The UWA System Health Lab (SHL) operated from 2015 to 2023. It's mission was to “to imagine a richer university experience for digitally savvy students” by “bringing a start-up mentality and technologically curious students to industry-motivated research projects." It was funded by BHP, a global resource company, through the BHP Fellowship for Remote Operations awarded to Professor Melinda Hodkiewicz for 5 years in 2015 and renewed for a further 3 years to 2023. The initial funding was associated with a major donation of ~$10M to the UWA EZone. The UWA EZONE complex has transformed the way the Engineering and Mathematical Sciences Schools educate students, undertake research and engage with the community. The work done in the SHL under the BHP Fellowship has supported this transformation by providing a supportive environment for engineering, computing and mathematics students to work on multi-disciplinary projects aimed at improving the maintenance of physical assets. The SHL has been a meeting place, leveraging the industry links of the Lab's leadership team, supporting current students meeting practicing engineers and engaging in industry workshops and conferences.
The SHL's overarching aim has been to assist young engineers and coders to gain competence and confidence that will enable them to transition smoothly into the workforce, research roles or start their own companies.
We have demonstrated a strong commitment to open source hardware and software, where possible, openly share data and models we create to encourage interaction. Code remains available on our GitHub https://github.com/uwasystemhealth and on https://github.com/nlp-tlp.
The hardware platforms we developed use low-cost interfaces, removing barriers to entry for researchers interested in data collection. Many of the projects involved rapid prototyping of sensing or test systems, data analysis and visualization.
Funding for the System Health Lab came from the $2M BHP Fellowship for Engineering for Remote Operations via BHP's Social Investment group. These funds were used to employ students as UWA Casual Staff, paying them for their work in the SHL as part of a novel work-integrated-learning approach. It also allowed for the purchase of equipment and parts and the development of web sites and other digital infrastructure. Videos were made of a number of projects and these are available on the SHL's YouTube site https://www.youtube.com/@systemhealthlabuwa9925
The SHL was led by Professor Melinda Hodkiewicz and Adjust Professor Dr. Ben Travaglione. Melinda was appointed the BHP Fellow for Engineering for Remote Operations in 2015. Prior to joining academia Melinda worked as an engineer in industry and uses this experience and her industry links to drive collaboration and innovation aimed at improving asset maintenance. Her interests span engineering, data analytics and data collection. Dr. Ben Travaglione is a Senior Research Scientist with the Defence Science and Technology Group and an Adjunct Professor at UWA. He leads the BlueBox project in the SHL and is the go-to person for our questions on DAQ (data acquisition), MEMS and coding for embedded systems. He is developing our capability to use open source collaboration tools and encouraging us to use Linux. He is a technical mentor to students and staff alike. Ben’s background includes a postdoctoral research fellowship in Quantum Information Systems at the University of Cambridge.
The SHL benefited from a number of people external to and internal to UWA who gave their time and experience to projects and to assist our students. Quenten Thomas is a software and mechatronics engineer with more than a decade of industry experience designing and building hardware, firmware and software. He is one of the founders of WearHawk – a start-up that is developing technology to monitor conveyor belts in the mining industry to predict and thereby prevent costly failures. Through the MO4U arrangement with UWA he works alongside, and collaborates with, the System Health Lab team and the Living Lab project. Dr.Jo Sikorska developed the SHL’s Prognostic Data Library project and worked for 18 months as a Research Fellow bringing a wealth of experience in data management for asset health prognostics to the SHL. Dr. Caitlin Woods has a Masters in Software Engineering and worked in the SHL during her PhD at UWA. Caitlin's PhD research combines techniques from Human-Computer Interaction, Organisational Psychology and Ontology Engineering to transform the way that maintenance procedures are created, managed and used in industry. Caitlin led ontology development work in the SHL. She is founder of Equanto, an ontology services group and works as an ontologist for Grundfos Pumps. Emily Low graduated with a Bachelor of Science (Hons) in Mathematics and Philosophy and along with Marcus Handley assisted with ontology projects. Emily now works for Social Ventures Australia in Melbourne. Marcus completed a BA in Computer Science at Cambridge University and now works at Jane Street in London.
Dr. Michael Stewart completed his PhD in computer science. His webdev skills were integral to development of SHL related websites including the PDL since 2015. Michael has led work on knowledge graph development in the SHL as part of his role as a Post-Doctoral Researcher with the Centre for Transforming Maintenance through Data Science. Dr. Tyler Bikaun has been active in co-supervising students on Data science and maintenance data related projects.
Associate Professor Tim French works in modal logic and has co-supervised most of the cognitive computing projects in the SHL. He provides ontology, reasoning, machine learning and much other advice and has worked on many theoretical and industry use case challenges. Tim has been a regular mentor in Unearthed Hackathon events. Associate Professor Wei Liu from the UWA School of Computer Science and Software Engineering collaborates with us on cognitive computing projects out of the SHL. Along with Tim she has cosupervised many of the SHL NLP projects and worked on industry use cases.
Associate Professor Adriano Polpo is a statistician who likes to develop new methods and study statistical theory underlying practical approaches. He has been mainly working with the SHL on reliability/survival analysis, regression models for counting data and Bayesian nonparametric methods. Dr. Débora Corrêa is a computer scientist working with machine learning, nonlinear time series analysis and complex networks. She has helped SHL students in applying these techniques to remote sensing and environmental data, streaming sensor data, and audio signals.
Professor Tim Sercombe made time to contribute his technical expertise as a materials engineer while being Dean and Head of School of Engineering at UWA to support a multi-year degradation project on UV testing of SLS vs conventional nylon. Associate Professor Adrian Keating provided assistance to many SHL student projects using COTS and MEMS sensors and in the analysis of these signals. Dr. Cristina Vulpe gave her experience in geotechnical monitoring to collaborate on student projects associated with remote sensing..
Given the number of software tool and digital infrastructure developed by the SHL team over the 8 years. A number of students are engaged post-2023 in managing and maintaining these artefacts and systems as well as those developed as part of the UWA NLP-TLP group. These students are listed under the 2024 Alumni cohort.