When Vicki Chen describes her area of expertise as ‘membranes’, it might not mean much to the average person. But membranes, which can be all manner of thin, permeable barriers, could offer solutions to two key challenges that the world will need to overcome with increasing urgency: excess CO2 and dirty water.
A professor in the School of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering at the University of Queensland, Shazia Sadiq runs a world-class team within the university’s Data Science research group that is working to improve data quality standards and come up with ways that they can be integrated across areas such as transportation, social media and learning analytics.
Professor Hala Zreiqat is hoping that, one day in the not too distant future, it will be possible to print parts of the jaw; until now, it has been an almost impossible part of the body to rebuild. And all of this will be done within two days, she says.
Today, 28-year-old Tutt has Young Australian of the Year for NSW 2020 on his resumé. He’s the CSIRO Indigenous STEM Champion 2019, the AMP Tomorrow Maker 2019 and the ABC Trailblazer 2019, all awarded in recognition of his work as the founder and CEO of DeadlyScience.
Robots and AI have long been a staple of dystopian fiction, either as merciless overlords, or as downtrodden slaves. Sometimes, they just take all the jobs. Professor Simon Lucey says that far from Artificial Intelligence (AI) being a futuristic nightmare, it has the potential to put Australia at the centre of a global revolution involving plenty of new jobs and benefits.Lucey isn’t simply speculating about a possible future – he’s creating it. In October 2020, he joined the Australian Institute of Machine Learning (AIML) at the University of Adelaide, where he is going to help drive Australia’s role as a world leader in machine learning and AI.
To Professor Glenn King, the funnel-web isn’t just a spider. It’s a chemical treasure house whose venom contains riches beyond measure: everything from environmentally friendly insecticides to treatments for neurological diseases to new and more targeted forms of pain relief.
The Tibees YouTube channel, started as a hobby, originally featured kittens and squeaking baby sloths. “I remember getting a hundred subscribers,” founder Toby Hendy tells The Brilliant. “It was a really big moment for me.”
Today there isn’t a sloth to be seen, although there is the occasional cat. Tibees is now a physics and mathematics channel with more than 610,000 subscribers and 65 million total views. And it’s a full-time occupation.
In 1975, IBM built a typewriter plant on the outskirts of Wangaratta in Victoria. Three hours away, students were attending Ballarat University. No one realised it yet, but the proximity of the two was to drive a new wave of regional prosperity, and open up new pathways for private and public collaboration.