2007 Media Releases
Tuesday 4 December, 2007
La Trobe University and Aadyana Holdings Joint Venture To Give Intelligent Machines a New Dimension
Long suffering from perceptions that they may be fast and smart but they’ll never compensate for lack of consciousness, intelligent machines are about to get a shot in the arm from science that will help bridge that deficit.
Scientists in Melbourne, India, Singapore and Japan will join forces in a privately-funded joint venture to develop emotionally intelligent Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) that can interact with humans in an emotionally intelligent manner across diverse sets of applications.
Business management and IT specialists at Melbourne’s La Trobe University, and information technology specialists in Singapore-based Aadyana Holdings Pte. Ltd. are jointly developing emotionally intelligent systems which will vastly improve recruitment and benchmarking decisions in HR and HR- based applications in various industry sectors, patient assessment in pre and post-operative health care, and decision-making in managing critical events, security, biometrics and law enforcement.
The University has filed to patent its core technology as a “Method and System for Monitoring Emotional State Changes.” It is envisaged the joint venture will also incorporate and embed technologies developed and proven in the market by industry partners into human-centred systems and business intelligence applications developed at La Trobe University over the past 18 years.
Chief Inventor Associate Professor Rajiv Khosla says the emotionally intelligent recruitment and benchmarking system can generate “organisation-based benchmarks and profiles to determine emotionally and culturally fit employees.”
The University - through the School of Business in its Faculty of Law and Management - and Singapore-based company Aadyana Holdings Pte Ltd, will launch the joint venture company Human Mind Innovations Pty Ltd to research, develop and license their technology globally.
The company also aims to develop a Research Centre of Excellence and to promote research and training in emotionally intelligent and human -centred systems and technologies.
The partners intend their joint venture will initiate, nurture and develop strategic alliances with industry partners and research institutions in Australia, Singapore, India, Japan and USA.
The partners will sign a Memorandum of Understanding and launch the joint venture at The Conference Centre, 2 Research Avenue, La Trobe University Research and Development Park, at 11.30 a.m. on Thursday 6 December.
Contact: Dr Rajiv Khosla, Associate Professor Information Systems, Department of Management & Marketing, School of Business, La Trobe University. T: +61 3 9479 3064 E: r.khosla@latrobe.edu.au