AUT's role in the world's biggest science project won a highly commended prize at the NZ Innovation Awards.
AUT leads New Zealand's role in the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) project which will see thousands of dishes across Australia and South Africa act as two giant radio telescopes.
The telescopes, which will be fully operational by 2030, will help create data images allowing scientists to see back to the beginning of the universe for the first time.
AUT and its partners are helping to design the correlator, which houses the high-speed computers. It is the brain of the operation and brings all the data together, correlating it, so it appears to have come from just one telescope – making it easier for scientists to identify important data. AUT is using its radio telescope at Warkworth to help model the demands of the SKA project.
The project won a highly commended in the Research Excellence category at the NZ Innovation Awards in October 2016.
AUT Colab Master of Creative Technologies Alejandro Davila, was also a finalist in the Young New Zealand Innovator category. Davila has created a virtual reality story-telling experience, called Green Fairy, a first in the Southern Hemisphere.
Te Ipukarea's Te Aka Dictionary & Te Reo Māori app & Tamata Toiere e-repository of waiata and haka, which AUT staff worked on, was also nominated for the Innovation in Media, Mobile and Entertainment category.
The telescopes, which will be fully operational by 2030, will help to create data images allowing scientists for the first time to see back to the beginning of the universe.
In 2015, AUT Professor of Biotech Innovation and Kode Biotech CEO Steve Henry was named Supreme NZ Innovator and winner of the Innovation in Health and Science category.