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Australian Inventor of Wireless Computing receives Prime Minister’s Science Prize
Inside almost every Wi-Fi device in the world is a little bit of the Australian sky: patented technology that makes Wi-Fi fast and reliable. This invention was recognised last week with the Australian Prime Minister’s 2009 Prize for Science.
On Wednesday 28 October the Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, presented the $300,000 Prize for Science to the lead inventor: astronomer and engineer Dr John O'Sullivan who went looking for exploding black holes and ended up inventing the core technology that made fast Wi-Fi possible.
It is one of the most significant discoveries in the history of Australian science and it is a classic example of how blue sky research can have unexpected outcomes. The story has been largely untold until last week, due to a long and complex commercialisation process.
While looking for exploding black holes Dr O'Sullivan created a technology that cleaned up intergalactic radio waves. In 1992, he and his colleagues at Australia’s national research organisation, the Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organisation (CSIRO), realised that the same technology was the key to fast reliable wireless networking in the office and home.
Their patented invention is now built into international standards and into computers, printers, smart phones and other devices used by hundreds of millions of people every day.
CSIRO has announced that $150 million from royalties earned by the invention will fund future blue sky research through the establishment of an endowment fund.
Professor O'Sullivan is now working on the design of the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder telescope - a step towards the giant Square Kilometre Array (SKA) which will be able to look back 13 billion years, almost to the Big Bang.
BACKGROUND
John O’Sullivan or how astronomy freed the computer from its chains
Nearly a billion people use Dr John O’Sullivan’s invention every day, when using a Wi-Fi network—at home, in the office or at the airport—people are using patented technology born of the work of Dr O’Sullivan and CSIRO colleagues. They created a technology that made the wireless LAN fast and robust. And their solution came from Dr O’Sullivan’s efforts to hear the faint radio whispers of exploding black holes.
“John is unusual in that he likes to work things out from first principles,” says CSIRO fellow and former Australia Telescope director, Ron Ekers. “He’s not comfortable with just reading answers to problems in books. He has the engineer’s push to build things and make things work, but he also thinks like a physicist about the basic properties of matter and electromagnetic radiation. That’s a really rare and wonderful combination.”
Amongst Dr O’Sullivan’s many research interests was the search for radio waves from exploding black holes—predicted in 1974 by Stephen Hawking. He didn’t find them, but the techniques he and his collaborators developed to clean up intergalactic radio wave distortion eventually found expression as the technology in the wireless LAN.
By 1990 CSIRO was looking for ways to commercialise its capability in radio physics. “We realised that our skills with antennas, signal processing, and radio design might allow us to cut the network cable that linked every office computer,” Dr O’Sullivan said. “From the beginning we set out to match the speed of the best wired networks of the time.”
But reflections got in the way. In the confines of buildings and rooms, radio waves bounce off many surfaces, so that a transmission arrives at a receiver followed by a series of echoes. This leads to a fuzzy, ambiguous signal, akin to ‘ghosting’ on a television. Using the same techniques he’d applied to astronomy, Dr O’Sullivan and his team realised they could send the information over many different frequencies and recombine the signal at the receiver.
Within a year, in 1992, CSIRO applied for an Australian patent and the long process of prototyping, trialling, and then commercialising and defending the technology and the patent, began. The US patent came in 1996. The solution was so successful, that IEEE, the global standards body, wrote it into one of its standards for wireless networking, 802.11a. It is now part of two subsequent standards, 802.11g and n. But it took until April 2009 to agree on licensing terms with the makers of wireless computers.
Meanwhile the wireless LAN technology continues to change the world. It’s built into the next generation of mobile phones and is set to transform how we interact with our cars and homes.
Prime Minister’s website: http://www.pm.gov.au/node/6284
CSIRO website: http://www.csiro.au
Other links: http://www.scienceinpublic.com/blog/prime-ministers-prize/2009-science