Industry connected

In a crowded classroom, students sit huddled in groups, thinking, reading and formulating in absolute silence. Suddenly, an exultant cry rings out. One of the teams has just completed a group problem-solving activity in complete silence. 

The winning team? The first to correctly assemble a jumble of puzzle pieces. With no instructions but the rule of silence, the students had to work out what was required of them as individuals and team members.

The participants are ‘maths and stats’ research students from the five Australian Technology Network (ATN) universities: Curtin University, University of South Australia, RMIT University, Queensland University of Technology and UTS. They make up a select cohort learning the skills to tackle industry research problems at the ATN Industry Doctoral Training Centre in Mathematics and Statistics (IDTC). 

The silent problem-solving task is one of the activities designed to teach ‘soft skills’ at the IDTC. 

“Students take part in researcher development courses that cover topics such as project management, group dynamics, communication skills, planning and networking – important professional skills that will enable them to better undertake research in an industry context,” says IDTC Centre Director Professor Murray Cameron. 

Professor Murray Cameron and Professor Nicky Solomon. Photographer: Joanne Saad.

Cameron says maths is crucial to industrial and service processes across business, industry and government sectors. 

“Something as simple as booking a taxi, through to managing a financial database or finding ways to optimise a transport network – almost any large, complex enterprise has an optimisation problem sitting underneath it.”

The key concept of the centre is that each student’s research project comes from industry. The participating industry partner gains from the research undertaken by the PhD student, and the student connects with industry to work on real-life problems with real-world outcomes. 

Importantly, students develop research skills to equip them for careers in industry as well as academia.

According to Dean of the Graduate Research School Professor Nicky Solomon, “These students gain an Australia-wide network of fellow students, working in different teams, and across different projects. For example, you might have a statistician working in health who is suddenly exposed to some of the mathematics that occurs in finance. 

“As the students work together, they learn about the range and applications of their research, which can be very stimulating.”

PhD candidate Joey Fung is halfway through his IDTC project and could not agree more. Working with CSIRO, Fung is analysing a challenging supply chain optimisation problem.

“Supply chains of mineral resources are very significant to Australia and the world – for example, in 2012, 41 per cent of the world’s electricity was generated with coal. 

“In a mining supply chain, minerals can be transported from more than 30 mines via a track network of several hundred kilometres, using more than 50 trains. This generates a host of problems, one of them being the most cost-effective infrastructure expansion to meet future demand.

“My research aims to produce insights into such infrastructure decision-making problems,” says Fung.

“The IDTC has provided me the exciting opportunity not only to work with CSIRO, a world leader in industry-related research, but also to apply my mathematical skills to an industry problem using real-world data.”