AURIN: Delivering Modern Digital Infrastructure to the Urban Research Community
Loren Bruns Jr1 1AURIN, University of Melbourne, VIC, Australia
Abstract
As climatic, demographic, and economic drivers converge to challenge the intimate fabric of our cities and regional centres, the Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN) has a key role to play in providing modern digital research infrastructure to support informed evidence-based urban and infrastructure planning and management.
In this presentation we reflect on a decade of accumulated expertise in digital research infrastructure at AURIN and discuss the current work being done to develop next generation digital research infrastructure built upon interoperable and standardised approaches to data and analytics delivery and execution.
The AURIN Data Provider (ADP), launched in July 2022, is the first of these new services to be released and forms a component of AURIN’s nascent Urban Data-as-a-Service (UDaaS) platform. We will describe its technical implementation, the learnings we have after its first 15 months of operation, and the role the ADP and its parent platform the UDaaS have in undergirding future internal and external urban research platforms.
We will also discuss AURIN’s future vision for a modular Urban Analytics-as-a-Service (UAaaS) platform designed to enable the creation and maintenance of rapidly prototyped, containerised, and continuously delivered analytical models and tools tailored for urban research.
When combined, the UDaaS and UAaaS platforms will form the foundations for a sovereign, data-led, approach to Urban Digital Twins (UDT) in Australia, enabling a system-of-systems approach to solving the multidisciplinary challenges that define our time: climate change, energy transition, and changing demographics.
Biography
Dr Loren Bruns Jr is the eInfrastructure Team Manager at the Australian Urban Research Infrastructure Network (AURIN), overseeing a team of research infrastructure engineers building modern, cloud-based digital infrastructure for the urban research community. Prior to joining AURIN, Loren spent two decades as a full-stack and research software engineer, creating research platforms and co-authoring papers in the fields of Alzheimer’s disease, neuropsychology, addictive behaviours, diabetes, and astrophysics.
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2198-2173