Awards

Our success in state-of-the-art research and commercial applications have been widely recognised by various research and innovation awards.

Victorian iAwards - Government and Public Sector Solution of the Year 2020

The Smart Infrastructure Team has been awarded the Victorian iAwards - Government and Public Sector Solution of the Year. The iAwards are Australia's longest running and most broadly scoped innovation recognition program, promoting excellence in the Australian digital technology ecosystem.

The solution aims to forecast NBN broadband service demand. As NBN rolls out its network, there is a need to forecast the orders received over time from each region of about 300-3000 premises. This order forecast helps plan the region-wide technical workforce needed to connect end customers. Accurate matching of demand not only leads to better utilisation of the workforce but also reduces the ‘time-to-connect’ for new customers. The order prediction is applied to new roll out regions to precisely allocate workforce and resources, and is being integrated to NBN's roll out team’s workforce planning model, which drives the workforce and resource allocation for new areas. Moreover, the model also provides insights into the demographic profiles of the regions with higher than average or lower than average take-up. These insights have helped tweak the products and services that NBN offers to meet any unmet market demand and to protect existing market share from competitive erosion. Understanding customers' expectations on services is the key for NBN not only before but also after service roll out. For existing service regions, NBN aims to maintain top-tier customer service and sustainable revenue.

Australian Smart Cities Awards - Finalist 2019

The UTS Data Science Institute has been selected as finalist for the 2019 Australian Smart Cities Awards (Research and Innovation category). This is a recognition of our current research work in transport, water, energy and air quality combining artificial intelligence with smart city modelling.

Victorian iAwards - Merit Recipient 2019

Western Water, CSIRO's Data61 and University of Technology Sydney have successfully applied advanced machine learning techniques to predict water pipe failures. Armed with this ability, water utilities can mitigate pipe failures, save maintenance resources and proactively renew the water mains in a cost-effective way, reducing impact on customers and lowering its cost to serve.

Eureka Prize for Excellence in Data Science 2018

The Smart Infrastructure Team received the 'Oscars of Australian science', Australian Museum Eureka Prize for Excellence in Data Science in 2018. The team has developed a tool that uses data-driven techniques to make intelligent predictions about failures, helping prioritise the selection of pipes for maintenance, reduce costs and minimise disruption to water supplies. A suits of other innovative analytical solutions of chemical dosing, energy management and customer demand prediction facilitate infrastructure owners to have intelligent, efficient and cost-saving system and help the industry significantly in increasing productivity, safety and customer satisfaction.

Australian Water Research Innovation Award 2018

The team received the Australian Water Association Research Innovation Award for NSW, and was highly commended for the national award in 2018 for their research and delivering real benefits to the water industry. We work with Sydney Water collaboratively, researching advanced analytics approaches to solving water industry challenges, including water pipe failure prediction, customer segmentation, demand analysis, sewer corrosion prediction, optimising water quality, predicting sewer chokes and prioritising active leakage detection areas. The aim is to achieve better services for customers and to deliver world class network performance.

New South Wales iAwards - Merit Recipient 2017

When applying data analytics to water pipe failure predictions, this approach provides financially viable solutions to effectively reduce maintenance costs, and efficiently allocate capital investment.

ANNY Excellence in Analytics Award - Finalist 2016

The International Institute for Analytics (IIA), the leading independent research and advisory firm focused exclusively on helping clients improve their analytics performance, selected our team as the finalist for 2016 ANNY Excellence in Analytics Award. The ANNY Award recognizes an organization’s application of advanced analytics to drive measurable business results at the project or organizational level.

NSW Water Professional of the Year 2016

In 2016, Dr. Fang Chen was awarded NSW Water Professional of the Year to acknowledge her efforts and contribution helping water utilities to prioritize capital expenditure and minimize economic and social impact. Dr. Chen has spent much of her career in the water sector and has achieved great success in the creation of advanced data-driven analytic solutions serving for more than 20 worldwide water utilities. This pioneering work has supported a diverse range of owners and maintainers of civil and industrial assets, and helped avoid significant cost and social impact.