies are recommended to reduce the chance of plasmodium developing a tolerance to artemisinin, which is eff ective in about 95 per cent of cases.

Works identifying the antimalarial medicinal properties of artemisia annua, or sweet wormwood, date back to 168 BC. Its effi cacy was forgotten, then rediscovered during the Vietnam War by Youyou Tu, a traditional Chinese medicine specialist. Last year she received a joint Nobel Prize for her discovery.

“Her work is really phenomenal and she’s saved millions of lives; defi nitely deserved that award,” says Jay Keasling.

According to WHO, malaria killed roughly 438,000 in 2015. Ninety per cent of victims were in the African region, and were mostly children.

Though Youyou’s discovery is the most eff ective known way to kill the plasmodium parasite, it is not universally available. There have also been shortages as well as wild price fl uctuations for the medicine.

In 2001, one of Keasling’s graduate students found a paper on artemisinin, and suggested it might be synthesised synthetically. E. coli was the fi rst ‘chassis’ or microbial host used, with a paper published on this in Nature Biotechnology in 2003.

Yeast ended up being a better option with more favourable internal machinery, including the cytochrome P450 enzyme in its metabolic pathway.

The eventual process is for artemisinic acid, a precursor material, as artemisinin itself is toxic to yeast as well as to the plasmodium. Following years of development to increase yields

assisted by two grants totalling US$53 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, industrial production of semi-synthetic artemisinin began in 2013.

The technology is licensed to Sanofi , which produces combination therapies on a ‘no profi t, no loss’ basis (a level of about US$350 to US$400 per kg) to level out spikes in demand. (It produced no semi-synthetic artemisinin last year, due to an oversupply at the time).

In April this year, the Gates Foundation invested US$5 million in Amyris to fund R&D to further decrease the cost of production.

ALL ABOUT ARTEMISININ

company began, from $US12 a litre at the

beginning of 2013, to $US4 a litre later that year,

and then $US1.75 in September last year.

Though production is getting cheaper, for

a company like Amyris to be competitive with

makers of fossil fuels, carbon penalties would

be needed.

“If you burn petroleum-based fuels in your

car or your plane or whatever, it goes into the

atmosphere, nobody has to pay anything for

that and it’s causing an environmental collapse,”

says Keasling.

“If there was a real tax on carbon, Amyris’s diesel

might be cost-competitive. So it’s kind of an unfair

playing fi eld, is what I’m saying.”

Despite his concerns about the sustainability of

current approaches towards conventional fuels,

the chemical engineer is optimistic about the

future, and about what can be accomplished with

good old S. cerivisiae.

“Ethanol cannot use the existing infrastructure used by the fossil fuel industry such as pipelines and tanker trucks.”

At the mention of the subject, he confesses his

excitement again, and reminds us that we’re just

getting started when it comes to exploiting the

ancient microbe. With ever-more powerful tools

and the right minds on the task, things just might

be okay.

“I think there’s huge potential in terms of

engineering yeast and we’re just seeing the

potential right now, but I think there’s so much

more to do,” says Keasling.

“I’d like to see us turn brewer’s

yeast into something known to be a

hydrocarbon overproducer.”

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etty Images, Blutgruppe

The idea of building an ethical robot might not be impossible,

depending on your defi nitions. Nor is it a trivial issue, as Simon Lawrence learned

during a conversation with Professor Alan Winfi eld.

“A way of thinking about our simple ethical

robots is that they’re kind of ‘safety plus’,”

explains Alan Winfi eld, Professor of

Electronic Engineering at University of

the West of England.

Winfi eld has been at the Bristol Robotics

Laboratory (formerly the Intelligent Autonomous

Systems Lab, which he co-founded) since 1993,

but he’s only recently turned his attention to an

important challenge: trying to make ethical robots.

The robots they’re using (Aldebaran’s NAOs)

aren’t ‘full ethical agents’, as one might guess.

However, progress on the concept has been

considered by moral philosophers and a ‘moral

health check’ has concluded the robots do indeed

possess a form of consequentialist ethics. This

is achieved by a ‘consequence engine’ – a robot

simulator within a robot. The simulator contains

the robot, its environment, and produces a regular

prediction set of possible next actions.

