Winners
Data61 and DELWP
Award for Environment & Sustainability
The team co-designed a web-based 4D visualisation and analytics tool to support modelling and communicating coastal hazards in Victoria. The Port Philip Bay Coastal Assessment Hazard Decision Support System integrates 60 hazard layers across a range of sea-level rise scenarios, alongside showcasing DELWP’s historical aerial imagery from as early as the 1930s. The system integrates various modules, 3D buildings and other datasets to allow informed analysis of various hazard scenarios for communities facing sea level rise and provides beneficial assets for marine and coastal management. Judges praised the project’s high social, environmental, and economic value.
Tony Snow
Professional of the Year
Every surveying professional in Western Australia would either know, or more likely have been taught by Tony Snow. Tony commenced his career in private practice but his passion for sharing his knowledge and skills to emerging professionals has led to a rewarding career as a university lecturer. Tony prides himself on being approachable, willing to learn and communicate new ideas and technologies. He also supports industry engagement and mentoring with the students through initiatives such as the WA Student Surveying expeditions to foster their development. Tony is also passionate about the profession and has been actively involved with a number of professional bodies over the past 20+ years. He has been an active member of the SSSI WA Regional Committee since the inception of SSSI as well as a key member of the national Engineering Mining & Surveying Commission. The judges all agreed Tony is a significant contributor to the future of the surveying industry in WA and plays an important role in the lives of young professionals, as well as providing excellent support of SSSI through various senior roles.
Dr Ivana Ivanova
Women's Leadership Award
Dr Ivanova is currently co-Chair of the Open Geospatial Consortium Domain Working Group on Quality, and ISPRS ICWG IV/III, and represents Curtin University in the IT-004 Geographic information/Geomatics working group at Standards Australia. Ivana’s research interests and expertise are in spatial data quality, data provenance and spatial knowledge infrastructures including cadastral systems.
Liam Kearney
Undergraduate Student Award
Liam Kearney was a Bachelor of Surveying (Honours) student at Curtin. To test the possible use of global ocean tide models in WA coastal regions, Liam’s research extracted tide information from three global tide models and compared them to those from coastal tide gauges. The results from the project indicated that the ocean models showed reasonable agreement with tide gauges in the southern regions of the WA coast, but the agreement with tide gauges decreased in the northern regions.
Manoj Deo
Postgraduate Student Award
Manoj Deo developed and validated several novel PPP algorithms with ambiguity estimation, PPP-AR and PPP-WAR approaches, which targeted the challenging aspects of PPP to improve performance. The beneficiaries of these algorithms are MFMC PPP users in various applications, who are expected to gain improved performance. It is noted that development of such products is underway by organisations such as Geoscience Australia, thus future rigorous testing of the proposed algorithms is imminent.
Dr Ivana Ivanova
Educational Development Award
Dr Ivanova holds an engineering and doctoral degree from the Slovak University of Technology, in geodesy and cartography. Ivana has lectured and conducted research at several universities and across three continents. Dr Ivánová is currently a senior lecturer at Curtin University, teaching geoinformatics, spatial data quality and distribution, and spatial databases in the Bachelor of Surveying degree, and at a postgraduate level, undertakes lectures in the new Geospatial Intelligence courses. In her teaching, Ivana is a strong advocate for OSGeo tools; helping students to develop open standards compliant geoweb applications.
Geospatial Intelligence
Award for Technical Excellence
Geospatial Intelligence have provided an innovative Artificial Intelligence spatial solution for Metropolitan Perth and the Kimberly, with an aim to automatically extract complex features from earth observation imagery through machine learning. They were able to leverage the availability of AI platforms and advances in computer vision technology to rapidly develop a system that could consume multispectral imagery, segment it and generate vector data describing features that it contained. Advanced machine learning was used to create a spatial product consisting of building footprints, roads, railways, water courses, swimming pools and tree canopies. Judges praised the technological scope of the project, calling it a ‘leap forward in remote sensing and cloud computing’
City of Cockburn and Esri Australia
Award for Spatial Enablement
City of Cockburn has enhanced their investment in technology by applying further integration between corporate systems improving their Community Safety and Security capabilities in a partnership with Esri Australia. The project allows CoSafe’s mobile patrol tasking to prioritise assignments spatially, utilising a map-centric geographical interface to achieve intuitive survey assignments at correct locations and streamline data collection. Judges called the project an excellent example of how spatial and temporal information can be used to harmonise with legacy procedures to positively impact the community.
Veris
Award for Innovation & Commercialisation
Conceptualised, designed, and built by the Veris team, the innovative Rail Runner is a trolley system that enables the surveying of overhead, suspended, and hard-to-access rails. Custom designed to address regular problems confronted by surveyors working on mining assets in the Pilbara region, the project successfully eliminates working at height risks, and minimises the need to shutdown production assets. The custom solution incorporates a self-fabricated mechanism, allowing auto-levelling of the prism to occur, and can be deployed on difficult rails without risking safety. Judges praised the clever innovation of the project, and the larger commercial viability of such a bespoke asset.
Nelson Kuna
Young Professional of the Year
Nelson is a Hydrographic and Marine Geophysical Surveyor in CSIRO’s Geophysical Survey and Mapping team. He graduated top-of-year-2010 in BSc Geophysical Sciences from Southampton University School of Ocean and Earth Sciences, National Oceanography Centre and has since gained 10 years’ experience in Geophysical and Hydrographic Surveying on challenging projects around Australia, Papua New Guinea, Europe and Scandinavia including inside the Arctic Circle, Southern (Antarctic) Ocean and Southern Indian Ocean. Nelson has recently been onboard the Schmidt Ocean Institute RV Falkor providing ocean mapping expertise during a challenging time due to COVID-19 restrictions.
State Emergency Service, Land Tasmania
Award for Technical Excellence
Tasmania’s SES is creating a digital twin of Tasmania upon which the Tasmanian Strategic Flood Model and future strategic flood hazard assessment will be undertaken for all Tasmanian communities. The twin is part of a partnership between the Australian and Tasmanian governments. The large project was successfully acquired and captured 12,000 square kilometres of LiDAR data within a year through challenging flying and terrain conditions. Judges praised the execution and collaboration achieved to complete of a project with such broad scale.
Esk Mapping & GIS
Award for Spatial Enablement
The Van Diemens Land Interactive Webmap is a multi-platform mobile and desktop portal connecting Heritage Tourism, Anthropology, Archaeology, Academia and technology to display convict stations and roads constructed in Tasmania during the 19th century. Esk Mapping & GIS turned a large amount of archived data into a publicly-accessible webmap, visualising not only the places, but also the accompanying metadata. The web map application plays a role in helping researchers and the general public locate and learn about convict places throughout Tasmania. The judges praised the showcase of spatial technologies in such an interesting and historical application, and an interface that facilitates analysis, visualisation, and planning