Dr. Chris Nicol is Head of Bell Labs Australia, Lucent Technologies.

A while back we asked him the following question:  Twenty months has passed since you gave your paper "The State of Research in Australia: Brain Drain, University Research Funding and the Microelectronics Industry"  to the Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council (PMSEIC) in June 2000. Were you to address the matter today, would you change your assessments?

Initially Dr. Nicol replied, "You have put forward an interesting question. Please tell me, why do you ask?"

TFW's response. "Your assessment was upbeat. Since that time the Government of the day has put forward, "Backing Australia's Ability", the Senate Committee assessing the fitness of our universities to do their job has published "Universities in Crisis", Canada and India, to name two nations, have begun to make available significant resources in an attempt to up their presence in R&D so as to become major world players.
    Recently Brian Anderson as President of the Australian Academy of Science  has written, "The foundations of good research and innovation are still to be found in the enabling sciences. We should not be too self-congratulatory that more than 60 per cent of Australian households have access to mobile phones. Our information technology tools and toys are largely imported; we have not created the right foundation to underpin vigorous indigenous industry."
    These examples suggest to me that perhaps you might reassess or at least modify you view of 20 months ago.

Following is Dr. Nicol's reply.

I was upbeat about research in Australia when I presented a paper to PMSIEC in June 2000. And I would have to say that I am now even more upbeat than before. I support the BAA initiatives that the Govt. has put forward. They are real initiatives - with real funding.

I believe the ICT Centre of Excellence will yield a great result for Australia. Furthermore - I agree with the priority setting process that the Government has undertaken. One of the most-impressive results that I believe will stimulate the right kind of activity in Australian research is the federation fellowships being offered by the ARC. These awards have proven our ability to attract excellent academics to return to Australia. They are competitive by international standards.

In the field of microelectronics, since my paper to PMSEIC, we have seen the formation of the AMN (Australian Microelectronics Network). The tele-test facility was funded as a part of the MNRF (Major National Research Facilities Program) process. Salaries for engineers in microelectronics have jumped significantly (by about 20-30%). My predictions in the paper to PMSEIC about Radiata came true... and I want us to see more startups of this nature in the future.

Now that research is looking healthier - I want to promote the field of microelectronics. Silicon chips are not and will never be commodity items. Nor do we need to invest Billions of dollars in IC fabs. It takes a modest amount of money to start making real impact in developing silicon IP. Radiata proved that - but this lesson seems to have been missed. Radiata were not lucky, they were clever - following a model that I promoted in my PMSIEC paper - a model proven by organisations like Bell Labs and Broadcom.

The future information economy will be built by people - not corporations or governments. The key is to get the best people - the rest will follow. And this is why I like the federation fellowships so much.

 The views expressed by Dr. Nicol are his own and not necessarily those of Lucent Technologies or The Funneled Web.

Alex Reisner
The Funneled Web