Winners

• BushfireConnect
• Silent Tweets
• Cross-domain, Open-ended Conversational System
• Business File: Connecting Consumers and Business
• Integrated Housing for People with Disabilities
• Winner of the 2011 People's Choice award is: Aneka: Cloud Platform for Elastic Applications

BushfireConnect
Public warning systems can provide life-saving information to the community, particularly in times of natural disaster.

BushfireConnect is a free, not-for-profit, community-based website information service which integrates information sourced from official communication channels with information sourced from social media channels.

The BushfireConnect website is intended to augment the work of emergency services, leverage mobile broadband technologies and unify collaborative communications between official agencies and the community by aggregating and mapping official and crowd-sourced information. The services offered on the BushfireConnect website went live in February 2011 and covered the reporting of bushfires in and around Perth, Western Australia. The intention is to expand the services offered via the BushfireConnect website to cover the reporting of bushfires nationally.

Telstra will supply access to cloud infrastructure and development and hosting environments for the expanded BushfireConnect service. Telstra will also provide a number of mobile devices and Next G® services for the development and testing of the BushfireConnect mobile application.

Further information: bushfireconnect.org
Silent Tweets
From announcements as simple as public transport changes, to more serious emergency warnings, deaf and hearing impaired Australians are often excluded from audio communication channels such as radio and audio announcements.

Silent Tweets is a free, innovative, smart phone application based on Twitter which is intended to provide deaf and hearing impaired Australians with access to a one-to-many broadcasting service. It is envisaged that it will act as an alert system allowing members of community to post geo-located messages for a specified period of time. Silent Tweets users who are in the geo-fenced area to which the tweet relates will receive the relevant tweet during the nominated time period.

Created by the Australian Communication Exchange (ACE), it is anticipated that the Silent Tweets application may be used for many different messages such as traffic reports, weather reports, platform or gate change announcement for mass transport, community announcements, public announcements at sports stadiums or even in-store special announcements and localised advertising.

Telstra will provide ACE with a number of handsets and Next G® services throughout the project. ACE will also have access to many of Telstra’s subject matter experts in various areas including Telstra’s Applications and Ventures Group, the Chief Technology and Innovation Office and the Telstra Advertising Network Group.

Further information: www.aceinfo.net.au/silent_tweets.html
Cross-domain, Open-ended Conversational System
The Open Conversational System is an automated system that can carry on an intelligent customer-focussed dialogue (in certain subject matter domains) by fusing software agents and knowledge engineering. The Open Conversational System draws upon structured information from the internet (or nominated corporate intranets) as the basis for its dialogue with end users. The Open Conversational System has been evaluated in the health domain, answering queries about a range of healthcare symptoms and treatments. It has also been evaluated within the travel domain to interactively address questions about routes, costs and modes of transport.

This project will test the Open Conversational System’s ability to answer end user queries in the information and communications technology (ICT) domain. If the project is successful, it is envisaged the Open Conversational System may be used to provide automated ICT “help desk” type solutions.

Telstra will provide access to generic mobile and broadband “question and answer” support information as well as access to domain experts for advice and testing purposes. Telstra will also provide access to cloud infrastructure for web hosting and mobile computing platforms for testing the Open Conversational System.

The Conversational System is a collaborative effort between the RMIT Agents group and an industry partner, Real Thing Entertainment.

Further information:  www.cs.rmit.edu.au/agents/qa   www.realthing.com.au
Business File: Connecting Consumers and Business
Social networking services like Facebook enable users to establish dynamic networks that incorporate friends, family, and social interest groups. These sites are expanding their services to connect individuals to businesses with a social media presence. The social networking model, however, has limitations as a conduit between consumers and business, in part because business and pleasure do not readily combine and these networks are intrinsically social in nature.

Business File will offer consumers and business a network dedicated to commercial communications. Consumers will be able to receive communications from businesses and customise how they are delivered, archive documents, and search for new businesses. The web service will enable users to separate commercial messages from other digital content resulting in less mixing of commercial content with personal email or social media.