“It’s not a new idea, but what we’ve done is we’ve

made that work,” he tells create.

“Only a few people have done it, but we’ve made

that work in real-time and hooked it up and we call it a

‘consequence engine’.”

As Winfi eld and his collaborators have coded it, the

robots follow a simple rule:

IF for all robot actions, the human is equally safe

THEN (*default safe actions*)

Output safe robot actions

ELSE (*ethical action*)

Output robot action for least unsafe

human outcome


PEOPLE

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The experiments began in 2014, first with

simple, Swiss-made e-pucks, then with NAOs.

The ‘person’ would walk toward the danger zone,

and – due to its ‘ethical’ programming, the robot

would move towards the proxy human and

nudge it off-course, avoiding the hole.

A couple of interesting things happened when

a second proxy human was added to the scenario,

also walking towards danger.

Sometimes the robot saved both, but on 14

of 33 rounds, it saved neither, due to dithering.

Unlike a person, who might commit to a certain

course of action, the robot’s lack of a short-term

memory caused it to constantly re-examine the

dilemma situation as it unfolded.

“It spent a fair bit of time changing its

mind – it doesn’t have a mind, of course, but

you know what I mean,” recalls Winfield.

“It took us a while to figure out, but it turned

out to be quite simple. Because the robots

re-calculate the consequences of the next of

these 30-odd actions every half a second, from

scratch, then it means that they can change their

decision every half a second.”

For whatever the robots’ shortcomings, they

arguably showed it was possible to have

some degree of ethical agency built in.

An IEEE Intelligent Systems paper

on machine ethics by James Moor,

which Winfield has cited with

approval, identifies four different

categories of ethical agency:

ethical impact agents (a system that can be

evaluated); implicit ethical agents (constrained to

avoid unethical outcomes); explicit ethical agents

(able to reason about ethics); and full ethical

agents (able to justify judgements).

It suggests a ‘bright line’ between the last two

and, though an AI might never cross that line,

Winfield argues his Asimovian example qualifies

as an explicit ethical agent.

Autonomous systemsWinfield has been thinking of ethics and robots

together for some time. He was part of

the UK’s Engineering and Physical

Sciences Research Council/Arts and

Humanities Research Council

workshop drafting a set of

Principles of Robotics in 2010.

This guides responsible

designing, building and

usage of robots.

The NAO robot (below) and (right) will sometimes dither when trying to work out which of two robots it should save.


PEOPLE

He also has a keen interest in public

engagement (serving as Director of the UWE

Science Communication Unit) and listening to

and addressing concerns around his fi eld, which is

notoriously prone to sensationalist news items.

“One thing that I try and do in my public talks is

explain that, actually, real robots in many ways are

much more interesting and very diff erent to movie

robots,” he explains.

He points to what he calls a “brain/body

mismatch” problem. Though we can build

high-fi delity, lifelike, humanoid robots – the

kind favoured by Hollywood – these do not have

It was only about three or four years ago that he

accepted the concept of a robot actually possessing

ethics. In his 2012 Short Introduction To Robotics,

he dismissed the idea as impossible in principle.

(“Embarrassing”, he confesses.) He credits the

conversion to a year’s worth of persuasion by a

research collaborator, the University of Liverpool’s

Professor Michael Fisher.

Winfi eld didn’t start his academic career thinking

about robot ethics, though. He didn’t even start

as a roboticist, and fi nished his PhD in Digital

Communications at the University of Hull.

In 1984 he left university, starting a spin-off

company commercialising computing architecture,

MetaForth Computer Systems. He returned to

academia in 1992 as Professor of Electronic

Engineering at University of West England, Bristol.

“I’d always been interested and had a boyhood

science fi ction interest in robotics, but didn’t get to

actually realise that ambition until the early 90s,”

he explains.

Since co-founding the robotics lab with

Chris Melhuish and Owen Holland, Winfi eld

has researched multiple robotics genres. This

has included AI, swarm and social robotics, and

evolutionary robotics.


