The $25,000 Siemens Prize for Innovation has been awarded to University of NSW student, Andrew Botros, for his groundbreaking work developing a physical model to calculate flute impedance for any fingering.
Andrew’s project beat a field of innovative projects by electronic, electrical, communication and computer engineering students from around Australia, by predicting hundreds of thousands of alternate fingerings and multiphonics for the modern flute. To date, 150 years of flute playing worldwide has resulted in only several hundred fingerings.
“It is my belief that electrical and computer engineers hold a lot for the future,” said Botros, accepting the award. “A lot of our advances have a big bearing on the community.
“But unfortunately that doesn’t always reflect into academic life. As a student there isn’t a lot of support for final year engineering projects or prizes of this sort. And Siemens stands out above all other companies, and it really is encouraging to be a part of a prize like this, and it makes us feel a lot more involved in this industry and profession.”
Other state winners included the digital signal processing radio, designed by Ben Lippmeier of the University of Canberra, featuring software that runs on a general-purpose processor and allows the radio to be programmed to transmit and receive communication signals from many different services. These services include cellular telephony, broadcast radio and wireless local area networking.
The radio is based around an Analog Devices SHARC processor, and uses the Analog Devices SoftCell chipset to perform sample rate conversion between the digital intermediate frequency and baseband. The radio has been designed in a modular way so that both cost and complexity can be kept to a minimum.
Adrian Bickerstaffe of Monash University presented a thesis on the control and management of suburban area networks (SAN), concentrating on resource access control, node authentication, the notion of trust and security, and quality of service. Bickerstaffe and collaborators designed and implemented a SAN test-bed, analysed prototype implementation models and SAN commercial aspects and compiled a SAN standard.
The broadcast monitoring tool (BLT) developed by Richard Mason and Kit Thambiratnam of the Queensland University of Technology has been shown to perform with “near perfect” accuracy identifying a database of 40 000 advertisements, with a throughput of 20 hours of broadcast for every hour of processing time on a 1.6GHz machine.
Helmet Pekarek, Siemens chairman and managing director, said he was impressed by the field of competitors.
“Every year we are astounded by the innovation and enthusiasm of the finalists, but this year the commercial potential of some of these projects has been staggering", Pekarek said. "Our aim with the Siemens Prize for Innovation is promote these extraordinary Australian minds, and to generate more interest in their work from the public and private sector.
"When you have a company like Siemens which was founded by one of the great inventors and entrepreneurs of the 19th century, developing and promoting Australian innovators comes as second nature. Fostering young Australians with such enormous potential is what Siemens is all about," he said.
The national selection involved finalists from seven states and territories presenting to an independent panel of judges.
Now in its fifth year, the competition features a prize pool of $50,000 is divided among state winners
Pekarek is keen to point out the importance Siemens places in fostering innovation, which it sees as a long term investment in the health of the engineering sector.
“Siemens is a very old company, and the main success factor has been innovation. And we are an engineering and technology company, so science and technology are the core of the group.”
Pekarek emphasises that the prize is part of the company’s strategy to encourage brighter students into the engineering field, which has periodically suffered in public perception, compared to more fashionable vocations like law or medicine.
“There have been tendencies from time to time for the brighter students to go to other areas than engineering, and we wanted to encourage people to choose that field and work in that field -- that it is important. We have always worked very closely with the universities, to be known, basically because they are our future employees and customers.
“I think it is not a phenomenon specific to Australia at all, I think it’s a phenomenon that’s a fairly global one.
“We had a phase in Germany in the 70s and early 80s where engineering had a poor image….and there was a very strong tendency for people to study social sciences, not engineering. So at that time it became apparent that we needed to establish a high profile for it.
“If you have a shortage of engineers, if you have a lack of interest in design and technology, this is not something that you can correct quickly. If you look at the whole pipeline, kids make up their mind which course of study over somewhere between a five and ten year cycle. So it does require continuous involvement.
“Working with universities, and getting close to students early, is an important factor. It’s a long connection (with academia). If you look at the company, it’s been around a long time and it has always been its strength to value-add.”
The Siemens Prize for Innovation is expected to be extended to cover New Zealand next year, and is one component of a larger platform of schemes, including the Siemens Science Experience for year nine school students throughout Australia and New Zealand, and the Siemens Fine Arts Scholarships, a partnership with RMIT which involves Siemens contributing $160,000 in scholarships to under and post graduate students over a five-year period.
Matthew Denby