Chapter 4 – Academic and research focus

ARC Centres of Excellence

This information is current as at January 2008.

In 2003, the Australian Research Council (ARC) established eight Centres of Excellence. ARC Centres of Excellence are centres of expertise through which high-quality researchers maintain and develop Australia's international standing in research areas of national priority.

UTS is a participant in the following two.

ARC Centre of Excellence for Autonomous Systems

The Centre for Autonomous Systems (CAS) is jointly funded by the Commonwealth and state governments and is a collaboration between UTS, the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales.

The aim of the Centre is to research and explore the nature of intelligence in problems of perception learning and control, and to lay the scientific foundation for the development and application of intelligent autonomous systems. Autonomous systems represent the next step in the fusion of machines, computing, sensing and software to create intelligent systems capable of interacting with the complexities of the real world.

Autonomous systems have a broad and diverse range of applications of national importance: from field applications such as automated mining, cargo handling, construction, forestry and transport, to potentially dangerous applications including robotic bushfire fighting, search-and-rescue, and broad areas of air, land and maritime defence, to social applications in robotic health care, automotive and entertainment.

The main objective of the Centre is to focus on key research challenges in this field and showcase the integrated operation of complex intelligent autonomous systems with capabilities substantially beyond any existing systems. The Centre aims to play a key role in establishing a new autonomous systems industry in Australia.

Inquiries

Professor Gamini Dissanayake
Director, UTS node, Centre for Autonomous Systems
CB02.6.3, City campus
telephone +61 2 9514 2683
fax +61 2 9514 2655
email Gamini.Dissanayake@uts.edu.au
http://www.cas.edu.au

ARC Centre of Excellence for Ultrahigh-bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems

The vision of the Centre for Ultrahigh-bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems (CUDOS) is to develop the experimental and theoretical expertise to design and build linear and nonlinear all-optical signal processing devices and to miniaturise these, leading to the 'photonic chip', believed to be the building block for the next generation of optical systems.

CUDOS's research focuses on a range of novel optics, including photonic crystals, microphotonic structures, microstructured optical fibres and nonlinear photonic materials, and relies on advanced fabrication techniques, new material systems and possibly entirely new principles.

CUDOS spans six universities in three cities — UTS, the University of Sydney, the Australian National University, Macquarie University, Swinburne University of Technology and RMIT University.

Its UTS node, led by Professor Lindsay Botten and based in the Department of Mathematical Sciences in the Faculty of Science, is home to the CUDOS Computational Modelling Program, which supports the work of the Centre through the development of novel theoretical and semi-analytic computational models, the development and implementation of general purpose finite difference time domain codes on large scale parallel computer systems, research in the areas of photonic crystals, microstructured optical fibres and radiation dynamics, and the provision of computational support for a range of experimental programs at other nodes.

Inquiries

Professor Lindsay Botten
Director, UTS node, Centre for Ultrahigh-bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems
CB01.15.28, City campus
telephone +61 2 9514 2247
fax +61 2 9514 2248
email Lindsay.Botten@uts.edu.au
http://www.cudos.org.au

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