Javed H1
1Atlas Of Living Australia (ALA) / CSIRO, , Australia
Biography:
Hamza is a software engineer with the Atlas of Living Australia (ALA), where he helps modernise the systems behind Australia's national biodiversity data infrastructure. His work spans cloud-native platforms, Kubernetes, and automated delivery, and most recently the question of what it takes to make established research infrastructure ready for artificial intelligence. Hamza is passionate about artificial intelligence and modern infrastructure, tooling, and engineering practice, and about how teams can responsibly adopt new technology.
Abstract:
The Atlas of Living Australia (ALA) is a nationally significant, open infrastructure platform that aggregates, enriches, and shares biodiversity data. With over 180 million species occurrence records, the ALA empowers researchers, policymakers, educators, government agencies, and the public, delivering open data and tools that drive evidence-based decisions and conservation efforts.
Following a multi-phase platform modernisation, the ALA is addressing the next challenge in its evolution: readying established research infrastructure for artificial intelligence (AI). This talk reports on practical work making our systems and data services usable by AI, so that the ALA's biodiversity holdings can be reasoned over directly by large language models.
Key milestones already achieved include:
– An elastic compute platform that provisions resources, including accelerated compute, on demand and scales them to zero when idle, making AI workloads viable and cost-effective.
– A Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that exposes ALA's biodiversity services such as species lookups, occurrence searches, and taxonomic queries as structured tools that language models can invoke directly.
– Natural-language access to complex biodiversity data, allowing users to pose research questions without prior knowledge of our application programming interfaces.
We will share insights from this work, highlighting architectural advances, practical challenges and what it takes to make existing services genuinely usable by language models, not just technically accessible to them.
By extending its infrastructure and data services for artificial intelligence, the ALA is laying the foundation for a new generation of AI-powered biodiversity science.