The project aims to provide businesses with improved connectivity with customers and more flexible and efficient communication options.

Telstra will provide mentoring for the venture as well as access to various subject matter experts from Sensis, Telstra Digital, and Telstra Advertising Network, to discuss issues relating to customer communications, business directory search and the expectations of online advisors and opportunities for advertising services in the online space. Integrated Housing for People with Disabilities
Today in Australia there are many young people with disabilities who are forced to live in nursing homes. The Integrated Housing project aims to address this via the development of innovative models of age-appropriate supported accommodation to get young people out of nursing homes and into their own homes.

This project will provide an evidence base demonstrating how integrated technology can be used to improve the way that people with acquired brain injuries live and also the way the people who support them work within new models of integrated housing.

This research will explore technological solutions to meet the specific support needs and barriers to independence experienced by people with severe brain injury who are moving out of nursing homes. This project will use integrated technology to keep people connected, enable them to remain as independent as possible and make the best use of paid supports.

The cost benefit analysis of the Integrated Housing model will demonstrate a scalable solution to dramatically increase the availability of supported housing to all people with disability. Using Telstra’s smart home technology, this innovative project aims to completely change the lives and outlooks of many deserving young people with disabilities.

Further information: www.buildingbetterlives.org.au

The winner of the 2011 People’s Choice award is:

Aneka: Cloud Platform for Elastic Applications
Aneka cloud technology, developed by Manjrasoft Pty Ltd, provides software designed to dramatically speed up resource intensive processing of tasks using cloud infrastructure. The technology is also designed to provide rapid application creation and an execution management platform to make deployment of applications on cloud infrastructure easy.

The Department of Space (Government of India) has previously utilised Aneka’s satellite processing application for monitoring natural disasters. China Southern Railways (GoFront) has used Aneka for building a private cloud to speed up rendering application involved in locomotive design.

Aneka will have access to Telstra’s subject matter experts to seek advice on design, architecture, migration, integration and testing of the Aneka technology.

Further information: www.manjrasoft.com

• iWebgate - DMZ in a box
• Seecue - Text indexing and search of video
• RMIT University - Real time stress and emotion recognition in speech
• Specialist Link - e-health for allied health

iWebgate - DMZ in a box
iWebgate presented to Telstra their ‘DMZ in a Box’ solution that offers enterprise grade security to small and medium sized businesses.

Most small and medium businesses use firewall technology to separate their private computer networks from the internet. The predictable and repetitive nature of this architecture can increase the risk of hackers attacking private networks.

Deploying an “interfacing network” between an organisation’s private network and the internet, in a space technically referred to as the demilitarised zone (DMZ), is considered best practice by many industry experts.

iWebGate’s new technology offers a solution that has previously been too difficult and expensive for most.

By using the iWebGate platform, companies of all sizes can access powerful computer networking technology to bolster their existing systems with enhanced levels of security.

Through the Telstra Innovation Challenge, iWebGate, together with a range of domain experts across Telstra, have examined achieving mass scalability and manageability. As a result, iWebGate’s technology was refined to centrally deploy "Security as a Service" through a hosted network solution for the small and medium business market.

This Security as a Service approach will allow the iWebGate solution to be centrally deployed and managed in order to minimise implementation costs and complexities. A trial of this Security as a Service solution will commence shortly.

If you would like to know more, please visit: www.iwebgate.com

Seecue - Text indexing and search of video
Seecue demonstrated to Telstra a new way of searching video content and driving web traffic to sites from video content searches. With over a billion videos viewed daily on the internet it can be difficult for users to find the exact content they are looking for. Seecue has developed an online and mobile search tool that allows video content to be searched as easily as text. This powerful core capability allows Seecue technology to be utilised in a range of applications, ranging from video search to contextual advertising.

Under the Telstra Innovation Challenge, we worked with a range of domain experts to determine how this technology can best be utilized, with a number of applications under consideration.