PEOPLE

“Real robots in many ways are much more interesting and very diff erent to movie robots.”

Winfi eld feels giving robots the appearance of humanity is a deception.

WHAT NOT TO BUILDAlan Winfield has some strong feelings about building certain kinds of machines.

“I get very angry, I have to say, with research colleagues who work on android robots,” he confesses.

It comes down to the brain/body mismatch issue. The idea of a robot that can think like a human is a deception. The EPRSC/AHRC principles (bit.ly/ethicalrobots) he helped write, argue that nothing designed should be able to dupe a person, and a high-fidelity android does

that. Basically the packaging shouldn’t make a promise that the intelligence can’t fulfil.

A two-way intellectual or emotional engagement with a robot is impossible, and there should be no possibility of a user expecting this.

“The point is that when you see a robot vacuum cleaner, a round thing that runs around on the floor, you’re not going to assume you can have philosophical conversations with that vacuum cleaner,” Winfield adds.

The possibility of deceiving a user can increase for vulnerable groups such as the disabled, children, and the elderly. This can happen through

appearing to possess feelings or volition. As the principles point out: ‘Robots are manufactured artefacts: the illusion of emotions and intent should not be used to exploit vulnerable users.’

Humanoid robots aren’t a problem, per se, but Winfield favours the ones with non-gendered voices (he believes gendered robots are unethical) and that are cartoonish in nature.

“The important ethical principle, as far as I’m concerned, is that you and I know that it’s an AI,” he says. “It should be always advertised as an AI. So the machine nature, if you like, of the thing you’re interacting with should be completely transparent and evident.”


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PEOPLEPEOPLE

intelligence that matches their appearance (“a real

ethical problem”).

Not surprisingly, he is also regularly asked about

human-level AI, and believes this is something

“hundreds of years” off , if it’s ever seen. Concerns

need to be taken seriously, though.

“It’s really important that society as a whole

should decide on the kind of robotics that we

want in our lives and in our society, and perhaps,

importantly, the kind of robotics that we don’t

want,” he explains.

Robo-ethics become importantThe days of mainstream autonomous cars are

approaching. Carnegie Mellon University Dean

of Computer Science Andrew Moore – who, like

Winfi eld, was invited to address this year’s World

Economic Forum on intelligent machines – points

out that diffi cult ethical issues are raised for

programming such vehicles, and the public needs

to be included in the conversation. For the issue

of an animal on the road, for example, a vehicle

must ‘decide’ to drive on and kill the animal

(1 in 1,000,000 chance of hurting the driver,

while killing the animal) or swerve to avoid it

(1 in 100,000 chance of hurting the driver, while

saving the animal).

“[And] someone has to write that number: how

many animals is one human life worth? Is it a

thousand, a million or a billion?” Moore asked the

Davos audience.

Roboticists confess such issues aren’t easily

solved. Nor are they trivial. As AI proliferates,

the idea of a “consequence engine” can only gain

in consequence.

Alan Winfi eld (right) and, (above), speaking at the World Economic Forum.

“It was only three or four years ago that he accepted the concept of a robot actually possessing ethics.”

Photo: G

etty Images, Jim

Kruger

Following a collapse in 2007, the I-35W Bridge across the Mississippi was rebuilt with next generation warning systems.

ENGINEERSAUSTRALIA.ORG.AU

PEOPLE

68

MAKING SENSEOF

Hundreds of web-connected sensors are placed

throughout a bridge as it is built. As a result,

for the entire life of that bridge it speaks to its

managers, constantly feeding back data about

its condition. The temperature in specifi c sections

of the bridge is monitored, as is the vibration. In

other areas, displacement and levels of stress are

reported. The bridge alerts its managers to anything

that needs attention.

And who are its managers? Most likely the fi rst

port of call for the data is a ‘bot’, a piece of software

designed to analyse masses of data and create an

alert when necessary. The alert goes to a human

member of the team, a specialist engineer highly

trained in data analysis. When a human engineer

receives an alert, it’s time to send a repair team.

