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(David Thodey) Well I’ve known the CSIRO for many years because
the Chairman of Telstra was Catherine Livingstone and of course
Catherine was Chair of CSIRO going back, what now, ten years ago.
So Catherine’s told me a lot about CSIRO over many years.
But also my time at IBM, we did a lot of work with
CSIRO and then at Telstra we’ve had various interactions.
I think that if I characterised it they’ve been
stop/start to be quite honest and yet the more
I’ve got to know about CSIRO it’s an incredible depth of
talent and capability and I think there’s just such
a wonderful opportunity, we could talk about that but
so I’ve known CSIRO for a long time, it is one of the
great brands of Australia really. Telstra’s been a great
journey, it’s a wonderful Australian company and in fact has many
similar connections back to the government as CSIRO
and it’s now gone through a privatisation program.
But it’s a very strong retail brand, it’s
about very strong engineering culture.
And in fact I would say a bit like the CSIRO in many ways, it has some of the
best engineers, telecommunications engineers and is known
around the world for its leadership, more so than what
Australians really rate it. And I think sometimes
it’s a bit, you’re not recognised in your own backyard
and I think CSIRO has some of those similar
characteristics where we have outstanding Australian
people and we need to really celebrate that and really
celebrate their recognition on a global scale.
So that’s a little of my background.
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Well I have seen enormous change in technology and the rate of change
of innovative new ideas and I think we’re in a
unique period right now. But I remember I come
back, you know in technology terms I go back to the mainframe
and I lived through the PC era and then distributed
computing and then the Cloud. Well in fact I should
say the internet and then the Cloud and then big data analytics
and now artificial intelligence.
But we’re in a very unique point that impacts research and
science right now because the rate of change of technology innovation, I’ve
never seen it happen faster. I spent a lot of time in the U.S
and I spent a lot of time in Europe and when you start to see
this technology innovation plus new business models
all coming together, this rate of change, this rate
of innovative ideas, we’ve never seen a period like it.
Because technology is touching everything.
So let’s take big data or artificial intelligence, even Cloud
computing, the cost of computing is dropping enormously and
no matter whether you’re a scientist or a business
person or even someone in public policy you’ve
suddenly got access to this enormous amount of data that can be changed to
information that drives into knowledge.
And if you can take that and then look at new business models
you can start to change industries, change the way societies
work, bring innovation into very thin verticals, you’d
probably see them in food processing, agribusiness sector.
And that's what’s so exciting now.
But you still need pure science and you still, then you need to look
at how you can take that and apply it into real life situations.
And that could be business or it could be societal,
and that’s what’s so exciting. So I’m seeing an
enormous change right around the world.
And I’ve never seen a time where its touching everything I know.
There’s been periods when we’ve had like the
PC era or maybe it was a little bit of the internet,
it was bit but not this big. So that’s what is so
exciting now and I think for the CSIRO I think we have
this unique opportunity to really collaborate and really
drive this change for the good of Australia.
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I think we need to do a better job at attracting people
into the science, technology, engineering and mathematics field.
The truth is in Australia at the moment that
we’re not getting enough people coming through,
both tertiary, even coming through at secondary
school and it’s such a wonderful career.
Its stimulating, its great people, its challenging and that’s what you
look for in a career. I mean yes you look for money but there’s
other things that people look for and if you want
to make a difference I’d say go for that career.
And I think we as a community working in science, technology, engineering
and mathematics we need to reach out more and to talk about how good it is.
And it’s not, you know sometimes you get the geeks’ brigade,
it’s not, I mean wonderful rich people, and that
you can make a difference in society.
That’s what gets people excited. So I don’t have,
I don’t find it hard to talk about what a wonderful
career you can have and I think CSIRO is the pinnacle
organisation where people aspire to come
to work and that is just wonderful. So we need to encourage that.
But we want to create lots of different
opportunities right across the industry, all industries,
because science, technology, engineering,
mathematics is such a critical part of it.
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