Professor Hugh Durrant-Whyte

New South Wales Chief Scientist & Engineer, New South Wales Department of Industry
Ceremony: 6 May 2019, 5:30pm - Faculty of Science

Speech

Well, it’s a really great pleasure to be here. There’s a special place in my heart for UTS. I have been in and out of its doors on many, many occasions over the past 25 years, so it’s wonderful to be here this evening.

I’d like to start by acknowledging the Pro Chancellor, the Provost, the Dean of the Faculty – and congratulating her for all those pronunciations she had to go through, the presiding Director, members of the University Executive, members of the Council and Academic Board, ladies and gentlemen, but most importantly are the graduates today. I’m very, very pleased to be here at your graduation.

I would like to also briefly acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which UTS campus stands today, the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, and pay my respects to their elders past and present.

So, in September last year, I became New South Wales Chief Scientist and Engineer, and I took over from Professor Mary O’Kane. Mary had been in the role for 10 years and had done, in my view, more than anyone else to promote science and engineering in New South Wales and she has really left a lasting legacy of strong government collaboration with science and technology in this state. And she’s left me some very big shoes to fill.

I thought I’d give you a little bit of background that I might hope acts as some advice for your own careers. I‘ve been very fortunate in having a long and very varied career. I actually trained first as a nuclear engineer and I worked in industry designing and building nuclear propulsion systems for submarines. I decided there wasn’t really a future, frankly, in nuclear engineering, so I subsequently went to the US where I was one of the very first PhD students in robotics and AI at a time when many had not even heard of these disciplines.

And I’ve had now a long career building very large-scale robotics – field robotics – with applications in areas including cargo handling, mining and agriculture. You can in fact see some of my robots every day if you go down to Port Botany; the automated container terminals there are part of what we did.

I’ve witnessed and been part of the growth of an industry, tremendously exciting, in Australia. Australia now leads the world in many of the areas of robotics and autonomous systems and especially in their application, and in this I’m very pleased to say that I’ve collaborated extensively with UTS where I have many valued, lifelong colleagues who contributed very much to a lot of these different projects.

And as you heard, most recently, I spent two years in the United Kingdom as Chief Scientist for the Ministry of Defence. This was a very, very challenging role in a very challenging time for the UK. With oversight of over 12,000 scientists and engineers, I was in a privileged position to nudge defence towards a new future of deterrence, based largely on emerging information technologies, sensing, robotics, autonomous systems, machine learning and AI.

So, if there is only one take-home message that I could give you as new graduates, it would be this: that you are only just at the start of a lifelong education. Every new job or switch in career is a new reason to learn new skills and to develop new knowledge. Life is truly a rich tapestry of experience and opportunities that you should always be striving to sample.

In moving from the UK back to New South Wales and my new role, I often like to joke that I’ve now swapped my past interests in submarines and missiles for those in koalas and road traffic. Of course, there is much more to being a chief scientist in New South Wales than that.

So, very broadly, my role as Chief Scientist here is to develop and apply science and technology to improve the economic, environmental and social wellbeing of the citizens of NSW. And we sort of do this through three activities. One is that we are the independent advice-givers to government. We chair committees, we provide independent reviews, we worry about why fish are dying in the Murray-Darling, why pollution contaminates farms and things like that, and we are very much the evidence-based part of policy in government.

The second thing we do is we try and attract and support research, particularly at universities, through special schemes, in particular, for example, funding recently the new Quantum Academy to make sure New South Wales is at the forefront of science and technology, not just in Australia but globally.

And then the final thing we really do is promote and support science and science literacy. In truth, I spend a lot of my time trying to educate ministers about the value of science and what it could deliver for the state, but we also support schools; we have science breakfasts and premier’s awards for science that really try to publicise the continuing importance of science to the economy of NSW.

From my previous roles, I’ve also brought a much stronger focus on science and technology delivering prosperity outcomes for the state. That is, to see the translation of research into outcomes that deliver economic and social benefit. This specifically includes improved pathways for translating research and skills that come from universities into development into commercialisation and into outcomes.

And this prosperity agenda in New South Wales means a number of different things. It means trying to translate what is your good science, what you see, all these great things that are happening into universities, into new companies, into new opportunities for what we could be doing in this state, to increase collaboration between academia and industry, to improve pathways for commercialisation, to better use academic expertise to solve problems that face industry and government. And most important for you, to deliver the skills in science and technology that will go on to build industry – existing industry and new industries – and to create business opportunities. And I encourage all of you to think in your minds how you might contribute to that.

This is a very good point to acknowledge the strong relationship that exists between UTS and the Office of Chief Scientist and Engineer, driven in very large measure by our mutual recognition of the importance of engaging universities in this prosperity agenda. In my view, UTS is now leading the way in delivering the prosperity agenda, both in terms of commercialisation of research and in terms of the skills and capacity of its graduates. UTS has built a collaborative and cooperative environment for researchers, students and business to engage with business and industry.

I might mention briefly the new UTS Botany labs that I had the pleasure of opening at the end of last year and the ProtoSpace facility in the basement of Building 11, both designed to be co-working spaces where researchers, students and industry can collaborate together to deliver these prosperity outcomes.

I should also mention that my office is supporting and collaborating with UTS in a number of exciting new initiatives, including the Defence Innovation Network and the Sydney Quantum Academy, initiatives that are creating both great technology but also economic outcomes for NSW.

However, I would now like to turn to the main event of the day – you. You are a most fortunate and capable group of individuals. Just last month, the latest Times Higher Education World University Rankings was released. UTS has not only moved up but it is now in the top 200 in the world of universities. This is remarkable for such a young university, which is also ranked as Australia’s top young university and number 10 young university in the world. More than this is the growing reputation UTS has for innovation and the industry-ready skills of its graduates – all of you here today.

To those graduating today as a UTS graduate, you are singularly well equipped to tackle problems across the professions and in the commercial, industrial, community and public sectors. You are exceptionally well equipped to succeed in work in Australia and globally. Through receiving your education from UTS, you have developed a set of skills that will help you adapt to new opportunities and jobs which have not yet emerged.

These skills include the ability to learn, to communicate, to interact with technology, to analyse complex situations through the lens of various disciplines, to pose problems and to know how to go about solving these problems. You’ll be able to contribute to knowledge and skills in a way that can make a real difference.

UTS is well known for its collaborative nature, utilising skills and capabilities across all these modern, multiple disciplines and sectors. Getting a degree involves hard work, dedication and skill, and tolerance and support from your friends and loved ones. You clearly have what it takes. I congratulate all of you and wish you the very best for a satisfying and rewarding future. A world of opportunities now awaits you.

Thank you.

About the Speaker

Professor Durrant-Whyte is a world-renowned robotics expert and the New South Wales Chief Scientist and Engineer. In his role, Professor Durrant-Whyte directs New South Wales in the continuing development of new applications in robotics and artificial intelligence.

Professor Durrant-Whyte was recently Director of the Centre for Translational Data Science at the University of Sydney, and formerly served as Chief Scientific Adviser for the United Kingdom Ministry of Defence. He has also previously served as Chair of the New South Wales Government’s Innovation and Productivity Council, and was head of National Information and Communications Technology Australia, now Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation’s (CSIRO) Data61.

Professor Durrant-Whyte has won numerous awards for his work including being named the 2010 NSW Scientist of the Year.

He is an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Engineers Australia, and a fellow of the Royal Society of London, the Australian Academy of Science, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, and the Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering.

Professor Durrant-Whyte graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering from the University of London and has a Doctor of Philosophy in Materials Science and Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.