In another piece of NICTA news, on Thursday Queensland Premier Anna Bligh announced that the state government will invest $10.05 million in NICTA’s Queensland Research Laboratory over the next four years. Here’s an interesting tidbit from the Australian IT news article:

Technologies developed by NICTA’s Queensland facility are widely used by the state government. One example is software to authenticate and protect digital evidence currently deployed by the state’s police force.

To be honest, “widely used” might be a bit of a stretch at this point, but it’s true that the state’s police force are using the mentioned piece of software and they’re very keen on it. I’d be willing to bet that the next four years of the lab will be pretty successful in terms of spin-outs, licenses and other outcomes.

NICTA has a very different atmosphere to DSTC (which I can’t imagine will ever be surpassed in my career in terms of outright coolness) and Sun Labs, two places I’ve worked before and which I give credit to for inspiring me along the path to a career in research, so it took a while to get used to. I guess it’s still trying to find its own culture, really. The Queensland lab may be helped on in that respect by the cozy confines of our new quarters at UQ (at the very least, we’ll all get to know each other very well!). NICTA as a whole has set pretty high standards for itself, particularly in terms of research project approvals, and to its credit, recent evidence tells me that it’s going to do its best to keep to those standards. I hope it does.