CSIRO Scientist Contributes e-Health Voice to Parliamentary
Forum

29 March 2007
Brisbane, Australia

On the 27th and 28th of March 2007, CSIRO scientist Dr Iain McCowan attended the 2007 session of Science Meets Parliament (SmP) which saw over 160 leading scientists from around Australia come together for a series of face-to-face meetings and forums with Parliamentarians in Canberra. SmP 2007 focused substantially on Australia’s environmental challenges but gave special attention to the research, prevention and management of chronic diseases, and health and the ageing population.

Dr McCowan is a project leader with the e-Health Research Centre, a leading national research facility in ICT for healthcare innovations. A Brisbane-based joint venture between CSIRO and the Queensland Government, the e-Health Research Centre’s research program aims to improve the quality and safety of healthcare for individuals and communities through an ICT research program focused on applied outcomes and active adoption by the health system.

SmP 2007 involved a range of briefing sessions including an overview by Commissioner Mike Woods of the key Productivity Commission research report, Public Support for Science and Innovation. In addition to highlighting the widespread and important economic, social and environmental benefits generated by Australia's $6 billion public funding support of science and innovation, the report draws attention to the significant benefits generated by collaboration between business and public sector research agencies.

Other briefings were provided by Prof Peter Schofield, CEO Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute, and Dr Jim Peacock, Australia's Chief Scientist.

On 27 March Dr McCowan and other scientists met with The Hon. Bronwyn Bishop MP. Their discussion, influenced by the Public Support for Science and Innovation report, included the need for increased explorative and innovative ’blue sky’ research.

The following day, Dr McCowan and two other scientists discussed Australia’s science and innovation capacity including improving maths and science education, and the internationalisation of science, with Senator Natasha Stott Despoja.

About Dr Iain McCowan

Dr Iain McCowan received the B.Eng. and B.InfoTech. from the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Brisbane, in 1996. From 1998 to 2001, Dr McCowan completed his PhD in Robust Speech Recognition using Microphone Arrays at QUT, including a period as a researcher at France Telecom R&D. He joined the IDIAP Research Institute, Switzerland, in April 2001, as a Research Scientist, progressing to the post of Senior Researcher in 2003. While at IDIAP, he worked on a number of applied research projects in the areas of automatic speech recognition, content-based multimedia retrieval, multimodal event recognition and modeling of human interactions, in collaboration with a variety of academic and industrial partner sites.

From January 2004, Dr McCowan was Scientific Coordinator of AMI (Augmented Multi-party Interaction), an Integrated Project under the EU’s Framework Programme, jointly managed by IDIAP and the University of Edinburgh. He joined the e-Health Research Centre in May 2005 as a Research Scientist in the area of multimedia content analysis.

About the e-Health Research Centre

Established in 2003, the e-Health Research Centre is a leading national research facility in ICT for healthcare innovations. A joint venture between CSIRO and the Queensland Government, the e-Health Research Centre's Research Program aims to improve the quality and safety of healthcare for individuals and communities through an ICT research program focused on applied outcomes and active adoption by the health system.