The inaugural International Symposium for Next Generation Infrastructure was held between 1st and 4th October 2013, at the SMART Infrastructure Research Facility at the University of Wollongong, Australia, and one lucky Geospatial Engineering researcher from Newcastle was able to attend. David Alderson gave a 20 minute presentation entitled “A National-Scale Infrastructure Database and Modelling Environment for the UK” following a successful submission of a conference paper to the conference committee, under the same title. The work contained within the paper and the presentation represented an amalgamation of work conducted by David and other researchers from the Geospatial Engineering group at Newcastle and other research institutes and universities involved in the Infrastructure Transitions Research Consortium (UK ITRC) programme. The focus of the paper and presentation was to give readers and delegates alike a glimpse of some of the work undertaken in the process of constructing a database of infrastructure-related data relevant to the UK. This included not only an overview of some of the datasets that may be found within the database, but also a preview of some of the visualisation tools that are being developed on top of the data. An overview of these visualisation tools can be found within other posts in this blog site here.
A copy of the slides can also be found here and here. Unfortunately the presentation has had to be split into two parts, so please download from both links to get the full presentation.
Other representatives from the School of Civil Engineering and Geosciences at Newcastle University, UK could also be found delivering presentations at the event including:
Miss Sarah Dunn, PhD Student – Modelling infrastructure systems for resilience and sustainability (part one, part two)
Mr Shaun Brown, PhD Student – Resilience of resource movements to disruptive events
Mr Matthew Holmes, STREAM PhD Student – How do we ensure the assessment of infrastructure resilience is proportionate to the risk?
Further to this fantastic opportunity, a further round of meetings looking to develop collaborations between researchers at SMART, including former Newcastle-based PhD student and post-doctoral researcher Dr Tomas Holderness, and the Geospatial Engineering group at Newcastle, is being held at the SMART infrastructure facility between October 8th and 11th 2013. These meetings will look to focus on potential collaborative opportunities regarding network interdependencies between infrastructure networks, and also web-based data dashboards for visualisation and dissemination purposes.
Watch this space for more information…