The Techno Expo
by Heather McEwen
On 15 August 2011 more than seventy research students from the ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science presented their research in an illustrated poster, and talked with visitors from business and academia.
Congratulations to our prize-winners who each won financial assistance for conference travel, plus a cash prize to help them to celebrate:
- 1st Prize: Lachlan Black, Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems, for his poster, Cheap Alumina Films for Next-Generation Silicon Solar Cells. Lachlan is researching ways to reduce the cost of manufacturing silicon solar cells. Silicon is a significant cost in the production of solar cells. One way to reduce cost is to make the cells thinner, however, the trade-off is a less efficient cell and so far this has been tackled by using aluminium oxide to ‘passivate’ the cell surface and make the silicon perform better. While effective, the technique for passivating cells is also expensive, and Lachlan is researching a simpler and less expensive technique called Atmospheric Pressure Chemical Vapour Deposition (APCVD) to improve the process.
Lachlan’s supervisors are Dr Keith McIntosh and Professor Andres Cuevas.
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2nd Prize: Shahriar Etemadi Tajbakhsh, Applied Signal Processing Group, for his poster, Convince me to Cooperate! Basically, if we could ‘piggy-back’ on each other’s wireless data we (industry and consumers) could all benefit because the result would be faster, more energy efficient and reliable communications while reducing bandwidth usage.
Shahriar’s supervisors are Dr Parastoo Sadeghi and Professor Rod Kennedy.
- 3rd Prize:Elena Kelareva, Artificial Intelligence Group, for her poster Optimising Ship Schedules at a Port. What if port authorities had a sophisticated tool to optimise ship schedules using live calculations of draft with the latest environmental forecasts and measurements to maximise the amount of cargo that can be loaded onto a set of ships? Elena’s research is doing just that, bringing environmental benefits and greater profits to shipping companies in the process.
Elena’s supervisors are Dr Philip Kilby, Professor Sylvie Thiebaux and Professor Mark Wallace.
This year the Office of Commercialisation (OOC) sponsored a special commercialisation prize. Congratulations to Daniel Chae for his poster and commercialisation submission. The judges, Dr Tom Hammond and Dr John Thorne in OOC, felt that Daniel best demonstrated how his research may eventually be commercialised. Daniel, from the Applied Signal Processing Group, is working in the emerging field of compressive sensing (or compressive sampling) which is a way to gather sparse signals to reconstruct, or process, a signal and still be able to convert data accurately. Daniel foresees clients in the wireless device manufacturing industry (for example audio and visual electronics), the security industry, and defence.
Daniel’s supervisors are Dr Parastoo Sadeghi and Professor Rod Kennedy.
Posters online
