Innovation meets sustainability at international conference

Innovators, academics, and industry experts came together for our third International Conference on Smart Sustainable Development last week.

The event included more than 30 research article and project presentations, as well as some insightful keynote and invited speeches over two days.

The Smart Sustainable Development conference and showcase is an annual event where sustainable practitioners can present innovative work and learn about what others are doing in this space.

It’s a unique opportunity to build a community of sustainable practitioners, form relationships, and showcase applications and technologies. This year’s event was held both virtually and in person at AUT.

On Thursday we heard a speech from Dr Terry-Ann Berry on supporting commercial circular waste management. On Friday we heard from Professor Albert Bifet about Green AI in Aotearoa and Dr Ben Redwood about his resource sharing app for driving the circular economy.

Research article presentations included topics such as sustainable construction, AI in agriculture, smart beekeeping, and sustainable social housing construction.

Project presentations included topics such as green architecture for weather monitoring, an eco-dairy bot, food donation, and AI for predictive maintenance in heavy machinery. The project category of the conference is for projects strongly aligned with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

Congratulations to the winners of our project category.

• 1st place - Cloud-Based Autonomous AgriTech Vehicle for Horticulture by Artem Tolstykh of Project Astra Limited and Masoud Shakiba of Unitec.
• 2nd place - CLEVA POD by Andrew Minturn CLEVACO Limited.
• 3rd place - GrEAt! Grey Energy Atlas by Florian Maehl, Alina Grau, Pascal Reddel, Mariem el Amri, and Ruth Schloegl of Frankfurt University of Applied Science, Germany.

Thank you to all of the attendees, presenters, organisers and sponsors who helped make this year’s event a success.