Australia India Business

A Meeting of Minds

As scientists turn their attention to global challenges, international collaboration is assuming greater importance. The Australia-India Strategic Research Fund exemplifies the power of such partnerships.

Interest in science and technology collaboration between Australia and India is greater than ever, with a strong response to the second round of the Australia-India Strategic Research Fund (AISRF).
India is an increasingly significant player in the global science and innovation system, and Australia wants to strengthen and expand scientific cooperation with this emerging technology leader. That’s why the Australian Government has committed A$20 million to the AISRF over five years to 2010-11 – with matching investment from the Indian Government – to support joint research projects and workshops.

Round two

The Australian Government provided A$7 million for round two of the AISRF. The successful proposals will extend Australia’s already rich connections with India, and yield economic, social and environmental benefits for both countries. The AISRF has three components:

1 The Indo-Australian Science and Technology Fund, managed with the Indian Department of Science and Technology;
2 The Indo-Australian Biotechnology Fund, managed with the Indian Department of Biotechnology; and
3 A Targeted Allocations component, which provides support for strategic large-scale collaborative projects.

There were 151 applications for round two funding, demonstrating the intense interest among Australian researchers in collaborating with their Indian counterparts. The successful projects cover transgenic crops for pest resistance, diagnosis and treatment of eye disease, nanotechnology and nanomaterials, astronomy, bioremediation of contaminated soil and more.
Applications for round three of the AISRF have closed and the successful projects should be announced in March 2009.
Drawing on the successful applicants from the second round, the following examples demonstrate the kind of work AISRF is supporting.

Opening eyes

The Centre for Eye Research Australia is collaborating with the Hyderabad Eye Research Foundation at the L.V. Prasad Eye Institute in India to produce a therapeutic contact lens that will treat blinding eye diseases.
The project is led by Dr Mark Daniell and includes collaborators at the Mawson Institute at the University of South Australia, and the Bernard O’Brien Institute for Microsurgery.
It will take an established therapy for treating chronic wounds and burns, and adapt it to grow tissue in serumfree cultures that can be used to repair damage to the corneal surface.
The project will conduct clinical trials to establish the safety and efficacy of the therapy compared to existing techniques. The new therapy would be cheaper than those available today, making it suitable for both developed and developing countries. If the patient’s own cells are used to grow the new tissue, it will be free of any animal products.
The project will also develop a bioengineered corneal model which will allow drugs and cosmetics to be tested without using animals.
It is an exciting new approach to treating eye disease.

Fighting cyber terrorism

Researchers from India and Queensland University of Technology (QUT) are stepping into the shoes of internet criminals to discover how they can defend the information technology (IT) networks of both nations against attack.
According to Eric Hall, Director of QUT’s Information Security Institute, QUT is collaborating with the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras and the Society for Electronic Transaction and Security on world-leading research to prevent ‘cyber terrorism’.
Simple computer programming could bring countries to a standstill by shutting down bank and government websites. “One of the vulnerabilities inherent in modern internet architecture is that servers are vulnerable from attacks that bombard them with massive volumes of traffic,” Mr Hall says.
“Perpetrators write very simple programs, called botnets, which are targeted at a key server of a significant network; for example, a server that controls a city’s electricity. They jam the server with synthetically produced traffic and effectively shut it down so the server can no longer do its job.”
Mr Hall says the attacks might be linked to terrorism or the work of criminals seeking to blackmail businesses by shutting down a server and demanding money to cease the attack.
“A year ago, there was a very significant attack on Estonia,” he says. “A criminal organisation attacked the country’s IT infrastructure and shut it down for a few days. This was a wake-up call to other western countries.
“An attack like this could halt not only our online banking transactions, but also freeze our rail, power and water distribution networks.”
Mr Hall said the project would include constructing test beds to simulate denial-of-service attacks.

“We are trying to understand the pathology of these attacks, to detect them and develop appropriate countermeasures,” Mr Hall said. “I can conceivably see scenarios where we would attack our Indian collaborators’ network to test their defences.”

Star gazing

Australian and Indian astronomers are using India’s Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope (GMRT) – the largest and most powerful low-frequency radiotelescope in the world – to search for pulsars (the remnants of stars) and mysterious radio signals from outer space.
A team at Swinburne University of Technology, led by Professor Matthew Bailes and Dr Ramesh Bhat, is working with researchers from Curtin University and the Australia Telescope National Facility, and Indian researchers from the National Centre for Radio Astrophysics.
The project is developing softwarebased signal processing techniques that will extend the capabilities of the GMRT. It will also use long-baseline interferometry to connect the Indian telescope with telescopes in Australia.
As well as searching for pulsars and very-short-timescale transient radio sources, the project aims to demonstrate the beam-forming techniques critical to next-generation telescopes, such as the Square Kilometre Array.
It will draw on the knowledge and infrastructure of all the institutions involved, strengthen strategic links between them, and promote the transfer of knowledge between Indian and Australian researchers.

Website: www.innovation.gov.au/aisrf

Reprinted in full from the print edition of Australia India Business 2009.

Tags: Australian-India Strategic Research Fund, Centre for Eye Research Australia, Dr Mark Daniell, QUT