NICTA plants digital seed for future cities

NICTA, Australia’s Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Research Centre of Excellence, has announced it will be a founding research partner for d_city, a new cross-disciplinary networked community committed to using breakthrough research, including advanced ICT research, in urban design, development and management.

The goal of d_city is to unite relevant research groups around the world to use data technologies to build better, more ecologically healthy cities. NICTA is contributing a one-off cash investment and office space in its Australian Technology Park laboratory to support the Australian d_city community.

NICTA chief executive officer Dr David Skellern believes the d_city movement has the potential to inspire imaginative Australian ICT research of global significance: “With an extra 2.5 billion people expected to live in the world’s cities by 2050, the development of smarter modelling, decision support and control systems for urban planning and management is essential.”

Co-founder of d_city Davina Jackson added: “I am delighted by this vote of confidence in the development of intelligent urban decision-making tools. NICTA’s involvement in this project should encourage architects, scientists and engineers to move urban design from paper and PDFs into advanced information modelling platforms.”

According to Jackson, reducing energy is one of the benefits expected to flow from the network: “This relates to construction, transport and energy-positive buildings, so d_city is addressing the fundamental problems contributing to climate change rather than just coping with them.”

NICTA is funded by the Australian government as represented by the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy and the Australian Research Council.