This is not the future, this is now. Since the

deadly collapse in the US of the I-35W bridge across

the Mississippi, the National Institute of Standards

and Technology and the Michigan Department

of Transportation launched a project, at a cost

of US$19 million, to develop a next-generation

warning system that can be retro-fi tted onto

existing bridges.

Numerous engineering bodies around the world

have been working on similar projects. The real

power of such sensors comes with a new build, says

Bhupinder Singh, Chief Product Offi cer at Bentley

Web-connected sensors in every construction project should spell the end of over-engineering and a fresh era of effi cient infrastructure. But an entirely new set of skills will be required to analyse the data, says Bhupinder Singh. By Chris Sheedy.

“Sensors in roads could warn upstream businesses of increased potential demand hours before the traffi c arrives.”


Systems. “Today, what you must do to maintain a

bridge that has been built without sensors is have

engineers regularly going out and inspecting it,

then you use your engineering judgement on what

you should do,” he says.

“With sensors, think about what you can do

to extend the life of existing infrastructure, fi rst

of all. In many cases infrastructure is living well

beyond its designed life. Whether it’s an off shore

oil platform, a bridge, a plant or a water treatment

network, I can imagine so many situations where

you could look at existing infrastructure that has

nothing digitally available then instrument it,

sensorise it, get the data and then make intelligent

decisions based on that. Secondly, for new builds,

if you put these sensors in from the start then you

can use analysis applications and be a lot more

judicious about exactly what needs to be done.”

Brave new worldAnything built in the next 10 years will be

instrumented and sensored a certain way, Singh

says, just as every new car will have sensors

off ering endless streams of information. Sensors

will revolutionise every build, particularly

long-life infrastructure projects for which the

often contradictory priorities of effi ciency and

performance are expected to co-exist sustainably

and in harmony.

“Extending the life of a piece of infrastructure

by fi ve or 10 years can save a lot of money,” Singh

says. “Think about off shore plants. With the price of

oil, if you’re going to extend the life of that off shore

platform by another fi ve or 10 years by doing some

sensoring, it can mean a lot in terms of profi t for

the company.”

Costs of builds themselves should become lower

now that early warning systems take away the

need for over-engineering and for laborious future

maintenance schedules.

“We’re all benefi ciaries of safety factors that

have been used in the past,” Singh says. “Whenever

people built things in the past, they over-designed

them to achieve a safety margin. Everything

outlives its design because of that fact.”

“Now engineers are trying to be more effi cient

and more optimal in energy consumption or in

the weight of the steel. They’re not over-designing

things by the same factor any more. You can use

this technology to compensate for that.

“Once something is intelligent and it talks to

you, you’ll be able to replace pieces of it more

quickly. Even if the effi ciencies are dropping it tells

you, so you can make a change and operate more

effi ciently as a consequence.”

Most exciting is the way sensors will be able to

work together to predict various issues. Weather

sensors could work with water management

sensors to predict fl ooding and put dam

management plans into play. Heat sensors could

work with sensors in the electricity grid to help

direct peak power to areas most likely to be using

air conditioning. Sensors in roads could warn

‘upstream’ businesses such as fuel stations, hotels

and roadhouses of increased potential demand

hours before the traffi c arrives.


PEOPLE

Road projects will be a key part of future engineering in northern and western Australia.

The issue, of course, is that for the magic

to happen on so many fronts – construction,

maintenance, safety, effi ciency, performance –

the engineering world needs people and systems

to make sense of the mass of data that will be

coming its way.

Convergence of techThe new, web-connected and sensored reality of

engineering, which Singh refers to as the ‘Industrial

Internet of Things’, is driving a convergence of

operations technology, engineering technology

and information technology.

Bhupinder Singh believes extending the life of infrastructure by a few years can save a lot of money.


GO WITH THE FLOW

Good water management is important in any inhabited part of the world, but in South Australia, the driest state of the driest continent on earth, it could be argued that

it’s even more so. Prolonged periods of drought are not uncommon so effi cient and eff ective water management is a must. SA Water recently boosted its performance while cutting energy costs by $3 million by converging IT and operational data and making the most of sensor technology.

