The NSW Smart Sensing Network has hosted a Bushfire Smart Sensing Workshop convening 100 participants from across academia, industry and government on 19 October 2021.

The workshop aimed to progress a roadmap for smart sensing innovation and identify opportunities for collaborative projects advancing the development and adoption of sensing technologies for bushfires.

Keynote speakers included Peter McKechnie, Deputy Commissioner, Field Operations, NSW Rural Fire Service (RFS); Stuart Ellis, CEO, Australasian Fire and Emergency Service Authorities Council (AFAC) and Dr Karen O'Connor, Missions Program Lead Fire & Flood Resilience, Minderoo Foundation.

NSSN Co-Director Professor Benjamin Eggleton opened the event and provided an overview of NSSN Grand Challenge Program themes, including ageing, COVID-19, water, smart cities, mining and bushfires.

"The NSSN Grand Challenges have been selected to align with national and global priorities," said Professor Eggleton. "The Program provides seed funding to collaborative R&D projects developing clever sensing solutions for bushfire monitoring, mitigation and response."

NSW Chief Scientist & Engineer Professor Hugh Durrant-Whyte addressed the audience and said NSSN, as a network, is well-positioned to convene different types of technologies that might genuinely have an impact.

"There's now a pipeline of funding, which can take ideas that are seed funded in NSSN through to a commercial use and commercial reality," said Professor Durrant-Whyte.

"I highly commend NSSN's activities and for identifying bushfires as a major area. NSW Government has also identified this as an ongoing area of real interest and importance for the state."

The event continued with keynote talks and a panel discussion by experts, innovation enablers, and leaders from across industry and government.

NSW RFS Deputy Commissioner for Field Operations Peter McKechnie said there is a tremendous amount of innovation that has been done in the bushfire space, but the real challenge is the applications for these.

"Our current focus areas are around near real-time imagery and locations of new fires, real-time imagery and data on active fires, their intensity and movement, forest canopy mapping, and accurate and timely public information warnings to the community," said Mr McKechnie. 

"Some of the challenges with applying new technologies are ground truthing and creating baselines that align with fire practitioners existing memory slides. 

"Removing the false positives is another challenge. It's easy to detect false positives in a small area around lightning impact and potential fires. But once you spread that across 80 million hectares of NSW, false positives can suddenly become a significant issue."

The keynote talks were followed by a panel discussion featuring Andrew Gissing, General Manager, Risk Frontiers; Josephine Khalil, Director of Strategy and Programs, Office of the NSW Chief Scientist & Engineer; Leigh Kelson, Program Director, FireTech Connect and Rob Webb, Director, National Projects and Innovation, AFAC.

After the panel discussion, the participants formed groups to workshop opportunities for collaborative R&D projects in areas including early fire detection, landscape and vegetation, air quality, fire response, water quality and critical infrastructure.

The event was moderated by Peter Runcie and closed by NSSN Co-Director Professor Julien Epps.

“I've been really inspired by the energy, the enthusiasm and the commitment that everyone has shown towards the challenge of smart sensing for bushfires today,” said Professor Epps.

“The workshop is just the beginning of the process, the NSSN will now develop the briefs from these initial concepts through to fully formed projects.

“There will soon be a call for proposals to the NSSN Grand Challenge Fund, which offers matched funding for collaborative projects between industry and universities in the areas of the Grand Challenges like bushfires and that's a great chance to kick off some collaborative projects.”

Media contact: Shahrzad (Zad) Abbasi - 0466 548 145

The NSW Smart Sensing Network (NSSN), an initiative of the NSW Government Office of the Chief Scientist and Engineer, is a consortium of eight leading universities across NSW and the ACT that brings together academia, industry and government to develop smart sensing solutions for complex challenges.

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