gvl berkeley university of melbourne nirmalathas

Engineering Research for the Benefit of the Society

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Thas A Nirmalathas

Commercializing Research@

The University of Melbourne

Outline

• Changing landscape

• Role of MERIT– Internal structure for multi-disciplinary research

• Overview of Research Performance– How well are our staff performing

• University Research Agenda– how well aligned is the School with the University and broader

research agendas

• New Initiatives

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MERIT Model

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Opportunities

Impact

BiomedicalEngineering

Structured Matter

Sustainable Systems andEnergy

Information and CommunicationSystems

CBE

CEE

CSSE

EEE

GEO

MECH

• Society benefits• Publications• Knowledge

trans

• Inspiration• Funding• Partnerships

Departments with strong discipline base

Major Research Focus

Commercilization support is normally through Melbourne Ventures

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Melbourne Ventures is one of the University’s commercialisation support activities which are coordinated

via VP (Commercialisation)

CommercialisationResearch……………………………………………………Teaching

Technology & IP Rights

Patent & trademark management

Technology licensing

Start-up creation & investment

Melbourne Ventures

Courseware & Curriculum Materials

Curriculum licensing

Multimedia & specialised software licensing

Copyright management

Melbourne Curriculum

Licensing Services

Research Services

Research contract management

IP policy and procedures

Melbourne Research

Office

Consulting & Advisory Services

Connecting organisations to University of Melbourne experts

Client responsive contractual and project services

Consultancy division

Customised Award & Non-Award

Courses

Programs division

Customised award and non award postgraduate courses

Research Management

VP (Commercialisation)

(Melbourne Consulting and Custom Programs)

The quick summary of Melbourne Ventures

Mission

To build commercial value on the foundations of Intellectual Property developed at

The University of Melbourne

Core functions

● Technology assessment ● Technology licensing ● Patent & Trademark management ● Creation of start-up companies ● Industrial partnerships ● Attraction of investment capital

Established 2004

Outcomes

Licence dealsStart-up companies

Commercially driven research partnerships(typically revolving around licences & start-ups)

Recent spinout – Manjrasoft

• Cloud computing technology, called Aneka, is used to setup enterprise Clouds and run applications both in academia and industry. In addition, our software runs on public Clouds such as Amazon EC2.

• Manjrasoft's core technology enables enterprises to improve performance and scalability within existing, Windows-based software application and development frameworks by distributing application processing within .NET enterprise environment

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Research Engagement in Centres

• Participates in >140 Research Centres

• Core Participant in 12 National Cooperative Research Centres

• 14 Affiliated Medical Research Institutes

• 18 Federation Fellows

• Research Income (2007): A$309m

Indicative research income by Faculty

School has a number of research centres with their individual commercialization models

One such example is NICTA

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NICTA Commercialization

• Projects are often “use-inspired”

• Entrepreneur-in-residence program– They start by having a couple of projects under focus, take the researchers through

Heilmeier’s questions and market opportunity assessment exercises

• Early discussions with “end-users”

• Progressively more engagement and redirection of research

project towards getting them ready for commercialization

• Proof-of-concept grants to demonstrate technology

• Market Validation Grants

• Spin-out or licensing

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NICTA Investment Model

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“Optical Network Monitoring” • Rollout of reconfigurable optical networks

– Dynamic, high speed, transparent networks– Sensitive to a range of impairments, very

limited options for getting information• Network operators essentially “flying blind”

– can’t monitor new generation flexible & dynamic networks

– Can’t efficiently diagnose faults– Can’t predict problems when provisioning

• Operators want diagnosis and prediction systems– Low cost monitors distributed around the

network (OSNR and MIM)– Link and lightpath configuring tools– Automation of network management

Optical Cross-Connect

Multi channel WDM

Optical Signal

Monitors

Fibers

Router

Network Management and Control

Signal Diagnostics

Routing information and control

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from monitor port

ADC 1

ADC 2

Asynchronous clock

t

Asynchronous Delay-Tap Sampling

• Replace clock recovery with physical delay (t)

• Sample pairs using external clock & plot– “Phase portrait”, (Asynchronous Eye)

0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000-60

-40

-20

0

20

40

60

80

Time

Dt

x2

y2x1

y1

Dt

x3

y3

Dt

x

y

101 & 010 transitions

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Asynchronous Delay-Tap Sampling

• 3-bit sequences geometrically separated

0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000-60

-40

-20

0

20

40

60

80

Time

Dt

x2

y2

x

y

010 & 101 transitionsDt

x2

y2

110 transitions

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Impairment Signatures (simulation)

Eye

Delay=T

T/2

T/4

Clean signalOSNR 35 dB

Clean

ASE NoiseOSNR 25 dB

ASE Noise Dispersion PMD

1st order PMD40 ps, =45°

In-BandXtalk-25 dB

Crosstalk All

Dispersion800 ps/nm

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Pattern recognition

A B C D E F G

• Change in mindset– intuition can be wrong, signatures do exist

• Use pattern recognition techniques • Similar to those used for hand writing recognition

• Additional challenges– letters overlap– want to know the size– letters interact

Effort and Timeline

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Research

Commercialisation

Research phase

Dec 2007Spinout

Dec 2004 Dec 2009(R&D support)