Unis unite via web link

A NEW state-of-the-art communications hub linking Monash University and Israel’s Technion was officially switched on at a celebration launch on Monday night.

At Monash Caulfield, Israel’s deputy chief of mission to Australia Meir Itzchaki joined the university’s vice-chancellor Professor Ed Byrne and deputy vice-chancellor of research, Professor Edwina Cornish, to watch the link go live, chatting in Israel with Australian ambassador  Andrea Faulkner and Professor Aharon Ben-Tal, dean of Technion’s  industrial engineering and management faculty.

The high-definition internet loop, complete with customised lecture theatres at either end, makes research partners on separate continents feel almost as if they are in the same physical space.

The Israeli end of the link was funded by the Victorian Friends of Technion.

The hub enables full interactivity between speakers and audiences at either end, so dialogue across oceans runs smoothly, without time lags.

The event’s host Professor Yuri Estrin, from Monash’s department of materials engineering, told The AJN that seminars by Technion and Monash experts will be transmitted on a range of topics, fostering closer research ties between the institutions.

One area that will benefit is materials engineering, the development of new materials, especially nanomaterials (which is used in miniaturising electronic circuits, improving insulation and producing improved flat-panel displays).

“Materials engineering is particularly strong at Technion and the most recent Nobel Prize winner, Daniel Shechtman, is from that department,” said Estrin.

Collaboration between Monash and Technion will also take place in the areas of mechanical and aerospace engineering.

Professor David Abramson, director of Monash’s e-Education Centre, said Technion, which has a Memorandum of Understanding with Monash, expressed an interest in the virtual lecture theatres developed at Monash.

Abramson said the virtual seminars stimulated actual visits between universities, with students sitting in on the international events and becoming interested in exchange programs.

“It’s very hard to choose someone on the other side of the world if you don’t know who you’d like to work with,” he said.

One student inspired that way was David Warner, an undergraduate from Monash’s faculty of information technology, who undertook the first research exchange to Technion as part of the Monash “Undergraduate Research Projects Abroad” scheme.

Warner said the exchange presented an opportunity to work with world-renowned academics on a cutting-edge information-technology research project, and to experience life in a leading, international research laboratory.

PETER KOHN