Free flow of ideas - students and industry meet

Research Conversazione provides postgraduate and undergraduate students in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies with an opportunity to share their visions for the future with CEOs and executives from some of Australia’s leading engineering and IT companies.

To participate, a student’s research must be innovative, focus on applied research, and respond to national and international needs in areas such as biomedical, civil, mechanical engineering or mechatronics and information technologies.

Amongst the five presenters is first year PhD candidate Shengzne Wang, a civil engineering student whose research on grains will help us plan and build safer cities.

Shengzne believes the safety of cities could rely on a few grains of soil and how they interact and behave under extreme conditions:

“My research will help engineers better assess the vulnerability of certain sites to the phenomenon of liquefaction. So when we plan our cities and suburbs in the future, we will know exactly where and where not to construct our houses and place our most critical infrastructure,” he says.

Fellow presenter Rana Abbas will discuss her ideas on how we can improve machine-to-machine (M2M) communication, comparing the random nature of M2M to a children’s netball game.

Following the presentations, industry guests have the opportunity to peruse the poster-presentations of the faculty’s top students.

“The students who present and discuss their work will lead the engineering and technology industries in the future,” says Keiran Passmore, Executive Director of Engineering Sydney.

“This type of forum allows for the free flowing of ideas between current industry leaders and our future leaders and vice-versa. For industry, it punctuates the contributions the University of Sydney is making to engineering and scientific knowledge.

“Among the projects on display are innovations that could quite literally change the way we live our lives,” Mr Passmore says.

“With interactive displays and bite-sized student research presentations, Research Conversazioneprovides a unique forum for industry representatives to engage with talented minds, meet our experts and forge linkages for future collaboration.”