Paul Boustead is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Electrical, Computer and Telecommunications Engineering at the University of Wollongong. He currently leads the ICE corporate project and co-leads the Smart Networks project in the Cooperative Research Centre (CRC) for Smart Internet Technology. Paul completed a PhD in telecommunications engineering at the University of Wollongong in 2000. Since completing his PhD Paul has worked on several industrially funded projects including a project for Telstra Research Laboratories that aimed to improve the flexibility of their network. In 2004 and 2005 Paul was project leader for a project, called Sparse Ad Hoc Networks for Desert Australia (SAND), in the Desert Knowledge CRC that aimed to improve telecommunications infrastructure for indigenous communities in Desert Australia. Before commencing his PhD Paul was an Electrical Engineer and worked on very large automation systems. Paul is named as inventor on a number of patents that are in various stages of the patenting process and has over 50 publications in journals, conferences in the area of telecommunications research and online virtual environments. These publications include an article in the "IEEE Communications Magazine". A major conference where work has been presented includes the IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality in Bonn Germany in 2005.