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IFE Grand Challenge Lecture recorded on 27 July, 2018.

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IFE Visitor Lecture recorded on 24 August, 2018.

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IFE Grand Challenge Lecture, recorded 4 May 2018 at QUT

In today’s media landscape, there is much discussion of closing the gap for Indigenous Australians, but a decade on, only three of the seven targets set by the Council of Australian Governments are on track. The four targets not yet achieved directly affect Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth: reading and writing, school attendance, life expectancy and employment.

With more than half the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population being 25 years or younger, and with no simple solutions in sight, it is time to prompt intergenerational change beginning with Indigenous youth.

In his address, Wayne Denning explores such solutions as: positive self-identification, in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander youth need to see themselves as successful, strong, happy, confident human beings who are comfortable within their culture; the promotion of their Aboriginality; and the amplification of programs that encourage youth self-empowerment and lead to a ‘youth movement’.

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IFE Distinguished Visitor Lecture, recorded 9 May 2018 at QUT.

Unfortunately, warfare and conflict in their many forms seem destined to blight our world for the foreseeable future. While war continues to be fundamentally a human endeavour whose character remains largely unchanged, the nature of contemporary and future conflict is undergoing significant changes.

Speaking from direct and extensive experience, Major General Jeff Sengelman (retired), as a former commander of Special Operations Australia, will reflect on high-performance special forces teams and the attributes that have made them so globally successful under the most extreme conditions and circumstances. From this, he will more widely discuss how autonomous and semi-autonomous systems, and the technologies that underpin them, are likely to impact fundamentally on current cultural, military, societal, ethical and legal approaches to conflict and warfare.

Ronald C. Arkin is Regents' Professor and Director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory in the College of Computing at Georgia Tech and is the Director of the Mobile Robot Laboratory. He served as STINT visiting Professor at KTH in Stockholm, Sabbatical Chair at the Sony IDL in Tokyo, member of the Robotics and AI Group at LAAS/CNRS in Toulouse, and recently completed a year’s leave at QUT and CSIRO.

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IFE Grand Challenge Lecture, recorded 25 May 2018 at QUT.

Through the 20th century, research laboratories at the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge embodied two leading models of research, based on competing philosophies of how research is conducted and research teams are assembled and supported.The Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge, under the guidance of J.J. Thomson and his acolytes, focused on recruitment and environment, producing a stunning succession of discoveries that underpin modern physics and chemistry. Several decades later, Howard Florey’s team at Oxford took a problem-based approach, carefully assembling the team best equipped to solve the antibiotic challenge, resulting in the discovery that has arguably saved more lives than any other.

Towards the end of the 20th century and on the other side of the world, policymakers and research administrators came together to develop a blended system that harnessed the best of each of these models. For more than a decade and supported by successive Australian governments, Backing Australia’s Ability provided a coherent, overarching structure to nurture a research ecosystem in which each element could thrive in collaboration with the others.

Professor Sheil will argue that examples of breakthrough innovation – such as the cervical cancer vaccine or CSIRO’s invention of Wi-Fi – must be read in the context of this ecosystem approach, which underpinned a research model that is at once engaged yet open; problem-oriented yet curiosity-driven.

This Grand Challenge Lecture is a call to arms for a revival and modernisation of such a systems approach, in which government, the universities, industry and the publicly funded research agencies each understand (and are funded for) their respective roles, yet find benefit in working collaboratively and generatively, within the most productive open-source template for adaptive innovation in the world of today and tomorrow.

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IFE Grand Challenge Lecture, recorded on April 6 2018 at QUT.

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