Delivering Impact
Monash University Magazine by Monash University
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MAN VERSUS MACHINE: A QUESTION OF INTELLIGENCE
By Monash University Feb 15, 2013
The Titan supercomputer in the US state of Tennessee was named in November 2012 as the world’s most powerful computer. It can process quadrillions of calculations per second – 176,000 times the computing capacity of 20 years ago.But is the Titan actually that much smarter than its predecessors? This, say researchers investigating artificial intelligence, remains to be seen.Based at Monash University in Melbourne, Associate Professor David Dowe is part of an international collaboration that has developed the Anytime Universal Intelligence (anYnt) test, intended to be able to measure the progress of artificial intelligence. It is the world’s first test of this type. Central to this effort, says Associate Professor Dowe, is the question of what intelligence is – that is, what is the test trying to measure
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OILING THE WHEELS OF DEMOCRACY
By Monash University Feb 15, 2013
The power of the consumer boycott is turning some major corporations into unlikely champions of a new form of political bargaining.Not so long ago, eating a biscuit or chocolate bar, or applying lipstick, meant, in all likelihood, that you were helping to deforest entire tropical landscapes. Today, just as unwittingly, you may instead be helping to drive a social and political revolution that is redefining the rules of international corporate behaviour and even giving democracy a passing fillip.At the centre of what was an emerging environmental crisis and has now become a benchmark for people power, is palm oil.It sounds innocuous enough but this simple agricultural product, mostly from South-East Asia, has become the focal point for a new tier of global governance, or rule making. Palm oil continues to catch nation states by surprise with its capacity to break through political inertia or corporate intransigence by harnessing – or threatening to harness – the power of the world’s consumers.It is a phenomenon still running its course and an enthralling spectacle for political scientist Associate Professor Helen Nesadurai from the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Monash University’s Sunway campus, near Kuala Lumpur. Malaysia is one of the largest producers of palm oil, giving Associate Professor Nesadurai a front-row seat to this seismic shift in the way non-governmental communities, often working with corporations, are setting rules that were once the province of corporate and political privilege.Associate Professor Nesadurai, who also collaborates with scholars from the University of Warwick in the UK (which has a formal alliance with Monash) and has consulted for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations secretariat and the Asian Development Bank, researches the politics and political economy of governance by non-state, civil society groups and private firms
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EYES ON NEW HORIZONS
By Monash University Feb 15, 2013
Some of the country’s greatest minds are meeting in a space custom-built for collaboration – and the possibilities are endless.Humans have asked what matter is for millennia. Today’s researchers are heirs to the accumulated answers to that question and can dream of advanced new materials that will help realise extraordinary technological advances.Among possibilities being explored by engineers in a new complex in Australia are solar cells so thin they can be printed onto plastic in a reel-to-reel printing process, putting solar energy on tap for all sorts of surfaces. There are materials that allow the human body to regenerate worn or diseased bones and organs. Physicists can create an entirely new state of matter with unusual properties, with a vast range of benefits including atomtronics that would help locate mineral deposits.The leadership at Monash University is well aware its engineers can make massive contributions to medicine, and that physicists are learning to build machines with implications for all research and development. To further fuel such collaborative ventures, it decided to build the New Horizons Centre (NHC), where researchers from multiple departments can cohabit and mingle to exploit radical new possibilities.
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POSITIVES AND NEGATIVES: A PLUS FOR ENERGY
By Monash University Feb 15, 2013
Salts that exist in a liquid state at room temperature could soon change the cars we drive, improve our renewable energy sources and help wean industrial chemistry off petroleum.Hybrid vehicles constitute a significant part of the automotive market. But safety concerns about the technology that powers these cars – their batteries are more likely than standard ones to ignite – is a major hindrance to reducing the carbon emissions of road transport. For Douglas MacFarlane, Professor of Chemistry at Monash University, the tendency of such car batteries to explode if damaged is a practical problem that he believes can be remedied by harnessing a remarkable conductive material that is much more stable. Ionic liquids, consisting of salts that have a low melting point, can be turned to diverse applications through the manipulation of their positive and negative molecules and atoms, components known as ions. Thanks to an Australian Laureate Fellowship from the Australian Research Council (ARC), over the next five years he will continue an ambitious research program of refining these ionic liquids, leading about 30 research chemists and materials engineers
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THE SEARCH NARROWS FOR EARTH-LIKE PLANETS
By Monash University Feb 15, 2013
Our galaxy is 120,000 light years in diameter. It contains up to 400 billion stars – and astrophysicists are getting closer to knowing where, in this vastness, to look for other life.One of the more improbable aids for exploring far distant space in the hope of locating extraterrestrial life is a map: a chart that, give or take a few hundred million kilometres, says ‘this is where the aliens live’.Given that any sign or signal sent from prospective neighbours in our Milky Way galaxy could be a billion or so years old by the time we saw it, the map would more likely be telling us where the aliens used to live. But such a map would still be a leap forward for astronomers searching for signs of other life, which is why astrophysicists in Melbourne and the UK are drawing one.The project is a collaboration between the University of Central Lancashire’s Professor Brad Gibson and the director of the Monash Centre for Astrophysics, Professor John Lattanzio, along with Monash University honours student Kate Henkel.
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MOLECULAR MAKEOVER TARGETS INSULIN LONGEVITY
By Monash University Feb 15, 2013
“Nature may have come up with a beautiful design in the insulin molecule, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be improved,” says Associate Professor Andrea Robinson from Monash University’s School of Chemistry. Regular doses of insulin are essential to the health of almost 300 million people around the world who have diabetes. Their bodies produce little or no insulin, which is needed to turn glucose from food into energy. But insulin in its natural form, or in the available synthetic forms, must be kept at four degrees Celsius or it loses its potency