For more information, visit: www.seecue.com

RMIT University - Real time stress and emotion recognition in speech
RMIT University presented a system to Telstra that can automatically recognise stress and emotion in speech in real-time. This system has potential applications in call centers and other environments where real-time processing of voice data is possible.

In particular this technology may offer opportunities to prompt customer service representatives to modify their approach, depending on caller sentiment. It may also allow for automated escalation of calls if the system detects strong emotion. In addition there are potential applications in fraud detection for organisations and agencies that deal with this daily as an operational concern.

As part of the Telstra Innovation Challenge, Telstra facilitated an introduction to one of our key vendors and technology partners who are now working with the university to test, validate and improve the performance of RMIT’s system.

If the system performs to expectations then it may be trialed in a live call centre environment.

The picture illustrates an example from a real-time demonstration of the stress and emotion recognition system developed by RMIT University.

Specialist Link - e-health for allied health
Specialist Link came to Telstra with a proposal to improve rural access to medical specialists and allied health practitioners. With the average life expectancy
for people in regional Australia being 4 years less than for people in urban areas , partly due to lack of health practitioners, Specialist Link proposed trialing online health consultations for regional Australians.

Specialist Link provides an online matching service to help patients find the right medical specialists and allied health practitioners alongside online health tools and assessments, free of charge to patients. Specialist Link software aims to streamline health practices so practitioners can treat more patients each day. Specialist Link's patient services and practitioner software uniquely position Specialist Link to enable practitioners to treat patients remotely using webcams in an online consultations setting.

As part of the Telstra Innovation Challenge, we worked with Specialist Link to support a trial for online video consultations, including supporting clinical reports and clinical notes between stakeholders to facilitate online consultations. This has involved working closely with our strategic suppliers of video technology. In addition Telstra provided a number of LTE wireless broadband modems to allow specialists and their patients to conduct consultations over Telstra’s wireless network.

For more information, please visit: www.specialistlink.com.au

• Quintessence Labs
• Dev Audio
• Neural Diagnostics
• Taggle
• Tele-Rehabilitation for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD)

Quintessence Labs
Quintessence Labs came to Telstra with an ultra-secure link encryption device based on Quantum technology. Their QLE-1 device utilised second generation, quantum cryptography technology and could be deployed over optical fibre networks with a view to enabling untappable, ultra-secure, high-speed communications.

Their QLE-1 device was at prototype stage and they were interested in proving it out on Telstra fibre network infrastructure. Under the Telstra Innovation Challenge, Quintessence Labs were able to deploy their technology on our network fibre in Melbourne and prove the viability of their product on commercial network infrastructure. While running on our network, the Quintessence Labs system was demonstrated in the Telstra Innovation Labs to a range of industry and government organisations.

Since the demonstrations in the Telstra Innovation Labs QuintessenceLabs has continued to mature their technology and develop business in both local and overseas markets. “The Telstra Innovation Challenge has been very useful for QuintessenceLabs in many ways including being a referenceable example of the technology being implemented”, said Quintessence Lab’s Chief Marketing Officer, Chris O’Neil.

From a product perspective QuintessenceLabs has built on the QLE-1 device core technology and expanded its offering to include the QuintessenceLabs Information Security Manager (QISM). QISM is an encryption key manager that supports data-at-rest and data-in-transit through the OASIS KMIP interface allowing interoperability with multiple vendor platforms. The underlying QLE-1 device participates in the creation, exchange and storage of the quantum key material.

Telstra will continue to work with Quintessence Labs to develop viable commercial applications around their world class core technology.

More details on the Quintessence Labs technology can be found on their website: www.quintessencelabs.com

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Dev Audio
Dev-Audio approached Telstra with a novel device called the Microcone® - a portable intelligent microphone for recording group conversation. A small table-top unit, the Microcone® is designed to pick up voices from multiple directions while reducing background noise. The Microcone® has a range of applications that could meet the needs of entrepreneurs through to enterprises.

As part of the Telstra Innovation Challenge, Telstra worked with Dev-Audio to help them convert their computer based meeting recording product to a cloud based solution. Meeting recordings and transcripts, stored in the cloud, can then be searched and analysed by individuals or work groups.

