COMSOC 2007

COMS 2007, to be held on 2-5 September in Sofitel Hotel, Melbourne, is the leading international conference on the commercialisation of micro and nano technologies.

This is a commercial event focused on the science of using molecular scale manufacturing to produce commercial products. Its about funding of research, IPOs, export and import of information, technology exchange, incorporating emerging technologies and about understanding the potential for this practical science.

The event comprises of the following major streams:

·         Bio and Life Sciences : technical and business approaches, applications and ethics and regulatory issues

·         Business Strategies : innovation methods, business models including clusters, start-ups, foundries, commercialising off the shelf technology (COTS), investment methods, barriers to commercialisation, case studies

·         Applications and Transformations : emerging and novel applications e.g. automotive, aerospace, consumer goods, sport and leisure

·         Nano in water, energy, agriculture and food

The event will feature the following plenary speakers (among others):

Professor Yoshinobu Baba  Department of Applied Chemistry, Graduate School of Engineering, Nagoya University

Clive Davenport  President MANCEF, CEO Small Technologies Cluster, Managing Director MNT Innovations, Melbourne, Australia

Dr Kees Eijkel  CEO Kennispark, Twente, Enschede, Netherlands, an organization that is responsible for commercialization and related area development

Professor Masayoshi Esashi  Director of Micro/Nanomachining Research and Education Center in Tohoku University, Japan

Dr Erol Harvey  CEO, miniFAB (Australia) and Professor of Microtechnology at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia

miniFAB, headed by Prof Erol Harvey, offers customised manufacturing and advanced product development, exploiting leading edge polymer microfabrication.  Recently, miniFAB has launched their new product miniChemLAB. The miniChemLAB system is a fully integrated and automated micro-reactor workstation dedicated to performing chemistry-on-a-chip operations, such as synthesis, screening, purity optimisation and various analytical applications.

Dr Abid Khan  Director, Monash Institute for Nanosciences, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia

More detail of the event can be found at http://www.mancef-coms2007.org

Instrumenting the Coral Reef

Supriyo Chatterjea from the University of Twente (ISSNIP member) is currently working together with the University of Melbourne and the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS) to set up a large-scale wireless sensor network to monitor various environmental parameters on the Great Barrier Reef (GBR). Scientists at AIMS are using the collected data to study coral bleaching, reef-wide temperature fluctuations, impact of temperature on aquatic life and pollution. One of the reefs under study is the Davies Reef which is approximately 80km north-east of the city of Townsville in North Queensland, Australia. Originally, AIMS has a couple of data loggers situated on the reef that records temperature at two separate depths once every thirty minutes. Scientists from AIMS need to visit the reef periodically to download the data from the loggers. The drawback of this system is that it only allows single-point measurements. Thus it is impossible to get a true representation of the temperature gradients spanning the entire reef which is around 7km in length. Also, the practice of collecting the data once every few weeks makes it impossible to study the trends of various parameters in real-time. Deploying a sensor network would not only allow high-resolution monitoring in both the spatial and temporal dimensions but would also enable scientists to improve their understanding of the complex environmental processes by studying data streaming in from the reef in real-time. The new data collection system that is being deploying at Davies Reef can be broken down into three main components (Figure 1):

1.      Ambient ?Nodes. These are the sensor nodes from Ambient Systems that will be placed in water and shock-proof canisters and then placed in buoys around the reef.

2.      Embedded PC. An embedded PC will be placed on a communication tower and will act as the sink node collecting data from all the sensors in the reef.

3.      Microwave link. This will allow data to be transmitted from the Embedded PC to the AIMS base station 80 km away using microwave transmissions trapped inside humidity ducts that form directly above the surface of the sea.

More information can be found in the technical report : A Distributed and Self-Organizing Scheduling Algorithm for Energy-Efficient Data Aggregation in Wireless Sensor Networks by Chatterjea et al. (http://eprints.eemcs.utwente.nl/9354).

 Figure 1. Overview of data collection system at Davies Reef (Courtesy of Supriyo Chatterjea)