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German-Australia Chamber’s Smart Energy Management Seminar

Energy monitoring and management systems play a vital role in helping achieve the strategic as well as operational goals for Smart Cities/Smart Buildings. Whilst sustainability friendly mans of generating energy can go a long way of making a country/city/region carbon neutral, which is an agenda of any smart city initiative, energy monitoring and management systems can contribute significantly by brining innovation in energy distribution and utilisation. Having noticed our Smart Cities initiative‘s increasing activities and widespread engagements in not only South Australia but other parts of the country, the German-Australian Chamber invited us to be a partner in the organisation of a seminar on “energy efficiency in buildings” on November 22, 2016. The draft of the program can be download here. According to the program, I’ll be giving an opening talk, Smart Cities Initiatives and Supporting Energy Management Systems, for which I’ll be relying on our research and development activities on Smart Cities related initiatives and projects over the last 18 months. The seminar’s goal is to initiative and groom productive and fruitful dialogue between German companies and Australian  academic institutions in order to Read More »German-Australia Chamber’s Smart Energy Management Seminar

Workshop on Smart Cities Research Collaboration With Councils/Government

We have entered in an exciting phase of our smart cities research and development initiative. We have been having a series of very productive and fruitful workshops with internal and external stakeholders to gather ideas, suggestions, and proposals from a wide variety of colleagues and partners (current and potential) for firming up the foundations and structure of our initiative. Last week (October 27), we organised a workshop involving more than a dozen participants from local councils and different agencies of the state department. The purpose of the workshop was to brainstorming and organise the ideas and needs of the councils/government that can be converted into researchable projects to support innovation and entrepreneurship in Adelaide in the area of Smart Cities. Our strong and ongoing collaboration with the Adelaide Smart Cities Studio was hugely helpful in an offer to host the event in one of the buildings of the council, next door to the Adelaide Smart City Studio, and the Studio’s manager Beth Worrall was extremely helpful and actively engaged in the workshop. We invited representatives from several councilsRead More »Workshop on Smart Cities Research Collaboration With Councils/Government

Smart Campus: Gamification of Disposing Waste Sustainably

One of the key area of our Smart Cities initiative is Smart Campus. When we presented the vision of Smart City R&DI centre for providing national and international leadership in Smart Cities knowledge and solutions, we envision a journey going from smart campus, smart city, smart state, to smart nation. We advocated the path of building living labs of smart cities solutions for experimentation. One of our projects on building solutions for Smart Campus is aimed at raising awareness about disposing off waste sustainably by leveraging Gamification. We have been developing a set of games (see poster) in close collaboration with the Green project initiative at the University of Adelaide . We the game project team (Ali, Min, Dicky, Joe) are extremely delighted that the trial of our Game went very well. There were more than 300 students who trial the game and learn about the waste management system introduced at the Hub Central at the University of Adelaide.

Read More »Smart Campus: Gamification of Disposing Waste Sustainably

Talk at NEC & IDC Event on Smarter and Safer Societies

Smart Cities initiatives can mean different things to different people and solutions providers. However, there is no doubt that a smart city solution should not only focus on providing the core service but should also contribute to the safety of the users of a service. That is why quite a lot of smart cities solutions are being presented from safety perspective as well – smart cities ought to be safer cities. I was honoured to be invited to present our initiative on Smart Cities R&D and innovation at an event co-organised by NEC and IDC – the event was titled, “Smarter and Safer Society – How ICT makes Government and Enterprise work smarter ”. It was a great get together where different speakers and panelists were enthusiastically presenting their visions, understanding, and observations about smart cities initiatives and solutions. I really enjoyed the talks, dialogues between panelist and audience. I spoke about our initiative on setting up an interdisciplinary centre for research, development, and innovation that can lead to citizen-inspired socio-technical solutions for making a city smarter. Here are the presentation that I used for supporting the talk and following is the abstract of my talk.
Read More »Talk at NEC & IDC Event on Smarter and Safer Societies

Ecoversity Funds Smart Waste Management Project

We have been awarded a small amount of funding to carry out a project aimed at developing and evaluating a game based application for raising the awareness about the waste management system introduced by Ecoversity initiative at the University of Adelaide. This project will be built upon the summer project on a similiar topic, Waste Management Education, carried out by Yue Zhuo, who was awarded a summer scholarship by Data61 (formally NICTA). This project will contribute to Ecoversity’s goal of improving the on campus waste management for sustainability and financial benefits. We are very excited to work on this project as it would enhance our collaboration with Ecoversity team as we share several common goals. This project will also contribute to our Smart Campus research agenda under our Smart Cities initiative. Read More »Ecoversity Funds Smart Waste Management Project