The organisation had the ability to move water around the network, but had a diffi cult time predicting demand and optimising water movement accordingly. By converging various data and analysing it within a piece of Bentley soft ware known as Amulet, SA Water’s understanding of interrelationships and greater ability to visualise connections between specifi c factors in the network enabled far better decision making.

Variables being analysed include population distribution and growth, operational activity, temperature and rainfall data, water restrictions and weather patterns and events.

Benefi ts of the optimised and data driven water supply system include:

>> Ninety per cent cut in response times to issues such as a broken water main (sensors throughout the system can show, simply and quickly, in which section the loss of pressure has occurred)

>> Reduction in the number of repair and shutdown issues escalated to significant events

>> Improved water security

>> Realisation of full asset capacity to allow for capital deferral benefits

>> Lower customer complaints and greater infrastructure reliability

To see a media kit or talk to the sales team about the print and digital packages they can offer please call Peter at Mahlab on (02) 9556 9116 or email [email protected].

REACH INDUSTRY DECISION MAKERS USING THE EA MEMBER COMMUNICATION PLATFORMS

Engineers Australia provides members with a range of resources, tools and information to assist them in their

day-to-day roles and long-term professional development.

VOL. 2 NO. 11 DECEMBER 2016

JORDAN NGUYEN and his quest to transcend human disabilities through

digital tech

How does a robot choosewhich human to save in a crisis?

Get pumpedHydroelectricity comes to therescue of windand solar power

Sharp adviceInsights from the top of western Europe’s tallest building

Advertisers can use the monthly print magazine, weekly enewsletter and the website to reach a highly targeted and engaged audience.

Websitewww.engineersaustralia.org.au122,358 average monthly unique users & 1,336,774 average monthly impressions

Print magazinecreate circulation 59,492

EnewsletterGeneral & Events newscirculation 90,000

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A typical rail surveying system is loaded with web connected sensors and measurement devices.

Just as scientists can analyse human or animal

DNA to anticipate health issues, or to personalise

care strategies, so too will engineering businesses

be able to harness structural DNA via data from

sensors to customise asset maintenance. This

is already resulting in impressive savings and

efficiencies in such infrastructural systems as those

used by South Australia Water.

The challenge for engineering companies will

be understanding the way their future business

will need to look in order to take advantage of the

powerful convergence of technologies.

“Between the various IT systems that are storing

the data, the systems controlling the sensors that

are emitting the data, and the new engineering

technology, you need a common data environment

in which they can converge and harmonise in order

to run analytics,” Singh says. “If these things are in

separate silos you have a problem.

“The systems won’t talk to each other enough

so you won’t be able to unlock the value. To us,

the key essential element is this common data

environment. The value to all of us is when we can

connect these things across multiple sets of data to

create real results.”

“When people built things in the past they over-designed them to achieve a safety margin.”

PEOPLE


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SAVE THE DATE Events & ConferencesDecember 2016 - September 2017

AUSTRALIAN INTERNATIONAL AEROSPACE CONGRESS 2017Venue: Melbourne Website: aiac17.com

Hosted at the iconic Melbourne Cricket Ground, the Australian International Aerospace Congress 2017 (AIAC17) provides technical and business opportunities for aerospace professionals worldwide. AIAC is also held in conjunction with the spectacular Australian International Air show at Avalon.Keynote speakers (clockwise from top left ) include:Major General Andrew Matheson, AM - Head of Helicopter Division, CASG, Department of Defence Air Vice-Marshal Catherine Roberts – Head of Aerospace Division, CASG, Department of DefenceProfessor Phil Webb – Head of the Centre for Stuctures, Assembly and Intelligent Automation at Cranfi eld University, UK

Engineers Australia provides a range of bespoke partnership opportunities. To position your organisation at the forefront of Australian and international engineering conferences and events enquire at [email protected]

Australian Construction Achievement Awards 2017Venue: Sydney Website: acaa.net.auThe Australian Construction Achievement Award (ACAA) showcases and highlights the innovation and project skills of the best construction projects, delivered by the nation’s very best construction companies. Now in its 20th year this prestigious award is the most signifi cant annual event for the construction industry. The ACAA is supported by the industry’s leading constructors, manufacturers, professionals and industry partners.

