In what I see as clearly good news for both Tasmania and CSIRO, the CSIRO ICT Centre recently announced its intention to open a new ICT Lab in Tasmania, with the support of the federal and Tasmanian state governments. It is hoped that the new Lab will be up and running “in the next few months”. This is of course a much happier counter point to the closing of our Melbourne Lab, which was decided last year and will be finalised early in 2006.

You can read more about the Tasmanian Lab in the CSIRO Press Release, but the gist of it is $15 million of funding from the governments, to be matched by $15 million of CSIRO money over 5 years to establish a Tasmanian research centre. It has been reported that this will result in 40 new jobs, including 10 PhD positions.

Although not yet decided, some of the research areas that have been suggested as focus areas for the new lab include sensor networks for marine applications and remote healthcare for aging populations, both areas in which CSIRO has significant experience, expertise and intellectual property.

The eHealth area seems particularly interesting to me, given Tasmania’s potential as a representative but manageable environment for running eHealth trials of research applications. I’m certainly not the first to claim that, in many ways, Tasmania can be seen as small scale model of Australia, with relatively low overall population density, higher density clusters of people in metropolitan and regional centres, and the familiar challenge of small numbers of people living in quite isolated and remote areas. It seems clear to me that many of the problems that must be explored and addressed in making remote healthcare work in Tasmania would reflect that challenges that must be addressed across Australia and elsewhere in the world.

What do you think – could Tasmania be a great application testbed, or am I being too idealistic?

Some of you who read my blog may know of my long-standing interest in the BeBox, a dual-processor PowerPC computer built by a now-defunct company called Be Inc in the early to mid 1990s. A smaller number of you may even know of my site, The BeBox Zone, that is dedicated to documenting everything about the BeBox and the BeOS, and providing a place for the still active BeBox community to gather and converse.

Recently, Cale Lewis (another BeBox community member) and I sat down and came up with a bunch of unanswered questions about the development of the BeBox and various BeBox prototypes that were built along the way. Given the nature of our questions, we headed straight to the source – Mr BeBox himself, Joseph Palmer – to seek some answers. Joe was the director of hardware at Be Inc, and more specifically, was the designer and creator of the BeBox machine. If any of you are interested in hardware development, or even just want to read some snippets of an interesting story of technology development, head on over and checkout the result of our interview with Joseph Palmer.