NEWS RELEASE
April 29 2002
UniSA
whiz-kids in line for prestigious engineering prize
Two
UniSA graduates have made it to the national finals of one of
Australia’s most coveted tertiary engineering awards, the Siemens Prize
for Innovation. The winning project devises visualisation software with a
host of potential applications ranging from defence aviation to medicine.
Guy
Gallasch, 21, and Mathew Elliot, 23, will compete in the Siemens Prize for
Innovation national finals for the $25,000 prize for Australia’s most
outstanding final year student project in the fields of electronic,
electrical, communication or computer engineering.
Guy
and Matthew were chosen as the South Australian finalists on the strength
of their project, Animation
facilities for defence systems modelling, which they completed last
year as part of their honours degrees in computer systems engineering.
The
project was supervised by Professor Jonathan Billington and Dr Lars
Kristensen from UniSA’s Computer Systems Engineering Centre in the
School of Electrical and Information Engineering, and funded by a UniSA
grant and the Defence, Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO).
Guy
and Mathew designed and implemented visualisation software that makes
systems modelled by coloured Petri nets (a widely used technique for
modelling complex computer-based systems) easier for the lay-person to
understand.
The
project was undertaken in partnership with the Airborne Mission Systems
Branch of DSTO, and while Guy and Mathew say its initial application will
be to better communicate the subtleties of defence avionics systems to
people who are not from a computer science background, it was designed to
be adaptable to many other uses.
“We
tried to make it as generic as possible so it could be applied to just
about anything,” says Guy. “It could be used in any type of aircraft,
or to model chemical reactions in medicine, traffic light systems – even
to explain what goes wrong when power supplies are interrupted.
“It’s
the sort of project that can be added to at any time according to what the
customer wants.”
Winning
the State prize has already earned the pair $5,000. At the finals in
Sydney on May 2 they will make a presentation of their project to a
distinguished judging panel, before the National winner is announced on
May 3 at the NSW Parliament House.
UniSA
is hosting the 23rd International Conference on Application and
Theory of Petri Nets, to be held in Adelaide from June 24-28. For more
information visit www.unisa.edu.au/eie/csec/pn2002/.
Media
contacts:
Charlotte Knottenbelt – media officer, UniSA (08) 8302 0578 or
0439 807 004 email charlotte.knottenbelt@unisa.edu.au
Bridget Armstrong – Siemens Ltd. Corporate Communications
Ph (02) 9491 5368 Mobile: 0417 373 995
Guy Gallasch 0409 091 390
or Mathew
Elliot 0413 599 182