APCMBE / ABEC 17Venue: Sydney Website: apcmbe17.comIn 2017 the Asia Pacifi c Conference on Medical and Biological Engineering (APCBME) will be held in conjunction with the Australian Biomedical Engineering Conference (ABEC). Don’t miss this opportunity to discuss the central role Biomedical Engineering plays in modern health care with high profi le, leading professionals.

Project Controls Conference 2017Venue: Sydney Website: projectcontrols2017.com.auPresented in partnership by the Australian Cost Engineering Society (ACES) and the Risk Engineering Society (RES) – both fundamental to the ongoing promotion and further development of Project Controls within Australian industry. This conference will showcase developments within Project Controls across all industries and sectors and will appeal to Company Owners and Executives to understand how their businesses could be infl uenced to improve effi ciencies and productivity.

Coasts & Ports 2017Venue: Cairns Website: coastsandports2017.com.auThe Coasts & Ports Conference series is the key forum in the Australasian region for professionals to meet and discuss issues extending across all disciplines related to coasts and ports.Coasts & Ports 2017 will explore the theme “Working with Nature”, which recognises the need to design and operate projects that place the natural environment at the forefront of the project, to benefi t the community and nature.

4-MAY

17-19JUL

26-2SEP

21-23JUN

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75ENGINEERS AUSTRALIA | DECEMBER 2016

CALENDAR

TechnologyWATCH The latest

developments from around the world.

TECH WATCH

76 ENGINEERSAUSTRALIA.ORG.AU76 ENGINEERSAUSTRALIA.ORG.AU

FLEXIBLE ELECTRONICSThe corrugated structure of borophene. Image: Rice University

Borophene, the graphene-like material made of boron, could be used in fl exible electronics applications, according to American researchers. Boris Yakobson from Rice University in Texas says graphene is too stiff for devices that also need to stretch, compress or twist, but borophene deposited on a silver substrate develops nanoscale corrugations, meaning it can be highly stretched once removed from the substrate, or reattached to a soft one.

“Borophene is metallic in its typical state, with strong electron-phonon coupling to support possible superconductivity, and a rich band structure that contains Dirac cones, as in graphene,” he said. Normally, borophene has a fl at structure like graphene because that’s where its energy is lowest. However, when grown on silver, it adopts an accordion-like form while silver reconstructs itself to match. The corrugation can be retained by ‘re-gluing’ boron onto another substrate.

DNA-LIKE SEMICONDUCTORSNeedles of the fl exible semiconducting material SnIP; on the

left side residual black phosphorus and tin iodide (red).

Image: Andreas Battenberg/TUM

German researchers have discovered a semiconductor with a double helix structure a little like that of DNA. The team from the Technical University of Munich said the tin-iodine-phosphorus material (SnIP) has extraordinary optical and electronic properties, as well as extreme mechanical fl exibility. Team leader Professor Tom Nilges said the semiconducting properties of SnIP promise a wide range of application opportunities, from energy conversion in solar cells and thermoelectric elements to photocatalysts, sensors and optoelectronic elements.

“Compared to organic solar cells, we hope to achieve signifi cantly higher stability from the inorganic materials. For example, SnIP remains stable up to around 500°C,” he said

The fi bres, which are up to a centimetre in length, can be easily split into thinner strands.


MEMRISTORS OPEN UP POTENTIAL FOR NEUROMORPHIC COMPUTING An illustration of the concept behind the new memristor.

Image: University of Massachusetts Amherst

American researchers have developed a new type of memristor with diffusive dynamics which could open a new avenue of neuromorphic computing hardware. The idea behind neuromorphic computing is that the computer operates more like a human brain. To do so, it needs the functionality of a biological synapse and this is where the memristor comes in.

The team from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst demonstrated a bio-inspired solution to the diffusive dynamics that is fundamentally different from the complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) approach, while sharing great similarities with synapses. This leads to a significant reduction in footprint, complexity, and energy-consumption.

