Advisory Board
The Advisory Board is chaired by the Dean of Engineering. The current membership includes the Program Directors for each engineering specialisation and the Chair of the Research Committee. External members are invited from local industry and leading national and international engineering programmes. Short bios of the external members are given below.
The full panel meets in February and the New Zealand members meet in August of each year.
External Advisory Board Members
Professor Chris Cook
Professor Chris Cook is Dean of Engineering at the University of Wollongong. Chris Cook is an electrical engineer with a BSc and BE from the University of Adelaide, and he received his PhD from the University of New South Wales in 1976.
Chris worked for Marconi Avionics in the UK as a project engineer designing aerospace computing systems, and later with GEC Australia as the Technical Manager of their Automation and Control Division, where he set up a group which designed and installed robot controlled automation systems for manufacturing applications. He then became the founding Managing Director of the Automation and Engineering Applications Centre Ltd., a non-profit company of the University of Wollongong, which built and installed automation and robotic systems for manufacturing companies around Australia.
He became Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Wollongong in 1989 and was Head of School for 12 years before taking up his current position as Dean of Engineering. In this time he was instrumental in setting up three joint Industry-University research centres which now employ full-time researchers and research students working on finding solutions to industrial problems related to power engineering.
Professor Jan Rabaey
Jan M. Rabaey is the Donald O. Pederson Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at the University of California at Berkeley. His current research interests include the conception and implementation of next-generation integrated wireless systems. This includes the analysis and optimization of communication algorithms and networking protocols, the study of low-energy implementation architectures and circuits, and the supporting design automation environments.
He is the author of "Digital Integrated Circuits: A Design Perspective", a state-of-the art textbook on digital circuit design (Prentice Hall, ISBN 0-13-178609-1). He is also the editor/author of "Low Power Design Methodologies" and Power Aware Design Methodologies, two Kluwer Academic Publisher books that present an in-depth coverage on low-power design ranging from the technology up to the system level. Most recently, he co-edited "Ambient Intelligence", a Springer_Verlag book on the applications, technology and systems aspects of the Ambient Intelligence concept.
Jan is currently the scientific co-director of the Berkeley Wireless Research Center (BWRC). as well as the director of the Gigascale Systems Research Center (GSRC). From 1999 till 2002, he served as the associate chair of the Berkeley EECS department. He was also the general chair of the 2001 Design Automation Conference, held in Las Vegas in June 2001.
Professor Gill Dobbie
Gill Dobbie is Head of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Auckland. She received a Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne, an M.Tech.(Hons) and B.Tech.(Hons) in Computer Science from Massey University. She has lectured at Massey University, the University of Melbourne, and Victoria University of Wellington, and held visiting research positions at Griffith University and the National University of Singapore.
She is intrigued by data and how it is managed and processed. Her current research interests include data management for collaborative applications, real time data management and data warehousing, finding patterns in large amounts of data, particularly for recommender systems and outlier detection, and defining and verifying the correctness of algorithms for novel applications such as XML databases and web services.
She has published over 100 international refereed journal and conference papers, and was awarded the most influential paper in the last 10 years at DASFAA 2011.
Gill has also been an active member on several conference programme committees. She was the Program Chair for IEEE International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference (EDOC) in 2009, the General Chair for 34th International Conference on Very Large Databases (VLDB) in 2008, and the Program Chair for31st Australasian Computer Science Conference (ACSC) in 2008.
Professor Philip Bones
Philip Bones is Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch.
He obtained his ME in Electrical Engineering (Cardiovascular Instrumentation) from the University of Canterbury in 1974, and received his PhD from the University of Canterbury in 1980. (Thesis title: Contributions to Electrocardiographic Science.)
Phil worked as a Biomedical Engineer in the Department of Cardiology for the Canterbury Hospital Board from 1975 – 1982. He was a post-doctoral research assistant in the Engineering Medicine Lab at Imperial College, London from 1982-1983, and was the Alexander Von Humboldt Fellow with the Electro-Physiology Group at the University of Heidelberg, Germany from 1983 – 1984. He was a Scientific Officer for the Department of Radiotherapy, Christchurch Hospital from 1984 – 1985, and then held the position of National Heart Foundation NZ Senior Fellow in the Department of Cardiology, Canterbury Hospital Board, from 1985 – 1987. He joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Canterbury, Christchurch as a Senior Lecturer in 1988, and became Professor in 2008.
His current research interests include image processing, in particular recovery of images from partial information and medical imaging, and biomedical signal processing, especially EEG and ECG.
Recent publications from Professor Bones and his collaborators include:
- Peiris, M.T.R., Davidson, P.R., Bones, P.J., Jones, R.D. Detection of lapses in responsiveness from the EEG. Journal of Neural Engineering, 8(1-016003) 2011:1-15.
