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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-02-18 Daily Xml
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Lot Fourteen

Mr PATTERSON (Morphett) (14:11): My question is to the Premier. Can the Premier update the house on how new developments at Lot Fourteen are supporting South Australia's growth?

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL (Dunstan—Premier) (14:11): I thank the member for Morphett for his excellent question. He is very concerned about the opportunities that are being presented down at Lot Fourteen. You will recall, sir, that Lot Fourteen was the original—

Mr Boyer interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Member for Wright!

The Hon. S.S. MARSHALL: —name given to the space which has been, for much of the last 150 years, occupied by the former Royal Adelaide Hospital, and our colleagues on the opposite side of the chamber decided to move the Royal Adelaide Hospital. I do note that that was a decision made in 2007, and by the time they actually decided to move it in 2017 they still didn't have any plan whatsoever for Lot Fourteen. I am very proud to make it very clear that it is an exciting precinct. I think it is possibly the most exciting urban development precinct in the entire country.

Yesterday, I was down at Lot Fourteen at the opening of the new premises for the Australian Institute for Machine Learning. At this point, I would like to offer some congratulations to the former government because they were aware of the establishment of the Australian Institute for Machine Learning, and in fact they assisted with the establishment of the Australian Institute for Machine Learning, and of course their operations have now been relocated to Lot Fourteen—and don't they look fantastic!

Machine learning is an area of science that is being massively, massively invested into at the moment—not millions of dollars per year, not tens of millions of dollars per year, not billions, but tens of billions of dollars per year are going into this area. South Australia is right at the epicentre of development, especially around the area of vision systems, which is an important subset of machine learning.

The centre is headed up by Professor Anton van den Hengel, who himself is a graduate of the University of Adelaide. In fact, he studied and completed his PhD under the provost there, Professor Mike Brooks, so you see there is a long-term commitment to excellence in this area of machine learning, and of course this is one of the great sectors that is going to create jobs into the future.

Currently, there are 125 to 130 researchers on that site. This is significant—125 to 130. It is the largest institute of its type in the country. I was very interested earlier this year when I visited Washington and I met with Dan Rice, who is the global VP for Lockheed Martin, and also his boss, Keoki Jackson. They spoke about the incredible excellence that we have here in South Australia. In fact, they said that it was ranked amongst the top universities in the world for this type of research.

It is, of course, keeping many young researchers here in South Australia. Yesterday, I offered my grateful thanks to those researchers at the opening of the new premises of the Australian Institute for Machine Learning. These are researchers who could get jobs in any other city in this country, in any other city in our region and, quite frankly, in any other city globally because of their expertise, but they choose to stay here because they know that they are doing something very special.

We are also attracting some of the top academics in this area to South Australia. I was very pleased that Mark Jenkinson from the University of Oxford is now part of the faculty here in Adelaide. Very soon, Professor Simon Lucey from Carnegie Mellon will be taking up a role at the Australian Institute for Machine Learning.

If you haven't been down to Lot Fourteen recently, you should. It is an incredible precinct which not only has the Australian Institute for Machine Learning but the Space Agency, the SmartSat CRC and MIT with their Living Lab, and the Australian cyber collaboration centre will open later this year. It's time to get excited about the future industries and the future jobs that will emanate from it.

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