Compucon Open Technology Seminar
Kamo High School
30 May 2013 Thursday

2:00pm - 2:15pm Reception (Music Studio in Art Block)
2:15pm - 3:15pm World Project landed on New Zealand
3:15pm - 4:15pm Video Surveillance and Analytics
4:15pm - 4:45pm Muffin break (Staff Room)

Both seminar sessions contain technical contents but a technology background is not essential for joining this seminar.  The sessions will be given in a layman language.

World Project landed on New Zealand

SKA Telescope is the biggest science project in the world in this century.  When built, it will become the most powerful telescope on Earth and in orbit.  It is so powerful that it will detect an airport radar on another planet of 50 light years away (if there is one).  The telescope will not be built in New Zealand but in Australia and South Africa (why 2 sites).  New Zealand is a founding member of this international project along with 9 other countries and a New Zealand government official is the current vice chairperson of the international SKA governing board.  This project was conceived in 1991 and has taken 22 years to reach the detail design stage.  The telescope will require 2 sets of high performance computing systems.  One is for converting waves from the sky to a form visible by scientists and astronomers.  The second is the data centre where scientists and astronomers work on the images.  New Zealand, England, and Canada have been assigned by the international project office to coordinate with other countries to investigate the feasibility of various computing technologies for converting sky waves to human visibilities.  There are 5 New Zealand members from 3 universities and Compucon working on this design job.  We completed the investigation as recent as 3 May 2013.  This seminar will disclose a lot of top world technology information that is otherwise not accessible elsewhere.  The experience is a huge education and business learning curve.  The speaker is the SKA design team member from Compucon New Zealand.

Video Surveillance and Analytics

Many of us have travelled in trains or train cars not driven by human inside the train.  These trains operate in a very controlled environment such as isolated tracks with direct link to a control centre.  This year is the start of private cars to become driverless and road tests are being done to learn more varieties of real life traffic scenarios.  Stepping back to New Zealand, our computer vision technology has been limited to IP based video surveillance for building security purposes.  The other most commonly known application is the recognition of vehicle registration plate numbers of cars going through the Orewa - Puhoi toll road.  This situation is going to change dramatically this year.  This seminar will describe several applications that are immediately available to any New Zealand organisation for security, safety, marketing, statistical, and whatever purposes that we can think of covering at least 30 industry sectors including schools and hospitals etc.  We call these applications Video Analytics and they are the 2nd stage of technology development after IP Video Surveillance. In the meantime, Compucon has already started the 3rd stage of development called data modelling.  This seminar will disclose the full story to the audience.  The content has a high context in education, administration, and business. 

Speaker:
TN Chan is the general manager and system architect of Compucon New Zealand. He
has provided industry level guidance to the University of Auckland since year 2002, and
lectures and seminars to teachers and students of Kamo High School for about the same
period. He is a Chartered Engineer with major industrial project management track
records in Hong Kong and Wellington. His current interest is in technology transfer,
quality assurance, and business productivity.

Compucon New Zealand makes desktop and server computing systems for serious and
professional users as the main business. It has developed a variety of new expertise in
recent years including high performance computing as applicable to the SKA Telescope
project and various other industries and computer vision for security and other purposes.