origins

Origins

AVF Research started in the late 1980s with a mandate to develop a portfolio of intellectual property  created earlier in Australian universities.  That work was supported by a series of Australian Research Council grants.

Applications domains targeted in originating projects were:

• astronomical imaging;
• biomedical imaging (MRI imaging, quantum radiology);
• geosensing and geoinformatics.

Our portfolio is concentrated around four methods for working with sparsely sampled sensor data:

• generalised cross-validation;
• Marquardt-Levenberg regularisation;
• Mercer kernel regularisation;
• Projection onto Convex Sets (PoCS).

Our principal institutional stakeholder is Macquarie University in Sydney.  Our 1980s projects in geoinformatics also received financial and in-kind support from BHP.   Several advanced geosensing services were spun off by BHP from the research collaboration.

Follow-up investment at the end of the 1980s diversified into research and policy development in augmented intelligence.  The work was based on our prior experience with multichannel sensor fusion.  Some of the research explored early-stage GPGPU technologies.  Our work in that area successfully anticipated a number of key software design features, features that later became central to GPGPU technologies as they matured.