NEC Announces Collaboration with University of Adelaide on Smart Cities

We are very glad that NEC Corporation has signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate with us on smart city related projects. This is a really exciting update as the MoU will enable researchers from our centre, Australian Centre for Smart Cities, to work closely with NEC team in Adelaide and elsewhere on challenging research and development projects for innovation in the area of Smart Cities. Australian Centre for Smart Cities has been forming close ties with several industrial, governmental, councils, and businesses for exploring the possibilities of joint efforts for developing knowledge, capacity, and services that can help accelerate the smart cities initiatives at the state and national levels. I’m copying one particular quote of the NEC Executive Director here as its indicates their confidence in our Centre’s ability to carry out excellent research and development in smart cities domain.

“We look forward to working closely with the University of Adelaide to find innovative answers to the challenges that demand a Smart Cities approach to urban living. The combination of the University of Adelaide’s research excellence and NEC’s global and local expertise in technologies that are essential for Smart Cities will open up new opportunities in the field,” said Mike Barber, Executive Director at NEC Australia.”Read More »NEC Announces Collaboration with University of Adelaide on Smart Cities

The Lord Mayor of Parramatta’s Visit to Discuss Smart City

Parramatta City Council is one of the very few councils that started initiatives on smart cities related projects. Paraconnect is considered an innovative initiative that has been driving through community involvement. When we started our research and development centre on Smart city, Australian Centre for Smart Cities, paraconnect was one of the few projects that we found very appealing and relevant for study. Hence, it was a privilege to receive the Lord Mayor of Parramatta city council along with his delegates to discuss our centre’s objectives, scope and directions. The delegate was visiting Adelaide to learning about different initiatives on smart city in South Australia, particularly the Adelaide Smart City initiates, with which we are proud to be associated as I serve on the steering committee of the initiative to represent the University of Adelaide. The paramatta city council delegate briefed us about their vision of the city of paramatta and different initiatives that are already underway to contribute to the achievement of the vision. We briefed the delegates about our centre’s vision, objectives, and some selected projects that are being carried out in close collaboration with the internal and external stakeholders. we also briefed the delegates about different smart cities initiatives around the world and how those initiatives have been providing us inspiration and collaboration. We were very happy find that sustainability and carbon neutrality were among the top priorities of the paramatta city council’s initiatives on smart city. Read More »The Lord Mayor of Parramatta’s Visit to Discuss Smart City

Smart Campus: Model Driven Security for Systems of Systems

Socio-technical systems underpinning smart and connected cities are good examples of systems of systems – where each constituent system act and behave independents but these systems are connected with each other and provide each other different services. Security is one of the key aspects of systems of systems, e.g., smart city systems or smart campus systems. It is extremely complex and challenging undertaking to model and analyse a secure systems of systems. Model Driven Engineering (MDE) is expected to bring much needed support to bring effectiveness and efficiency in terms of automating some of the tedious and error-prone tasks. To support a MDE approach to secure smart cities systems, we need appropriate meta-models and suitable tools that can convert the meta-models in graphical editors that can support the modelling and analysis of secure smart cities applications. In collaboration with researchers from France, we have been working on a project aimed at developing graphical editors and model cases of secure systems in a smart cities, or smart campus. Apart from senior researchers from Adelaide and France, Zi Yang Pang has been working on summer scholarship on this project. The project has the following goals and scope and we are hoping to apply the meta-model language for secure smart cities systems very soon and afterwards we plan to extend the tools to provide end-to-end support. Read More »Smart Campus: Model Driven Security for Systems of Systems

Envisioning Bowden Development as a Smart City

Smart City initiatives in different parts of the world are gaining momentum and such initiatives are inspiring governments, councils, private sectors, and citizens everywhere – As the Lord Mayor of Amsterdam once said that Smart Cities are just like “Football teams” that every city wants to have one its own. Since starting our Smart Cities initiative at the University of Adelaide and joining the steering committee of the Adelaide city initiative, I have been observing more and more initiatives and activities about smart cities at different  levels. Last week, I was approached to make a presentation about Smart City during a workshop of It services team of Charles Sturt City council. The purpose of the workshop was to have the staff envisage Bowden, a relatively new development in Adelaide, as a smart area of quality living for people in different demographic categories. Despite being extremely snowed under with several tasks with hard deadlines, I accepted the invitation of making a short presentation on smart city and ICT driven innovation to inspire the participant before their brainstorming session on coming up with smart city services.Read More »Envisioning Bowden Development as a Smart City