By Tim Davies

Armed with a poster I recently attended the 2015 eResearch conference in sunny Brisbane. The eResearch conference usually brings together the best and brightest eResearchers from across the globe and this year was no exception. The theme of the conference was ‘Fuelling the Knowledge Economy’ the fuel in this case was the stimulating discussions and presentations centring around new information-centric research capabilities. SMART joined in on these discussions with a captivating poster that illustrated many of the eResearch capabilities that the SMART infrastructure Facility has to offer.

The poster highlighted SMART as an eResearch toolmaker with a focus on the following areas.

Regional Planning

SMART has developed a next generation model, called ‘Vision Illawarra’, that aims to provide a more transparent and dynamic view on how the social and economic fabric of the Illawarra region could look in the future. This tool, the first of its kind to be implemented in Australia, will bring together economic, transport and land use planning.

Modelling

The radiotherapy (RT) modelling  project aims to develop an integrated approach for radiotherapy service planning that combines future geographical projections of cancer incidence with the placement of new RT services designed to maximise patient uptake rates (due to travel distances).

Data Discovery

SMART Infrastructure Facility in collaboration with CSIRO has developed the SMART metadata and data management system. The system has been developed to catalogue datasets from disparate data providers, research outputs, commercial and academic research projects and is designed to be flexible enough so that any type of infrastructure information can be catalogued.

Knowledge Capture

Hong Kong’s MTR Corporation have commissioned SMART to develop methods to harness information published by commuters on social networks such as Twitter, Weibo, WeChat and Facebook and utilise this information.

Simulation

Transport for NSW and SMART have collaborated in developing an interactive, visually intuitive and highly flexible simulation platform to support transport and urban planning in Sydney. The resulting agent based model “TransMob”, simulation agents represent individuals and households living in an urban area.

GeoSocial Intelligence

The PetaJakarta.org platform harnesses the power of social media to gather, sort, and display information about flooding for Jakarta residents and governmental agencies in real time.