NICTA, which secured the Federal Government contract to run the ICT CE in 2002, launched it in February this year. The founding members of NICTA include the NSW and ACT Governments, as well as the University of NSW and the Australian National University (ANU), which will provide expertise and most of the initial employees. Many ANU researchers have been switched over to NICTA.
NICTA intends that the ICT CE will attract expatriates back to Australia, with the Canberra node predicted to create over 80 research jobs and 20 support positions over the next five years. The node is expected to attract about one-third of the AU$129 million in federal funding allocated to the project.
"The generous support of our ACT partners, the ACT Government and ANU, who are each contributing AU$20 million to NICTA over five years, plus the significant funding by the Commonwealth Government, enables us to create an ICT research, education and commercialisation institution in Canberra which has the capacity to achieve a world class standard of excellence," said NICTA's chairman, Neville Roach.
AU$10 million of the ACT Government's contribution is earmarked to build a purpose-built facility in Civic in central Canberra.
The Canberra node of the ICT CE will focus on wireless signal processing, autonomous systems and sensing technologies, logic and computation, statistical machine learning and sensor signal processing, and systems engineering and complex systems.