- Bones, P.J. and Wu, B. Sparse sampling in MRI. In Dougherty, G. (Ed) Medical Image Processing: Techniques and Applications, Springer, 2011.
- Wu, B., Millane, R.P., Watts, R. and Bones, P.J. Prior estimate-based compressed sensing in parallel MRI. Magnetic Resonance in Medicine, 65 (1), 2011: 83-95.
- Bones, P.J., Butler, A.P.H., Ronaldson, J.P. and Opie, A.M.T. "Development of a CT scanner based on the Medipix family of detectors", in Developments in X-Ray Tomography VII, Proc. SPIE, Vol. 7804, 2010:780414.
- Bones, P.J., Vafadar, B., Watts, R. and Wu, B. Imposing spatio-temporal support in magnetic resonance angiographic imaging, in Image Reconstruction from Incomplete Data VI, Proc. SPIE, vol. 7800, 2010: 780007.
- Maclaren, J.R., Bones, P.J., Millane, R.P. and Watts, R. MRI with TRELLIS: A novel approach to motion correction. Magnetic Resonance Imaging, 26 (4), 2008: 474-483.
Richard Templer
General Manager Advanced Manufacturing Technologies – PhD, FiPENZ, AFNZIM After completing his mechanical engineering degree, Richard worked for Volvo in Sweden and MacMaster University in Canada. Returning to New Zealand, he received two scholarships for his PhD(Eng) study, completed while working for Fisher & Paykel Healthcare’s design team.
He moved to Industrial Research, where he developed robotics for the worldwide meat industry, won a joint Royal Society Science medal, and became Automation Systems team manager in 2000. In 2001 Richard was the NZIM Young Executive of the Year and also won the iPENZ Innovation award in 2002. Richard moved to Wellington in 2002 to work for the meat and wool industries as GM R&D.
In late 2007 he joined the Foundation for Research Science & Technology as an Investment Strategy Manager, in July 2008 became the GM Investment Strategy Team and in July 2009 Group Manager Industry & Environment, responsible for $380 million of public investment. In late 2010 Richard was the Foundation’s acting CEO during the transition to the Ministry of Science and Innovation, then acting Deputy Chief Executive Science Strategy & Investment at MSI, before joining IRL for the second time.
Murray Milner
Dr Murray Milner is a principle of Milner Consulting and Chairman of Harmonic. Murray is a world class telecommunications technology expert with a doctorate in electrical engineering and 34 years experience in the ICT industry.
Murray held a variety of senior positions within Telecom New Zealand including Chief Technology Officer (until September 2005). During his career Murray has also held a variety of auxiliary positions within the wider industry, including; national, regional and international standards bodies; various government forums; national and international conferences and forums.
Murray has a Doctorate Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Canterbury. He has undertaken post doctoral research in economics, public policy and telecommunication engineering at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford Universities in the USA.
During his career Murray has received a number of awards, including a Confederation of British Industries Scholarship, a Harkness Fellowship, the IPENZ Supreme Technical Award for Engineering Achievers in 2004 and the Chairman's Award at the Telecommunication User Association of New Zealand Innovation Awards for 2005.
Nick Wood
Datacom
John Yaldwyn
Chief Technology Officer 4RF. John is 4RF’s founding Director. He led the development of the initial Aprisa platforms and continues to contribute to new product designs. He is also responsible for the regulatory function within 4RF.
Prior to forming 4RF in 1998, John held senior engineering and management roles with MAS Technology for 13 years and travelled extensively, liaising with customers worldwide. His engineering skills and in-market experience helped shape the pivotal architecture and system design of the DXR™ 100 and 200 product families and he was instrumental, as MAS Vice President Advanced Systems, in the Nasdaq IPO. Following the merger with DMC in 1997, he was appointed Marketing Vice President and developed the design of the DXR™ 700 platform.
John Clegg
John Clegg is the CEO of ProjectX Technology http://www.projectx.co.nz, a boutique technology company based in Wellington.
John has a BSc (Computer Science) and MBA from Victoria University. John is an experienced technical specialist in online and e-commerce business with a background in financial and transactions systems. John has multi-national experience working in UK, India, Australia, South Africa, USA and New Zealand.
John is the founder and chairman of the Summer of Tech programme (previously Summer of Code New Zealand). John started the internship programme in Wellington NZ in 2006, because he saw a gap for business wanting to access top local talent. John believes that stronger partnerships between industry and tertiary institutions is key to accelerating the development of the future graduates. John has a hand-on approach to solving the ICT talent problems and making sure the Summer of Tech programme delivers value to all stakeholders in the short, medium and long term.