Side Events

Join us for drinks and canapes for the official ICRI 2024 Conference Cocktail Event. Hosted at the Queensland Art Gallery by the river, this world-class venue will delight and inspire.

Indigenous Knowledge Systems – perspectives from Australia’s First Astronomers

This event offers ICRI delegates an opportunity to engage with Indigenous knowledge systems. We will hear from Elders and astronomers who will share Indigenous perspectives on astronomy, and from research infrastructure professionals working with Indigenous communities.  The experience will highlight the richness of Indigenous scientific traditions and the importance of Indigenous science and engagement to contemporary scientific research, with a particular focus on research infrastructure. 

The event will take place at the Brisbane Planetarium and includes:

• Welcome to Country
• Panel discussion on Indigenous astronomy
• Viewing of Skylore – an exhibition featuring some of Australia’s leading Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders sharing star knowledge
• Planetarium screening of The Earth Above
• Outdoor star gazing with telescopes (weather permitting).

The GSO on research infrastructures is a working group under the G7. The Group serves the shared policy goals of its member countries in ensuring that world class Research Infrastructures are available to promote high quality research. This, in particular, is important in areas which require international cooperation on global challenges or where it makes sense to pool investments to secure the best value for money. The GSO is composed of representatives from Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, UK, USA, and the European Commission. Participating countries are represented on the GSO by government officials and experts in the areas of international research infrastructures and international relations. The OECD acts an observer to ensure good coordination with the Global Science Forum (GSF).

This ICRI 2024 side event aims to shed light on the untapped potential for research infrastructure collaboration with partners in ASEAN and encourage further exploration with this rapidly developing region. The ten member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) – Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam (and soon Timor Leste) – are an economic powerhouse with a combined population of over 672 million. ASEAN is a diverse region known for its economic growth, biodiversity, cultural richness, and its vibrant and increasingly tech-savvy young population. ASEAN countries offer a wealth of opportunities in research infrastructure that are often overlooked. This event explores the untapped potential and emerging trends in research infrastructure across ASEAN member states, and highlights opportunities for international collaboration.

The ‘Global Ecosystem Research Infrastructure’ (GERI) is an integrated network of six site-based research infrastructures around the world, that are analogous but independent, and have come together to better understanding ecosystems across global biomes. GERI activities go beyond that of their original design and are a large value add to the research communities and sponsors, alike. GERI focuses on establishing the pathways for network-to-network activities across continents and cultures, garnering community support, eliminating barriers for researchers to work together, and federating our data together. In this way, GERI prepares and provides these data to better understand environmental change at a global scale and supports the next decade of Earth system science research.

The need for digital infrastructure to support research is only going to increase. And we will only meet this need by thinking outside the box and working with industry to deliver the required compute and storage. Join a half day roundtable discussion and workshop to hear from national research infrastructure leaders on how they are using commercial cloud to deliver their services to the research community and discuss the barriers and future opportunities to partnering with organisations like AWS.

This session will showcase successful RI collaborations between Australia and Switzerland. With a keynote from Prof. Thomas Schulthess, Director of the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS).

This is a hybrid event

Relationships and partnerships facilitate successful research infrastructure outcomes. Hubs and projects that manage research infrastructure face the challenge of bringing together distributed facilities and institutes to service their communities. These challenges can be shared when relationships and partnerships are nurtured. Positive relationships with infrastructure and informatics providers at local and global scales have yielded successful outcomes in the life science research infrastructure community. Australian BioCommons – a digital infrastructure enhancing Australia’s research capabilities across environmental, agricultural, and biomedical science, and ELIXIR – a European intergovernmental organisation dedicated to helping researchers leverage vast amounts of life science data, exemplify such successful collaborations. In the last five years, both ELIXIR and Australian BioCommons have prioritised partnerships with national informatics and infrastructure providers to the benefit of multiple national molecular life science audiences.

At a global scale, Australian BioCommons and ELIXIR are into their fourth year of an AUS-EU collaboration agreement, which is an example of a successful global partnership that has yielded fruitful outcomes for the global community of practitioners (https://www.biocommons.org.au/elixir-collaboration).

This interactive side meeting is an opportunity to showcase some examples of project outcomes that have emerged from partnerships and relationships locally (across Europe and Australia) and globally. We will highlight the collaboration agreement and provide examples of successes to date including key outcomes, and future plans. We plan to discuss common themes, and emergent strategies that have led to this collaboration’s success and partnerships more generally.

The ambition is to produce a short paper outcome which describes the ‘shape’ of a successful collaborative partnership in this space. In presenting these successes, we aim to share good practice with other research infrastructures in attendance from any domains that are looking to establish their own global partnerships and collaborations.

Australia is a mega biodiverse continent with many species found nowhere else. The best estimates are that only 30% of our biodiversity has been identified and described. Biological and paleontological collections, including those held in museums, herbaria, research institutions and government, provide the fundamental distributed infrastructure that underpins all we know and understand about species. 43% of described species in Australia are only known from collection specimens. Advanced technologies, including genomics, advanced imaging, artificial intelligence and machine learning, are rapidly expanding the potential role of biological collections in supporting science, industry and government decision-making. Individual collections play an important geographic, taxonomic and socio-cultural role in any national system demanding a distributed approach supported by effective partnership and coordination mechanisms. This symposium, hosted by the Queensland Museum (QM), will explore the design of distributed research infrastructure, focusing on biological collections, as a potential pattern for other NRI. The symposium will include a special back-of-house Queensland State Collection tour hosted by QM’s biodiversity and geosciences team.

This workshop event will take place at QUT’s Samford Ecological Research Facility (SERF), a 51-hectare property located in the Samford Valley, 45min from Brisbane’s CBD. The property holds the last patch of remnant Dry Sclerophyll Forest in the Samford Valley, a small area of Gallery Rainforest, currently listed as endangered, and open pastures. With the valley rapidly changing from a rural and farming environment to an urban lifestyle, SERF is a unique research facility used to monitor the impact the increased population is having on our fauna, greenhouse gases and waterways.  Additionally, the rural setting enables sustainable agriculture and food security research to be easily facilitated. The diverse research projects and 24/7 monitoring of the environment is enabled by research infrastructure and support from QUT, NCRIS-enabled TERN (Australia’s ecosystem observatory), and the Australian Research Council . 

The GSO on research infrastructures is a working group under the G7. The Group serves the shared policy goals of its member countries in ensuring that world class Research Infrastructures are available to promote high quality research. This, in particular, is important in areas which require international cooperation on global challenges or where it makes sense to pool investments to secure the best value for money. The GSO is composed of representatives from Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, UK, USA, and the European Commission. Participating countries are represented on the GSO by government officials and experts in the areas of international research infrastructures and international relations. The OECD acts an observer to ensure good coordination with the Global Science Forum (GSF).

The GSO on research infrastructures is a working group under the G7. The Group serves the shared policy goals of its member countries in ensuring that world class Research Infrastructures are available to promote high quality research. This, in particular, is important in areas which require international cooperation on global challenges or where it makes sense to pool investments to secure the best value for money. The GSO is composed of representatives from Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, UK, USA, and the European Commission. Participating countries are represented on the GSO by government officials and experts in the areas of international research infrastructures and international relations. The OECD acts an observer to ensure good coordination with the Global Science Forum (GSF).