Telstra have since facilitated introductions between Dev-Audio and a range of our strategic vendors and technology partners.

To find out more about DevAudio you can visit their website here: www.dev-audio.com

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Neural Diagnostics
Neural Diagnostics approached Telstra with a technology to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. They claim that the use of their EVestG™ device, and a cloud based signal processing service, can help medical specialists make rapid, accurate and non-invasive diagnostic and treatment decisions on a number of neurological and psychiatric disorders. This may allow for a diagnostic and treatment decisions to be made when symptoms are first noted in patients and potentially much earlier than is currently achievable with other methods.

Initially, one of the issues faced by Neural Diagnostics was the size of the data sets created by each e-consultation and the amount of computing time required to process each e-consultation. Ideally, Neural Diagnostics wanted to arrive at a result that could be used in a clinical setting within minutes of the EVestG™ measurement occurring.

Under the Telstra Innovation Challenge, a compute intensive cloud computing instance was provisioned that allowed them to process data very quickly.

Neural Diagnostics are now migrating their proprietary analysis software to a GPU-based architecture, allowing for even better performance which will help Neural Diagnostics realize their key goal of near real-time analysis. This advance facilitates Neural Diagnostics’ implementation of the next step of EVestG™ development - supporting its national and international clinical research partners to fast track the discovery and validation of the electrophysiological biomarkers for each disorder of interest.

Neural Diagnostics final goal is to provide accurate diagnostic reports to a patient’s treating doctor, all within a single consultation, using the power of next generation computing platforms.

Since commencing Telstra's support, Neural Diagnostic’s technology was successful in being awarded the ABC New Inventor Invention of the Year, and received a major Commercialisation Australia grant.

To find out more about, please visit: www.neuraldiagnostics.com

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Taggle
Taggle came to Telstra with a solution that utilised small, low-cost, long-life tags that aimed to allow users to track the location and status of large number of assets via the internet. The Taggle system had a number of potential applications in tracking both portable and static assets that could be put to use by businesses, governments and consumers.

As part of the Telstra Innovation Challenge, Telstra gave Taggle access to a number of mobile phone tower sites in Sydney and Mackay to install their specialised smart radio systems. These test environments allowed Taggle to test the viability of their mobile asset tracking system in both a built up urban and rural environment.

In addition, Telstra provided Taggle with access to specialist radio engineers and network planning technology.

Taggle are now actively pursuing opportunities in water metering, livestock tracking and irrigation and soil monitoring.g.

You can find out more about Taggle by visiting: www.taggle.com.au

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Tele-Rehabilitation for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD)
Associate Professor Anne Holland came to Telstra with a proposal that had the potential to positively influence the lives of patients suffering from Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), more commonly known as emphysema. Traditional modes of rehabilitation for people with COPD involve patients attending a medical facility where they undergo treatment and participate in controlled exercise programs to treat their condition. Although rehabilitation for COPD is very effective in reducing breathlessness and improving quality of life, patients may not participate because of the challenges involved in travelling to a medical facility. As the population ages, new models of rehabilitation for COPD are urgently needed to help patients access effective treatment.

Associate Professor Holland proposed a system that allowed for a supervised remote exercise regime where patient responses are monitored and observed via video-link. Participants can interact with each other and with the supervising physiotherapist, just like in a regular rehabilitation program, without needing to leave their homes.

Under the Telstra Innovation Challenge our domain experts gave recommendations on appropriate video systems for use in this application. Telstra then supplied Next G® modems to support a trial of this system with real patients. The trial, being conducted by La Trobe University, the Institute for Breathing and Sleep, and Austin Health, is still underway and will continue into 2012. Preliminary results suggest that supervised remote exercise programs for people with COPD are safe, feasible and highly valued by patients. Further testing will confirm whether remote rehabilitation programs can be substituted for regular rehabilitation programs, which may allow isolated and disabled patients to participate in rehabilitation for the first time.

For more information please go to: Website  Staff Profile

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