One government initiative designed to promote research and reduce the brain drain in ICT is the Information and Communications Technology Centre of Excellence, which is run by NICTA (National ICT Australia consortium).
NICTA's mission is to increase and commercialise research in Australia, improve the quality and quantity of students, and interact with other industry and research organisations.
Originally based on the idea of being a "centre of excellence", NICTA was changed to a distributed model so the AU$129.5 million of federal government allocation wouldn't be concentrated in one place.
The first researcher to return under the NICTA umbrella was Dr Will Uther, who investigated several options after receiving his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University before deciding to join the consortium.
"As I was finishing my PhD, I was tossing up whether to go into academia or (go) into industry," Uther told ZDNet Australia .
He observed that the way the academia worked in the States was quite different from Australia.
In Australia, an academic is essentially an individual person who runs a research group, much like a managerial role, he says.
"In the US, an academic can either go into one of the top universities, which have a huge work load with the requisite drain on lifestyle, or be employed by one of the second-tier universities--a lower workload with students that aren't as good," adds Uther.
