ADFA delegation

01 November 2004

A delegation of engineers from the UNSW faculty at the Australian Defence Force Academy have spent two days in Sydney meeting with their Kensington counterparts.

The recently appointed Rector, Professor John Baird, and UNSW@ADFA's Associate Dean of Research, Professor Joseph Lai, led a delegation of more than 30 members of the Schools of Aerospace, Civil and Mechanical Engineering (ACME) and Information Technology and Electrical Engineering (ITEE) today.

The purpose of the meeting with faculty from the Schools of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical Engineering and Telecommunications, and Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering was to explore opportunities for research collaboration, networking and sources of funding.

The academics divided into groups to discuss key research areas such as fluids and heat transfer, image processing and video compression, structural mechanics, smart antennas and computer science areas such as networks, cryptography, computer security and software.

"An enormous amount of goodwill went into this exercise and we now hope to harness the synergies for some great outcomes," said Professor Joseph Lai.

Professor Rob Burford, Associate Dean (Research) from the UNSW faculty, said academics often looked to other universities for collaboration, overlooking the excellent facilities and researchers available at ADFA.

"A lot of ADFA work might have a military facet but in terms of freedom to publish it's quite unfettered," he said. "We hope now to strengthen by clustering strategic areas of research and raise the external research profile of engineering."

Kensington Campus engineers now will return the favour by visiting ADFA next month.