A national broadband communications network offers enormous opportunities for Australia’s agricultural sector. In turn, connected farms, and their supporting industries and communities will play a significant role in Australia’s digital economic future. UNE-PARG staff have joined forces with Regional University Network colleagues from Ballarat University, University of Southern Queensland, University of Sunshine Coast and Central Queensland University, and the CSIRO to host Australia’s first Digital Rural Futures Conference, here in Armidale NSW, where the NBN first started. The conference aims to be a regular, national forum to exchange ideas and provide updates on the opportunities and challenges faced by agriculture in Australia’s digital economic future. In our first conference (sub-titled ‘Smart farms – Smart regions’), we will focus on three themes:
1. Smart technology: including sensors and sensor networks, immersive and sentinel vision and communication technologies, far-end control and autonomous systems (including UAVs and robotics) for environment, agricultural production;
2. Data and information management: including cloud-based services, interoperability, sharing and security, crowd sourcing and citizen science, remote surveys, web-supported smart phone apps; and
3. Smart services and decision support systems: application cases including precision agriculture, farm-to-customer retail, remote on-farm product support, tele-working, remote diagnostic and advisory systems including tele- veterinary and tele-agronomic support, assisted living, tele-health, remote extension and training , consumer surveys, intelligent networks for power grid control, emergency and environmental risk management.
Check out the conference website for more information (www.une.edu.au/smart)