Science at the Shine Dome 2010
New Fellows Seminar
Wednesday 5 May
Dr John O’Sullivan FAA
Australia Telescope National Facility, CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science
John O’Sullivan has had an extensive career in wireless and radiophysics in both research and commercial contexts. He is the winner of the 2009 Australian Prime Minister’s Prize for Science, the 2009 CSIRO Chairman's Medal and the 1992 CSIRO Medal. He obtained his PhD at Sydney University before spending the first nine years of his career working at the Netherlands Foundation of Astronomy, ultimately as head of the engineering group. He worked primarily on digital receivers and processing for the Westerbork radio telescope but was involved in a range of astronomical research projects, including fast time event searches initially for exploding black holes.
At CSIRO John led extensive research projects in signal processing and wireless communications which, among other outcomes, led to key technologies underpinning the now ubiquitous Wi-Fi wireless networking and prior to that an integrated circuit to perform fast Fourier transform processing. He left CSIRO to become director of technology at News Ltd, and vice president of technology (Asia Pacific) of News Corporation, as a member of a global strategic technology group concerned with satellite TV, digital terrestrial TV and internet technologies.
John then joined Radiata Communications as chief technology officer and vice president of systems and was part of the Australian team which developed the first chipset to meet the 802.11a wireless networking standards. After the acquisition of Radiata by Cisco, he managed the development of subsequent chipsets, which are incorporated in wireless networking infrastructure installed worldwide. Most recently, he has returned to technology research for radio astronomy and is working with CSIRO on the Australian Pathfinder Project for the international Square Kilometre Array.
From astronomy to wireless networks and back again
I will give a brief outline of the path from pure research in radio astronomy to very successful commercial outcomes in a startup company and royalty returns for the invention underpinning the now ubiquitous Wi-Fi wireless networking. Challenging astronomical observations of exploding mini-black holes and methods for mitigating the effect of atmospheric ‘seeing’ in both optical and radio telescopes, amongst other drivers from astronomy, led to the development of a special processing chip with wide applications. This turned out to also be an important step in a solution to the problem of transmitting wireless data indoors at high data rates, which has enabled Wi-Fi. A small CSIRO team was responsible for this invention.
