Broadband and the Digital Economy

The Digital Economy refers to how we use technology to improve the productivity of the physical economy and also to the growing markets for completely digital goods and services. Key drivers are not only an increase in the speed of broadband but also the increasingly pervasive nature of connectivity as next generation networks are rolled out globally.

In this business area NICTA aims to improve productivity and underpin new markets by using new digital services based on innovative broadband technologies and applications. These technologies will be developed and applied by NICTA through knowledge, skill and technology transfer for the benefit of Australia.

We will engage with our customers using NICTA’s research into cloud computing, enterprise services, e-government and e-business, content management, networking and mobile applications. Advances in these fields are opening new opportunities for delivering government, education, financial, health and entertainment services. 

Contact
Director of Broadband and the Digital Economy
Terry Percival
Terry.Percival<at>nicta.com.au

Digital Productivity Showcase Opening

The Digital Productivity Showcase is a space designed to bridge the gap between research, local software companies and end-users of digital productivity tools.  It also addresses an unmet local need for a neutral meeting ground for government, researchers, vendors, users and creators of digital productivity tools - to learn about the latest digital tools and services on the market and to indentify gaps and opportunities.

The Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, Senator Stephen Conroy and NBN CEO Mike Quigley toured the Digital Productivity Showcase on 29 March. BaDE Director, Dr Terry Percival guided them through the tour of the showcase, starting in the NBN enabled home and working through small businesses, regional services, professional services to big business and e-government.

A news clip of this visit can be seen at the channel 10 web site
http://ten.com.au/news.htm?movideo_m=173810  

NICTA’s Sentiment Analysis Tool

Households are becoming increasing conscious not only of budgets but of ethical considerations, our sentiment analysis tool allows them to make more informed decisions, in this demonstration we are showing a social media based comparison of Coles versus Woolworths, obviously this has many more serious business applications. 

Tele-work

In our vision for the  future telework is not sitting at home answering emails and phone calls, but a multimedia rich environment uses multiple concurrent communications sessions, so you can really feel like you are in a work environment interacting with lots of people . We are fortunate today to have a demonstration of an academy award winning technology.  Tony Clark from Rising Sun Pictures creates fantastic special effects for movies such as Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, he developed CineSync which allows creators and directors to collaborate on the addition of special effects remotely, you have to see it to believe it.  It is now widely used in the film industry and yes last year he won a Technical Academy award for it!

Social TV

There is a huge amount of video out there on the Internet, some of it is entertaining, some is amusing, some vey informative and an awful lot that isn’t.  In fact the world is moving to the delivery of all video services over IP networks, so how do you work out what content is right for your needs.  Our social TV project is developing technologies to find and recommend to your family programs suited to your education and entertainment needs. This project is part of our collaboration with the Australian Centre for Broadband Innovation, CSIRO, the ABC, Technicolour and Ice-TV.

Virtual Counters

The next step beyond telework, is providing services to regional centres, we are investigating why virtual counters are not being widely adopted. As we will demonstrate today, the individual pieces of technology are now available, the bandwidth is or will soon be available, The real trick is fitting the technology into business processes and making it intuitive for humans to use.

The next step in our journey is enabling SMEs who aren’t tech savvy to use digital productivity tools.  We have developed an number of cloud tools, for cost estimation (so you can work out which cloud service provider), monitor the performance, or have automatic business continuity in the cloud.  Also on display are the tools from a local SME, Senath which provide a one click shop for SMEs to go online with a complete suite of business tools. They have included some of NICTA’s cloud tools in their offering. 
 

To move systems online you first need to set up a business process and set of rules.  These rules are very complex with many branches, and we need to ensure that there are no inconsistencies within the rules, or oxymorons, dead ends or repetitions.  We have been working with the NSW LPI e-conveyancing team on applying our logic reasoning tools to prove that the rules are absolutely correct.

Having ensured that the rules are consistent and have no dead end, we then need to develop tools to implement them and once they are implemented we need to check that the business process complies with the original rules. We have a demonstration on our tools that do this for a credit card application.

Big data and big business

Large organisations have massive amounts of data about their customers from a variety of heterogeneous sources.  Big data analytics is now a hot topic using tools based on Hadoop. We have developed a new language (called Scoobi) to help organisations make better use of this information and have been working with finance institutions in this space.  Today we are demonstrating work we are doing with SICRA showing how to use these tools to easily analyse ten years of stock market data.

Finally the biggest business of all is Government. When institutions bring new services online via data centres or private clouds the key is to dimension the service correctly so it doesn’t undergo meltdown.  Our tool (called ePASA) has been used by a number of government departments to correctly dimension new services. Today we demonstrate how this tool can be used to design a “Myheatlh” website.

NICTA is researching differential privacy tools, which allow you as the consumer to determine how much privacy you are prepared to disclose. Our question today is when you buy a prepaid SIM card does the backpacker working behind the counter really need to know all your personal details to the extent that he could steal your identity – as opposed to the details required by the AFP to track criminal activities, our collaborator Trustworks360 will provide some answers.