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Professor Brian Anderson was interviewed in 2008 for the Interviews with Australian scientists series. By viewing the interviews in this series, or reading the transcripts and extracts, your students can begin to appreciate Australia's contribution to the growth of scientific knowledge.
The following summary of Anderson's career sets the context for the extract chosen for these teachers notes. The extract covers some of his research experiences in the aircraft industry and defence. Use the focus questions that accompany the extract to promote discussion among your students.
Brian Anderson was born in Sydney in 1941. He began his tertiary studies at the University of Sydney where he earned a BSc (pure mathematics) in 1962 and a BE (electrical engineering) in 1964. During his undergraduate studies he was a member of the Australian Air Force Reserves. He was awarded a PhD from Stanford University, USA, in 1966.
After some time working at Stanford and in industry in the USA, in 1967 Anderson returned to Australia to be the professor of electrical engineering at Newcastle University. He was there until 1981 when he moved to the Australian National University (ANU) to found the new Department of Systems Engineering within the Research School of Physical Sciences and Engineering.
At the ANU he was involved in several initiatives in the way engineering was organised, including founding the undergraduate Faculty of Engineering and having the university offer a degree in systems engineering. He was also instrumental in the foundation of the Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering (RSISE) which was established in 1994 and he served as its director from 1994 to 2002. One of his many significant interactions with industry was the founding of National ICT Australia (NICTA). He served as the inaugural CEO of NICTA for one year and then as NICTA's chief scientist from 2003 to 2006. He is currently a distinguished professor in RSISE and a distinguished researcher at NICTA.
Anderson's research interests have included circuits, signal processing, control systems and telecommunications. He has done work in systematically simplifying a complex flight control system, researching the formations of unmanned airborne vehicles and investigated mathematical topics such as random processes and linear algebra. His work is very international and he has had visiting appointments at universities in Japan, South Korea, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, France, Belgium, New Zealand and the USA.
In addition to academic and industry work, Anderson has served on a number of government bodies including the Australian Science and Technology Council and the Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council. He was made an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1993 and received the Australia Centenary Medal in 2001.
He was elected a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1974 and served the Academy as president from 1998 to 2002. He became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1989.
Actually, getting so many things done at an organisational level has not kept you from being heavily involved in research covering a lot of areas of information science. Could you tell us a bit about the sorts of things you've worked on?
I've done many things, because I've been in this for a long time. The areas in which I have worked have been largely control systems and signal processing, with some telecommunications. And occasionally that's spilled over into mathematical topics in random processes or linear algebra or something like that. Many of the problems have had their origins in industrial needs or applications domains.
For example, Boeing were taking several hundred person years to design the flight control systems for their commercial aircraft. That was because they were using trial and error methods; they did not have a systematic methodology. The only systematic methodologies that existed gave them extremely complicated control systems on paper, which would just worry a manager to implement and so were deemed unusable. My particular research in that area was all about how to take a design of a very complicated control system and say how to systematically simplify it. 'Systematically' means that you don't do trial and error and you've got good computer programs; also, you needed to be able to simplify it to a level that a manager was happy with. So I did that, and it gave rise to commercial software and a book, because it's a big topic.
Another thing that I worked on a few years ago came from DSTO, the Defence Science and Technology Organisation. Submarines, when their motors are on, give off periodic sound signals that travel through the water. Other people who are listening are receiving an extremely noisy signal with many harmonic components. The question was: how can you best process that noisy signal and infer an underlying periodic signal, and get some sense for the relative magnitude of the harmonic components? That can, of course, fingerprint the motor you're listening to.
The thing that's got me really hooked at the moment is largely related to formations of unmanned airborne vehicles and, less obviously, to sensor networks. You could imagine maybe 100 vehicles flying in a formation in the air – not that we are doing this yet – and ask: if you're going to maintain the shape of this three-dimensional formation, then who looks at who and what do they measure, and what do they make sure they keep constant? And, by the way, what if one of the sensors goes down, or they're supposed to be joined by someone or they want to detach someone? That's the sort of problem I'm working on now. Some of this is with DSTO but some of it is more long-range.
The particular research topics that you have talked about have been quite largely related to aircraft and defence, almost linking back to your undergraduate days in the air force. What about some of your significant industry experiences?
I was a member of a scientific and technology advisory board of CRA, which later became RTZ, for many years – in fact, up till the time RTZ took it over – and I was a director of Cochlear Limited (which makes implantable 'bionic' ears) from the time that it was formed. For a number of years before that I was a director of Telectronics, which made implantable pacemakers. So these were high-tech areas.
Focus questions
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