Optimism and Agency in Times of Change

Associate Professor Susan Hansen

The most unusual title for a course I have come across recently is "Optimism and Agency in Times of Change" (SCNC220), offered by the Fenner School of Environment and Society, which is now part of the College of Systems & Society at the Australian National University.  Perhaps an antidote to the gloom and doom induced by social and old fashoned media. The learn about how changes can be made, to improve the world. 

I was walking down the corridor & noticed the neatest row of color matched posit notes on an office wall. This was Associate Professor Susan Hansen's plan for the running of the optimism course. 

Humanitarian Innovation Hackerthon for the Pacific

Greetings from the Knowledge Hub at University of Sydney, where I am helping shortlist entrants in the Humanitarian Innovation Hackerthon. Entries are focused on the challenge of helping with disasters in Pacific countries. The challenge is to come up with something affordable, which helps people, without doing things to them. The Knowledge Hub is similar to ANU's Hive.

Agentic Coding Studio

Charles Martin and Ben Swift are offering the course "Agentic Coding Studio" this semester at Australian National University, School of Computing. The idea is to teach professionals how to use AI tools to systematically write computer code. 

Building the Decentralised Web in Canberra

Greetings from the start of Solid 2026 Hackathon: Building the Decentralised Web in Canberra, at the Australian National University. Solid is a standard from the W3C, the people who look after the web. It allows individuals to decide who has access to their data. Solid uses  Personal Online Data Stores (PODS) which hold user data & they can choose who can read it. The problem, as I see it, is what would motivate for-profit companies and government agencies, to use the Solid standard, when their business is based on appropriating user data. Perhaps some of the teams today can come up with some business models to make Solid profitable.

Telstra Mobile Network Failure

Faults reported to DownDetector, on 8 July 2026.

Telstra's mobile phone network failed just before 4 am today. The Australian Science Media Centre (AusSMC) asked for expert comment, so I wrote a couple of paragraphs about it: 

"Telstra's mobile network problems appear to have started just before 4 am today, based on faults reported to DownDetector. The problem peaked just after 6:30 am, with a steady improvement since then.

Apart from consumers' phones, the network is used for transport & mobile payment systems.

It is too early to say what the cause was, but from past experience I expect it was due to a software upgrade which went wrong, not an attack.

One way you can protect yourself at home from such outages is to have phones on different networks.

A widespread long-duration outage, particularly of the Testra network, could be very inconvenient. But it is not going to be catastrophic."

Just as a household can cushion the effects of the loss of one network by having phones on different networks, financial and transport companies can have a backup network programmed into their systems. This will cost a little more, but allow service to continue when one network goes down, for whatever reason." 

AI Teaching People to Assemble Flatpack Furniture and Drones

Greetings from the School of Computing at the Australian National University, where Jiahao Zhan is explaining how videos can automatically be aligned with assembly diagrams. Anyone who has ever tried to put an Ikea flatpack together will under stand the value of this. You have a printed sheet and might even have a video demonstration, but how do they go together? Zhan's software turns the video into a set of step by step instructions. 

Zhan has spent time at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories. As it happens Mitsubishi is building frigates for the Australian navy. Robot assembly could be used to speed construction. More locally, I had a technician in my home this week, trying to work out how to replace the motor in my Mitsubishi air-conditioner. ;-)

Apart from reducing the frustration with DIY, and teaching robots to assemble, this has applications in medical procedures and maintenance of safety critical infrastructure. As an example, in the past a large team of people would spend years producing maintenance training materials for a new aircraft. However, UAVs are now being designed, built and put into use within a few months, and being constantly updated. The operator needs to be able to assemble the UAV from a kit of parts in the field. Deployment can't be held up while instructional videos are produced, but correct assembly is a matter of life and death. 

ps: The seminar also demonstrated the hybrid mode. In addition to a room full of people, there were some on Zoom. At question time it was imply a matter of switching on the audio from the remote participant, so they could ask.