Vision
FLEET’s mid-term year: reflecting on achievements and looking forward to the future
Impact to date, and the way forward
2021 saw FLEET’s mid-term review by the ARC. This review serves as an important milestone in the life of a centre. It is an opportunity to take stock of the Centre’s accomplishments and to examine what is working well and what isn’t.
The review also serves as a pivot point to re-orient the Centre’s focus – from building capacity and ramping up the research, towards building a lasting legacy and a sustainable future for the Centre’s research program.
Reflecting on achievements
The 2021 mid-term review was a helpful prompt to reflect on the achievements of FLEET of which we are particularly proud.
Foremost is the building of a unique and powerful interdisciplinary network of researchers. FLEET started with a vision of integrating disparate scientific threads – topological states of matter, atomically-thin materials, cold atomic gases, ultra-fast laser science – into a coherent whole, tied together by the vision of using dissipationless conduction in novel quantum systems to reduce the energy used in computing.
Ensuring that this whole is greater than the sum of the parts has required an active effort to enable communication and understanding across disciplines and to foster a sense of investment in FLEET’s mission among our members.
The result has been a success. Cross-node publications grew from 3% in 2017 to 15% in 2021, and now most of FLEET’s publications (61%) are collaborative, involving multiple chief, associate and partner investigators and/or nodes.
FLEET has also more than doubled its links with aligned national and international research institutions, adding – we’ve added 25 new collaborating organisations, including 11 new Partner Investigators and 16 new research associate investigators. Anecdotally, we have formed many vibrant and lasting collaborations, enabling promising new research avenues we didn’t even dream of at the outset of the Centre.
FLEET’s unique interdisciplinary network facilitates high-impact research. FLEET set a goal of 20% of our research papers being published in journals with high impact (impact factor greater than 7), and in the first five years an astounding 55% of papers were in high-impact journals. FLEET excellence is recognised internationally; members were invited to present their research at international conferences 146 times from 2017 to 2021, meeting our aspirational KPI of 148 even though conference opportunities were significantly impacted by the pandemic.
innovation
It is not enough for Centres of Excellence just to do excellent research; we have a unique opportunity and duty to change the culture in which research is done. FLEET set out to create a more diverse and inclusive working environment in STEM. FLEET pioneered family-friendly workshops, which was a bold experiment at the start but has turned out to be a resounding success and has provided an exemplary model for research institutions worldwide. Uptake by FLEET members bringing their families to workshops has been very high, creating a more welcoming and inclusive environment for everyone. Countless times, international to visitors to FLEET’s workshops have commented that they were absolutely amazed that this was possible and thrilled by the success!
FLEET hypothesised that women in STEM might be underserved by narrowly focused recruitment searches, and developed the Women in FLEET Fellowship program in response. By recruiting broadly across all areas of FLEET, the WIF program received 68 applications from talented women scientists, compared with a total of 28 applications from women received in 15 previous targeted searches. The Australia Research Council (ARC) was briefed on the successful strategy, and FLEET has this year expanded the program to target diverse groups as well as women.
FLEET is unique among Centres of Excellence in asking all of its members to contribute 20 hours of outreach a year. Not surprisingly, this has made FLEET an outreach powerhouse (FLEET members have reached 900 teachers, more than 21,000 students and over 33,000 public members). But we also found an added benefit from this innovation: our members report that they value the experience they have gained in science communications, and their CVs are stronger as a result.
Successful mid-term review
FLEET’s mid-term review was conducted in May 2021 with a panel appointed by the ARC interviewing people from all levels of FLEET’s membership over two days. Our members represented FLEET superbly, and the panel found FLEET was performing to an excellent standard against most of the review criteria. The comments of the review panel were constructive in nature and focused on enabling FLEET to make the most of the excellent capacity it has built to leave a lasting legacy of achievement, and a sustainable future for its research mission.
FLEET’s legacy
In response to the mid-term review, along with feedback from FLEET’s advisory committees, FLEET is reorienting its strategic plan to focus on the legacy of the Centre.
A major part of this new strategy will be to direct half a million dollars in strategic funding to build a new Translation Program modelled on the successful program of the Engineered Quantum Systems (EQuS) Centre of Excellence. The program will allow higher degree by research (HDR) students, postdocs and investigators to pursue translational impacts of their FLEET research.
FLEET will also re-focus its outreach and communications activities to better measure the impact of our outreach programs on the public, and to better engage industry and policymakers to build a sustainable future for FLEET research.
This is an exciting period in the life of our Centre, when we can take stock of the excellent research network and capacity we have built and dream big about how to use that capacity to have the greatest impact on the future.
FLEET’s legacy will be:
- Increased understanding of quantum materials and electronic devices, and new concepts for low-energy electronics at the frontier of science
- The next generation of science leaders, trained in the electronics of tomorrow
- A capacity for quantum materials and electronic devices research in Australia
- Strong links to international excellence, and ongoing partnerships between industry, academia and government, ensuring that FLEET science has impact
- Translation of FLEET science to industry
- Increased diversity in STEM and models for more inclusive research collaboration
- Recognition of the grand challenge of sustainable computing by government and society.
FLEET's grand challenge
FLEET’s mission is to enable continuing growth of computing without that growth being throttled by the availability and costs of energy. We will do this by developing a new transistor that can switch at lower energy.
CHALLENGE: A sustainable future for computing
Computing provides overwhelming benefits to the community and economy. FLEET’s mission is to enable continuing growth of computing without that growth being ‘throttled’ by the availability and costs of energy.
FLEET addresses a grand challenge: reducing the energy used in information and communication technology (ICT), which already accounts for about 8% of global electricity consumption and is doubling every decade.
The current, silicon-based technology (CMOS) is 40 years old and reaching the limits of its efficiency.
Fundamental physics indicates that computing efficiency could still be thousands of times better, which inspires us to search for a replacement technology.
Using computers consumes energy. Lots of energy.
Computers work by activating microscopic switches called transistors – a couple of billion of them are packed into each small computer chip.
And each time one of those transistors switches, a tiny amount of energy is burnt.
Consider the billions of transistors in each small computer chip, each switching billions of times a second, and multiply that by hundreds of servers in hundreds of thousands of factory-sized data centres.
For many years, the growing energy demands of computing were kept in check by ever more efficient, and ever more compact computer chips – a trend related to Moore’s Law, which observed that the size of transistors halved around every two years.
But Moore’s Law is already winding down, and will probably be declared dead in the next decade. There are limited future efficiencies to be found in present technology.
The January 2021 Decadal plan for semiconductors identifies ever rising energy demands for computing vs. global energy production as a ‘seismic shift’ that is creating new risk, predicts that global computing capacity will be strongly limited by energy in 1-2 decades. The Plan states that new computing paradigms offer opportunities with dramatically improved energy efficiency.