An exciting aspect of the AETM activities is visiting our sister associations’ annual conferences, as well as having those associations visit Australia and attend the AETM Conference each November.

This year, AETM president Scott Doyle and Federation University’s Amit Suyan, one of the 2024 AETM scholarship winners, attended the ETC Conference hosted at North Carolina State University in the beautiful city of Raleigh.

Amit, as one of the scholarship winners, was offered the opportunity to attend an international conference and repeat his winning presentation from the AETM 2024 Conference. The presentation titled Hybrid Teaching and Meeting Spaces explained Federation University’s “Connected Classrooms” concept.

It was well received, and the ETC delegates were captivated by the fantastic hybrid deployments at Federation University, with a lot of interest in follow-up questions for Amit.

A big focus of the conference this year was, naturally, AI in AV and education. It was quite interesting to note that the frenzy and negative concerns of AI in our industry are dissipating as early adopters of AI are sharing the drawbacks and misses that AI is presenting, whilst also noting how it can make a positive impact now in our daily work and the hopes of how AI can support AV management and deployment in the future.

The North Carolina State University AV team conducted a few workshops in their newly built learning spaces. These sessions are always great to participate in. Lessons learned from the project are how we all learn internally and from one another.

One particular active-learning space, shoe-horned into a basement of the building, demonstrated how complex fine-tuning of audio systems to complement the built environment and booth display automations certainly highlighted how in-house AV teams’ expertise complements system integrators with the organisational knowledge and stakeholder feedback held when deploying new spaces.

The AETM is looking forward to welcoming both ETC and SCHOMS presentations at our annual conference this year, hosted by UTS in November.