With the rapid urbanisation of the world, cities everywhere are experiencing growth in both size and complexity. Each city has a unique set of circumstances, and city planners must defend against multiple types of security threats, both man-made and natural, physical and virtual.
So says Walter Lee, head of innovation management office: global safety division at NEC Corporation, who will be presenting on 'Advanced technologies to keep cities safer,' at the ITWeb Security Summit 2016 from 16 to 20 May at Vodacom World in Midrand.
He says attacks in prominent and developed cities over the past 18 months, for example Brussels, Paris, Sydney, and similar, have shown that threats will only become more disruptive and decentralised as criminals look for new ways to exploit the system. "This puts a massive strain on governments to look for ways to defend on multiple fronts effectively and efficiently."
According to Lee, many of the challenges faced by city planners, ranging from terrorism to natural disasters, require the cooperation of different branches of the government. "To launch a co-ordinated response, different arms of the government, with different levels of access, must contribute their own sets of data input."
In these instances, he says technology can be used to facilitate cross-agency collaboration. In the aftermath of a disaster, governments need to swing quickly into the recovery stage. "Big data, including the latest machine-to-machine communication technologies, promises to enable the rapid response required."
He says at the end of the day, the goal is to achieve situational awareness - a multifaceted understanding with reasoning capabilities that not only displays information but presents actionable intelligence.
Delegates attending Lee's talk will learn about two exciting technologies - face recognition and fingerprinting - and will share how these and other technologies have been deployed to help government agencies maintain safety, security and efficiency in their city operations.
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