“Specifically, we developed a diffusive-type memristor where diffusion of atoms offers similar dynamics and the needed time-scales as its bio-counterpart, leading to a more faithful emulation of actual synapses, which is a true synaptic emulator,” they explained.

MAKING FUEL OUT OF GUM LEAVES Eucalyptus oil could be converted into a renewable fuel. Image: Stuart Hay, ANU

Australian researchers believe eucalyptus trees are a potential source for low carbon renewable jet and missile fuel.

Dr Carsten Kulheim from The Australian National University (ANU) said eucalyptus oil contains compounds called monoterpenes that can be converted into a very high energy fuel, and this high energy fuel can actually fly jets and even tactical missiles.

Certain monoterpenes commonly found in eucalyptus oil such as pinene and limonene, can be refined through a catalytic process, resulting in a fuel with energy densities suitable for jet fuel.

“If we could plant 20 million hectares of eucalyptus species worldwide, which is currently the same amount that is planted for pulp and paper, we would be able to produce enough jet fuel for five per cent of the aviation industry,” Kulheim said.

Congratulations on being appointed the Vice President of the ISO. What does that involve?Thank you. The role is essentially the chair of the Finance, Audit, and Risk Committee for the International Organisation. It’s making sure that the ISO fi nancial resources are used eff ectively and sustainably, and there’s the right governance around those processes. It also extends beyond that, to advising the executive, the Secretary General and the ISO Council, advising them on how their fi nances are going.

Why is that important for Australia to be active there?Because we’re part of the global economy, and because we need our companies, our professions, to be part of the global value chain. One key way of doing that is being involved in the development of standards, and being involved in the adoption of them. It helps us not only shape global markets, but to be part of global markets. That participation at ISO governance and technical levels means that our voice is not only heard, but our voice helps us shape and inform the whole international standards, and therefore, international trade.

You’re an engineer originally. Is this a little bit outside your normal area of expertise?The good thing is, being an engineer, I’m very numerically literate. I have run P&L across

Asia. In my days at GE I ran a $50 million business unit in Asia with general managers across all of the diff erent countries. I have sat on other boards and other fi nance order and risk committees in my career. It’s a really nice blend of all of those things. Understanding why standards are important and why fi nances are important to drive these strategies. It’s a nice place to be. And I’ve got to say that engineers are very good at having fi nancial oversight.

Are there areas where work has to be done to keep standards relevant to what’s happening in the industry?I think that’s a really important thing, and one of the other responsibilities I’ve got, I’m on the Prime Minister’s task force for Industry 4.0. So, right now we’re looking at the reference architecture standards and norms that are needed for that ‘4th Industrial Revolution’ or ‘factory of the future’ depending on how you want to frame it.

There is some really interesting work being done internationally, in Australia and a lot of the advanced economies, to make sure that we can take advantage of this

really interesting future. And, again, for the people in Australia, where their industries are transitioning, really wonderful opportunities exist for companies to be part of the global supply chain. Which means we need the standards to support that.

Were there any specifi c areas where it’s particularly challenging or interesting for the ISO or Standards Australia?Yes, there certainly were. One area we talk about is the ‘internet of things’, the ‘internet of everything’, but for that to be successful, everything’s got to be able to talk to everything else. You’ve got to have standard protocol. You’ve got to have a reference architecture that means you can link into, and have, the communication protocol. So there is work being done there and defi nitely a role for Australia, and the International Standards Organisation, to get it right.

Are engineers involved enough in standards?It’s a really interesting area, especially for members of Engineers Australia, to have that opportunity to get involved in contributing to standards, both nationally and internationally. We’d love to get lots of young people coming along to our standards committee. Engineers Australia is one of the nominating organisations, and for young engineers we have a ‘young leader’s program’ that we run every year.

I’ve got to say that engineers are very good at having fi nancial oversight.”

Dr Evans has held the top job at Standards Australia for the past three years. She was recently appointed Vice President (Finance) of the International Standards Organisation (ISO).

Dr Bronwyn EvansCEO, Standards Australia


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