A recent federal grant of $12.3 million under the 2023 National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) round, has brought the Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network’s (AURIN) NCRIS funding to a total of $25 million over the next five-year period.
AURIN’s strategic plan for 2023–28 involves tackling some of the big challenges facing Australian cities and regional centres, such as adapting to the impact of climate change, facilitating energy transitions and delivering adequate housing and social infrastructure.
According to AURIN, it sees itself as “the connecting point between academia, government, and industry, we facilitate access to hard-to-get data, contribute to higher research efficiency, and cost-effective scientific investment” while aiming to “enhance research translation and contribute to a vibrant innovation ecosystem as well as high impact research”.
“This is an exciting period of growth at AURIN, and I look forward to working with our partners towards our common goal of delivering the best possible research outcomes for our communities,” said Prof Pascal Perez, Director, AURIN.
“I am proud to be leading our team into a bright future.”
AURIN says that over the coming years it aims to identify the information and support tools that decision-makers need and ensure the data and analytics it provides are modular and compatible with efforts to develop an Urban Digital Twin (UDT) for Australia.
“At the moment effective implementation of UDTs in Australia is hindered by a lack of standardised and coordinated approaches in utilising the wide range of data and tools available,” the organisation says.
“Because of this there are limited effective uses and integrations of UDTs and the complexity of customised workarounds impedes seamless updating, adaptation and governance of UDTs.”
AURIN is therefore developing a UDT community to:
- Consult on an ongoing basis
- Map work being done across research domains, creating a balance of data, modelling and visualisation
- Develop a systemic way to think about the backend of UDTs
- Break silos of knowledge to enable interoperability
- Include social data to go beyond spatialisation and modelling and add a human component.
