Distinguished Professor, The Australian National University
BSc,BE (Sydney),PhD(Stanford).DHC (Louvain). Hon DSc Tech (ETH Zurich), Hon. DEng (Sydney, Melbourne, UoN), Hon.DSc (UNSW), FAA, FTSE, FIEEE, Hon FIEAust, FRS

Professor Brian David Outram Anderson addressed graduates from the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology in the Great Hall, University of Technology, Sydney on Thursday 3 October 2013, 2:00pm.

At the ceremony, Professor Anderson, AO, Order of the Rising Sun, Japan, received the UTS honorary award, Doctor of Engineering (honoris causa).

Professor Brian David Outram Anderson graduated from the University of Sydney with degrees in both Mathematics and Electrical Engineering. He continued his studies at Stanford University where he received a PhD in Electrical Engineering.

Professor Anderson worked in the industry in the United States and at Stanford University before returning to Australia in 1967 where he served as a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Newcastle through to 1981. At that time, he took up a post as Professor and Head of the Department of Systems Engineering at the Australian National University in Canberra, where he later was Director of the Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering from 1994 to 2002. Professor Anderson served as President of the Australian Academy of Science from 1998 to 2002.

In 2000, Professor Anderson chaired a working party of the Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council that recommended the urgent establishment of a publicly funded research organisation in Information and Communications Technologies. The government committed itself to this proposal, and announced a competition for approximately $130M. Professor Anderson put together major partners, ANU, UNSW, ACT Government and NSW Government. He served as Interim CEO of the National Information and Communications Technologies Australia Ltd (NICTA) until May 2003, when he became Chief Scientist. Professor Anderson finished as Chief Scientist of the NICTA in September 2006 and became Distinguished Researcher.

Professor Anderson’s research interests include circuits, signal processing and control, and his current work focuses on distributed control of multi-agent systems, sensor network localisation and adaptive and non-linear control. He has received a number of Research Contracts and Grants including that of National ICT Australia (Bid team leader and interim CEO), three Fulbright Grants and two substantial Australian Research Council Discovery-Projects Grants.

In addition, Professor Anderson has successfully supervised approximately 40 research student theses. Many of these students have gone on to hold senior appointments and fellowships. Professor Anderson continues his passion for research in his role as Distinguished Professor at the Australian National University.

Professor Anderson has served as a member of a number of government bodies, including the Australian Science and Technology Council and the Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council. He was also a member of the Board of Cochlear Limited, the world's major supplier of cochlear implants from 1995 to 2005.

He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and an Honorary Fellow of the Institution of Engineers, Australia. In 1989, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society, London, and in 2002 a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Engineering.

Professor Anderson holds honorary doctorates of the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, and the Universities of Sydney, Melbourne, New South Wales and Newcastle. He was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in 1993.

Professor Anderson has an ongoing relationship with UTS, participating as a guest speaker at a number of UTS presentations including the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology “Dean’s Leadership in Innovation Series”. He is the inaugural Chair of the Faculty’s Research Advisory Board.

It is a great honour for the University of Technology, Sydney to award Professor Anderson an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Engineering (honoris causa), in recognition of his outstanding and distinguished research in Electrical and Systems Engineering and his outstanding contributions to the advancement of the global community.

Speech

Chancellor, Vice-Chancellor, Dean, staff of the University, distinguished guests, families and friends of graduates, and graduates.

The University is now 25 years old and rightly celebrating that fact, but I am happy to record a much longer association with some of its people. I was the graduate student supervisor of the Dean and one of his department heads, as well as of another more recently graduated PhD. I am proud and admiring of their achievements. I have long admired too the achievements of the Chancellor and was privileged to work with her over several years around 2000. It will be no surprise to you then when I say that I am not just profoundly honoured, but profoundly happy to be honoured by the university.

But I’m only one of many receiving a degree today. And I turn to congratulate the many graduates here. Everybody knows that obtaining a university degree usually requires many sacrifices by the student and often their family, not just of a financial nature, but also of time, and of forgone opportunities. To arrive at the end of the road is a time for congratulations and celebration, by the new graduate and also by all those who have supported her or him, especially within the family. And mixed with a just sense of achievement, there is often a keen sense of anticipation about the future.

And what will the future bring? If one is speaking of engineering and information technology, it is very hard to say, indeed, it is probably foolhardy to try to say. Many people have made the mistake of trying to forecast the technical future ten, twenty or thirty years down the track, and found that they got it famously wrong. I do not want to fall into that trap. While changes are evolutionary and sometime can be forecast, others can be sudden and disruptive, and are generally unpredictable.

I will share with you an early instance where I certainly fell into the trap. In my final undergraduate electrical engineering year, we had to write a simple computer program to add 12 and 4 to obtain 16. This involved typing some sort of mumbo jumbo into a teletypewriter, getting a paper tape, marching across campus to the building housing Sydney University’s one computer, passing the tape through a glass window to a gentleman wearing a white lab-coat, waiting while he did some magic and then gave us another tape back, walking back to the start point, and finally running the tape through the teletype to get the answer. The prediction I made, certainly to myself, was that this process was such a waste of time that probably computers had little future.

Since that time, we have experienced the third great technological revolution that mankind has seen. The IT revolution has been as transformational as the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution. Along with colour TV, smart phones, massively open on-line courses, and telemedecine have come a series of societal challenges, revolving round issues like privacy, cybercrime, high-frequency financial trading, or programs automating responses to nuclear attack.

The future may bring us 3D Skyping, firemen equipped with canisters of microairborne vehicles to search burning buildings, or even electronic caps that we can put on when going to bed so we can wake up knowing another language. One can but dream, and one cannot dream it all.

The lesson of contemplating the future is that you have a collection of skills and knowledge that are only suited to today’s problems, and some of tomorrow’s problems. Continual adaptation and refinement is needed as the years go on, if the toolkit is to stay technically relevant. Your toolkit of skills and knowledge is a depreciating asset that continually needs replenishment.

Given that you do have an asset, you can ask what the long-term returns might be, say in 30 or 40 years time, as you approach retirement.

Some of you will have done great service to the nation. Some of you may become extremely rich. Some of you may direct huge enterprises. However, some will have been ruled by their asset, and in its service have turned to insider trading, or suffered a string of broken relationships through inattention, or succumbed to substance abuse which began when seeking relief from work pressure.

But for the great majority in the middle, there are two things I would like to suggest.

Most of you will in the future have professional responsibility for and oversight of other people. It would be good if in 30 or 40 years or whenever you retire, you are able to say to yourself: “I treated other people well, and in fact I helped some of them live a fuller life.”

Most of you also will be in the situation where whatever you do has the possibility to make the world a slightly better place, through the improvement in some way to people’s lives, be it their health using new technologies, the consumer goods in their home, the roads they drive on, the physical environment, or whatever. It will be great if you can say at the end of your professional career, “Yes, I improved the world in which I lived.”

If you have treated people badly, and if the only part of the world that you have improved is your bank account, then underneath everything, I think you will probably feel a deep sense of disappointment. My final point is this. To the extent that you can shape your future, I do hope you make the right choices to shape it well.