Industry Connections
Industry Advisory Committee
Prof David Skellern
Chairman, National ICT Australia
Dr Skellern is one of Australia’s most successful ICT entrepreneurs, sporting a strong background in research, education, collaboration, and commercialisation. Dr Skellern has been a Director of NICTA since 2003 and was appointed interim CEO in 2005. In February 2006, he confirmed a further 3-year appointment as the Chief Executive Officer. Dr Skellern began his career in 1974 at the University of Sydney where he spent around a decade designing, building and commissioning instrumentation and extensions for the Fleurs Synthesis Radiotelescope, one of Australia’s pioneering giant radiotelescopes. From 1983 to 1989 he held various academic appointments as a staff member of Sydney University's Electrical Engineering department. In 1989 Dr Skellern took up the Chair of Electronics at Macquarie University. Dr Skellern has also spent significant time working in industry as a visiting researcher, including over two years at Hewlett Packard Laboratories. In 1997 he co-founded the Radiata group of companies in Australia and the USA, established to commercialise the results of the WLAN research project that he led at Macquarie University in collaboration with CSIRO. Over the next three years he played an integral role in building a successful company with a team of 65 staff. In September 2000 Radiata demonstrated the world’s first chip-set implementation of the 54 Mbit/s IEEE 802.11a High-Speed WLAN standard.
David Bull, BCS Electronic Design
David Bull is the Managing Director and Principle Design Engineer in BCS Electronic Desing. He has consulted to the IT&T and medical device industries since 1989. His experience encompasses various roles from product designer to senior management in a leading medical device company. He has many years experience in both systems-level and low-level electronic design including; EFTPOS secure data links, payphones, wireless data links, medical devices etc.
David received a Bachelor of Science, majoring in Computer Science and Electronics, from Macquarie University. He also holds a Master of Science (research) in Digital Voice Compression Systems also from Macquarie.
Sandra Coffey, Honeywell
Peter Ferris, Optus
Peter Ferris is the General Manager of Technology and Planning, in the Networks Division of SingTel Optus. He has held this role since February 2004 and has been with Optus for the last 13 years. Between October 1993 and January 2000, he held a series of senior managerial positions within Optus, related to the design, support and operation of the Optus network. Prior to working for Optus, he worked for Telecom Australia (now Telstra) in a series of managerial and technical roles for more than 23 years. Throughout that period he was involved in the design, installation and operation of Telecom Australia’s ARE11 & ARF exchanges; as well as the Digital, Radio and Analog transmission networks.
Ian Gibson , CISRA
Dr Ian Gibson is the General Manager of the Image Processing Technology Division at Canon Information Systems Research Australia (CISRA), an R&D subsidiary of Canon Inc. He has been with CISRA for about 15 years, seeing it grow to over 300 staff.
He started off as an ASIC design engineer where he was involved in several large imaging chips used in multiple Canon products. Since 1999 he has been managing research activities, concentrating on a range of digital image processing applications. During this time several new technologies have been developed and been adopted into Canon products and businesses globally.
Richard Gobee, OEM Technology Solution
Richard Gobee is the Managing Director of OEM Technology Solutions. OEM was formed in 2005 and evolved from the engineering services division of Dominion Electronics which Richard co-founded in 1993.
Richard specialises in both embedded product and systems design - with particular focus on the Industrial Automation and Controls Industry. He has over twenty years experience in this industry – encompassing a variety of roles including electronics design, software development, system design, integration and commissioning, business development, sales and marketing.
Richard holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical) degree from UTS and is currently a committee member of the Institute of Instrumentation, Controls and Automation (IICA) Sydney Branch.
Y Jay Guo, CSIRO ICT Centre
Prof. Y. Jay Guo is the Director of the Wireless Technologies Laboratory in CSIRO ICT Centre, where he leads 60 researchers working on broadband and adaptive wireless communications, radio positioning, mm-wave and THz imaging, and antennas and propagation. Under his leadership, the laboratory has made world-class breakthroughs in multi-gigabit wireless communications, multiple input and multiple output (MIMO) communications systems, and reconfigurable and wide-band antenna arrays. It has also achieved great success in industrial engagement and commercialization. Prior to this appointment in August 2005, Jay held various senior positions in a number of international companies in the European wireless and mobile communications industry, where his responsibilities included research leadership, strategic planning, and advanced technology and product development.
Jay has over twenty years of industrial and academic experience in Australia, U. K. and China. He holds over ten patents in wireless technologies. He has published two books on Fresnel zone antennas and mobile communications technologies, and over ninety research papers in top-tier academic journals and at international conferences. He has served in numerous organizing and steering committees of international and regional conferences and R&D consortia, such as IEEE VTC, IEEE ISCIT, AusWireless, ATANC, UK Mobile VCE, and Australian Electronic Industry Action Agenda (EIAA) group.
Andrew Myles, Cisco
Dr Andrew Myles has a BE (Elec) and a BSc from Sydney University and a PhD from Macquarie University. Andrew has had a diverse career having worked in corporate research labs (Hewlett Packard), university research labs (Macquarie University), management consulting (Arthur D Little & PA Consulting) and engineering development (Radiata). Andrew is currently the Manager of Wireless Standards at Cisco with an emphasis on 802.11 and WiFi, and is the Chairman of the WiFi Alliance.
Ben Smith, Division of ICS
Ben has a background in photonics that has spanned manufacturing, product development, research and sales. After gaining a 1st Class Honours degree in Optoelectronics at Macquarie University in 1996, he moved on to work at the Optical Fibre Technology Centre at Sydney University. In 1998 he moved into a role in JDS Uniphase in which he worked in a number of roles as a production engineer, product development engineer and technical account manager.
He joined the Division of Information and Communication Sciences in early 2004 as the Industry Liaison Director and has brokered a number of industry research partnerships across a number of areas including: wireless circuit design, data mining, e-learning and biophotonics. In 2006 his role expanded to include commercialisation of intellectual property and he is currently negotiating a number of technology licence deals in the laser and image processing fields.
Stephen M Thurgate, Division of ICS
Professor Thurgate completed his undergraduate studies and a Masters in Science at the Australian National University and a Diploma in Education at Canberra University. In 1978 he moved to Perth, to join the physics staff at Murdoch University were he completed his PhD in surface science.
Professor Thurgate’s research interests are in developing new techniques for surface science. He developed a substantial array of surface analytical equipment at Murdoch, including a number of novel instruments. He spent three sabbaticals at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, on the outskirts of Washington DC. He has published more than 80 research publications in international journals and received more than $3m in research grants.
Professor Thurgate served as President of Academic Council at Murdoch University and in a range of administrative positions in the period 1997-2003. He was Head of the School of Engineering Science at Murdoch in 2006 when he accepted the position of Dean of the Division of Information and Communication Sciences at Macquarie University.
Graham Town, Division of ICS
Associate Professor Graham Town is an academic electrical engineer with 8 years experience in the Australian electronics industry and over 17 years experience in tertiary education and research. He was responsible for setting up Macquarie University's first engineering program, and is currently the BE Program Director. His experience is diverse, and includes work on microwave and antenna systems for telecommunications and avionics, construction of an NMR imaging system, medical imaging, and more than ten years experience in fibre optics and photonics research for applications in telecommunications and sensing. He leads the Guided Wave Optics and Photonics Research group, a member of the Macquarie University Centre for Lasers and Applications, and part of the University's Centre of Research Excellence in Lasers and Photonics. Current research is in the areas of polymer guided-wave optics and broadband optical fibre sources (e.g. continuum generation, multiwavelength lasers) and their applications.
Steve Winnall, Cochlear
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