NICTA

NICTA

Type	Company limited by guarantee
Industry	Information and Communications Technology Research
Fate	Merged with CSIRO
Founded	2002
Headquarters	Sydney, Australia
Key people	Professor Robert Williamson, CEO
Number of employees	300
Website	nicta.com.au

Construction of NICTA's new premises at the Australian Technology Park (ATP).

NICTA (previously known as National ICT Australia Ltd) is Australia's Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Research Centre of Excellence. The term "Centre of Excellence" is common marketing terminology used by some Australian government organisations for titles of science research groups.^[1] NICTA's role is to pursue potentially economically significant ICT related research for the Australian economy.

Currently NICTA is structured around groups focused primarily on pure research and the implementation of those ideas within business teams.

History

In 2002, NICTA won a competitive selection process to be established as Australia's national centre of excellence in Information and Communication Technology (ICT) research, under an Australian Government policy initiative to promote science and innovation called Backing Australia's Ability.^[2] The creation of the centre was intended to address a previously identified weakness in long-term strategic ICT research in Australia.^[3] NICTA was officially opened on 27 February 2003.^[4]

The founding members of NICTA were the University of New South Wales, Australian National University, the NSW Government, and the ACT Government. NICTA later acquired other university and government partners. In January 2003, The University of Sydney became a partner. In July 2004, the Victorian Government and The University of Melbourne became partners.^[5] In January 2005, the Queensland Government, the University of Queensland, Griffith University, and the Queensland University of Technology became partners.^[6] The University of Melbourne and the Victorian Government became members in May 2011.^[7]

Since foundation NICTA has created more than six new companies, collaborated on joint projects with a range of ICT industries, developed a substantial technology and intellectual property portfolio and continues to supply new expertise to the ICT industry through a NICTA-supported PhD program.

Australian Federal Government funding of NICTA is due to expire in June 2016 and is there a concerted effort in securing a merger with CSIRO. Ostensibly this merger would be with the CSIRO Digital Productivity Flagship and there is the potential for up to 200 redundancies^[8] due to funding cuts to both organizations.

Duane Zitzner (who replaced Hugh F. Durrant-Whyte as CEO in December 2014 after Durrant-Whyte resigned suddenly due to a disagreement with the NICTA Board ^[9]) left NICTA at the end of May 2015 in the hope that the merger with CSIRO would be completed by the end of June 2015. As of August 2015 the merger had not been finalized^[10] and Professor Robert (Bob) Williamson (who also heads NICTA's Machine Learning Research Group) is acting and terminal CEO.

NICTA formally merged with CSIRO to form a new entity called Data61 on 28 August 2015. Mr Adrian Turner was appointed to head the merged unit. He reports to a Deputy Chief Executive of CSIRO and has the positional equivalence of a CSIRO Flagship Director.

Organisation

Quadcopter at CeBIT 2014

NICTA research is focused in five scale Research Groups:^[11]

• Software Systems
• Mobile Systems
• Machine Learning
• Computer Vision
• Optimisation

NICTA focuses on potential economic opportunities that related to the use of information communication technology. NICTA is primarily funded by government and engages in additional industry partnerships to augment its base funding. These may include start-up corporations or other specific Australian government funds.

Four NICTA business teams^[12] are responsible for determining potential commercial or economic outcomes in the following domains for ICT:

• Broadband and the Digital Economy
• Infrastructure, Transport and Logistics
• Security
• Environment

Additionally the Engineering and Technology Development team helps to productize research outcomes.

Locations

NICTA has over 700 people (half of whom are graduate students) spread across four cities in Australia:

• Australian Technology Park Laboratory and Headquarters, Sydney
• Neville Roach Research Laboratory, Kensington, Sydney
• Canberra Research Laboratory
• Victoria Research Laboratory
• Queensland Research Laboratory

The Neville Roach Laboratory was moved from its standalone location onto the University of New South Wales main campus in July 2015 as a cost saving measure.

In addition, NICTA collaborates with many Australian universities and research organisations, and has smaller numbers of staff on various non-partner (and non-member) university campuses around the country.

Funding

NICTA is funded by the Australian Government as represented by the Department of Communications and the Australian Research Council. NICTA also receives funding from industry and several state governments, and is supported by its member and partner universities.

See also

• OpenNICTA

References

External links

• NICTA website