Future industries

Across the globe, we’re creating 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. Hidden within it are insights that can help businesses understand their customers, identify future trends, and make smart business decisions – if only they knew how.

She’s a world-leading researcher in areas of artificial intelligence (AI) like fuzzy transfer learning, concept drift and decision support systems, among others. And over the next five years, UTS Distinguished Professor Jie Lu is set to make Australia a global leader in another AI discipline: autonomous machine learning for decision support.

Low back pain is the leading cause of disability across the globe. Affecting up to seven million Australians, it also comes with a massive price tag, accounting for $1.2 billion of our national health care expenditure in 2008/2009 alone.

Rescuers could one day be able to see clearly through the thick smoke of a bushfire, surgeons could operate using a hologram of their patient as a guide, and wi-fi might become a thousand times faster with the help of emerging technology to highly miniaturise optical components.

How can we make courts more efficient while retaining a just judicial system? Law Professor Anita Stuhmcke and Senior Lecturer Pam Stewart are mining data from High Court decisions to find out.

Remember the cute robot from the 2008 Pixar film WALL-E? The reality of a robot companion with emotional expression might not be such a far-off fantasy, after researchers at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and the Honda Research Institute (HRI) collaborated to design a personal robot with the explicit intention of ‘bringing joy’.

Australian researchers are investigating whether 3D-printing technology could help make food both safe and appetising for people with swallowing disorders or ‘dysphagia’.