Locate15 is the premier national spatial information conference and exhibition in Australia and New Zealand bringing together industry, government and academia 10-12 March 2015 at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre forum to discuss location-based innovation.
The Conference is designed to energise the location industry; inspire both producers and consumers of location information; and drive greater awareness, adoption and innovation of spatial technologies.
Keynote Speakers
Drew Clarke, Secretary, Commonwealth Department of Communications
Mr Clarke was appointed to office in March 2013 with a portfolio that includes the ABC, SBS, Australia
Post, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, the Telecommunications Universal Service
Management Agency and the National Broadband Network Company (NBN Co). Drew began his public
sector career as a surveyor working in Australia and Antarctica, and has held leadership roles in energy
policy, AusIndustry and science agencies.
As the outgoing Chair of ANZLIC, Drew Clarke will reflect on the achievements of the peak intergovernmental spatial policy council over his 4-year term. He will discuss his views on the future vision for ANZLIC and the spatial industry in Australia and New Zealand.
Nicholas Gruen, CEO, Lateral Economics
Mr Gruen is a widely published policy economist, entrepreneur and thought leader who has had regular columns in the Courier Mail, the Australian Financial Review, the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald.
He has advised Cabinet Ministers, sat on Australia’s Productivity Commission and founded Lateral Economics and Peach Financial. He chairs:
- The Australian Centre for Social Innovation;
- The Deakin University Arts Participation Incubator
- The Open Knowledge Foundation (Australian Chapter)
Mr Gruen is Patron of the Australian Digital Alliance, which brings together Australia’s libraries, universities, and major providers of digital infrastructure such as Google and Yahoo.
Topic Presenters
Stream: Sustainable Management of our Natural Resources
Dr Shay Har-Noy, Senior Director of Geospatial Big Data, DigitalGlobe
Dr. Har-Noy serves as Senior Director of Geospatial Big Data at DigitalGlobe where he is running the initiative to extract critical information from the 3,000,000 km2 of high-resolution satellite imagery that DigitalGlobe collects daily. Har-Noy graduated summa cum laude from Rice University with degrees in Economics and Electrical Engineering and received a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering with research in image processing from UC-San Diego.
Teaming up with other experts in the field he was founder and CEO of Tomnod, a high tech San Diego company that leveraged crowdsourcing, machine learning, and cloud computing to make timely satellite image analysis more accessible to open new markets. Tomnod was acquired by DigitalGlobe in early 2013 and is now a critical component of DigitalGlobe’s Geospatial Big Data technology stack.
Stream: Securing our Nation, Disaster and Emergency Management
Matt Thomas, Sensing City, NZ
Mr Thomas has worked as a consultant in Business Architecture and Programme Management for over fifteen years in the UK and New Zealand and started his own consulting company in early 2013 and has been working on Sensing City since April 2013.
Matt Thomas is working to turn Christchurch into the only place in the world where you can see how cities work in real time, based on data. This involves the installation of sensors in the rebuilt infrastructure, and aggregation of existing public and private data.
Call for Papers have been extended to 22 December. For the full list of topic/streams please visit or to submit your Executive Summary visit .