Mass Transport Security

Athol Yates specialises in analysing national security policy and the role played by the private sector in enhancing national security. He has written extensively on the subject as well as giving a large number of invited presentations.

Athol's qualifications include a Bachelor of Engineering, GradDip Soviet Studies, and Masters of Public Policy. He is the editor of the National Security Practice Notes, and one of the two anchors for National Security Radio.

His recent publications include:

He is also the author of the 180 page report Engineering a Safer Australia: Protecting Critical Infrastructure and the Built Environment, which is the only public report on Australia's critical infrastructure protection efforts.

Craig Stewart, Chief Officer of Capital Programs in the Department of Subways at Mass Transport Authority, New York City Transit

Craig Stewart serves as Chief Officer of Capital Programs, Department of Subways, reporting directly to the Senior Vice President of the Department. He is responsible for providing executive direction in the management of the Capital Program. His duties and responsibilities include long term strategic planning, financial and project management, asset database management, scope development and acceptance and testing of completed projects. Most recently Mr. Stewart has been part of the development of new Security Initiatives at New York City Transit. He is the Steering Committee representative from NYCT to the MTA.

He began his career with NYCT in 1985 where he has held numerous management positions, including Director of infrastructure Projects with the Office of Management and Budget, and Director of Program Oversight with the Engineering and Construction Department.

Graham Miller is from Queensland Transport where he is currently the Deputy Director of Transport Security. He has been in that role for the last 18 months and prior to that, Graham was in the Queensland Premier's Department as the Principal Project Manager in the Security Planning and Coordination Branch where he managed a number of counter-terrorism projects.

In his current role, Graham is also the Project Manager for Queensland's Major Transport Precinct Project which commenced last year. Graham will provide an overview of this project, and outline how Queensland is striving to improve and better coordinate counter-terrorism arrangements at its major mass passenger transport precincts. The approach that Queensland is taking in this project is quite unique, and Graham will take us through the lessons and learnings of this project to date.

David Bell, Security Manager Passenger Services, Passenger Services Group, Queensland Rail

David joined Queensland Rail as the Security Manager, Passenger Services in October 2005. Prior to this he had over 30 years in Commonwealth employment in a variety of security and risk management positions. His last 15 years in the Commonwealth was as a Senior Adviser in the Protective Security Coordination Centre where, among other things, he wrote the first consolidated Commonwealth Protective Security Manual (PSM) and coordinated many aspects of security for Federal politicians and for visiting foreign dignitaries. He was a Senior Security Adviser for both the 1981 and 2001 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings.

David has had over 36 years experience in protective security, risk management and counter-terrorism coordination in a wide variety of environments.

John is Executive Director of Bus Association Victoria, a position he has held for eight years. His role focuses on the development of more sustainable transport systems. Prior to this, John was Deputy Chairman of the National Road Transport Commission (8 years) and chaired the Victorian Recycling and Resource Recovery Council (10 years).

He has a masters degree in economics and had his own consulting practice for twenty years, specialising in policy work in transport, regional economic development and in environmental fields. At BAV, he has undertaken studies into the linkages between public transport services and transport disadvantage, in both metropolitan and regional settings.

John convened the Committee for Melbourne Public Transport Task Force, is a Board member of Metlink, the Victorian public transport marketing organization, and of the Victorian Alpine Resorts Co-ordination Council. He was awarded a Centenary Medal for services to public transport and conservation.

Tony Beard, Special Advisor, Security Risk and Prevention, Office of Transport, Department of Transport and Regional Services

Tony Beard is the Special Advisor, Security Risk and Prevention in the Australian Office of Transport Security (OTS), Department of Transport and Regional Services (DOTARS).

OTS is the Federal Government’s principle advisor on transport security and has responsibility for legislative and regulatory oversight of Australian aviation and maritime transport preventive security regimes. In addition, OTS is the lead transport security agency under the Federal Government’s Critical Infrastructure Protection program.

Isuru Neelagama is Communications and Policy Manager at the Bus Industry Confederation and has worked in a number of transport related communications roles including time with the Australian Trucking Association where he assisted in the development and implementation of a trucking security initiative funded by the Department of Transport and Regional Services.

His current work at the BIC includes a range of duties primarily focussed on building a direct relationship between BIC's lobbying activities in the area of public transport and the overall BIC communications narrative and strategy.

Peter Verwer is Chief Executive of the Property Council Australia, which is the nation’s leading advocate for the country’s $600 billion investment property industry. As well as pursuing its core business of advocacy and public affairs, the Property Council also operates learning, research, publishing and networking businesses.

Peter’s current priorities are tax reform, economic growth, sustainability and regulatory reform.

Peter is a member of many public and private sector bodies, including the Construction Forecasting Council (Chair); Mass Gatherings Infrastructure Assurance Advisory Group (Chair); Green Building Council Technical Assurance Committee (Chair); Australian Construction Industry Forum; Business Coalition for Tax Reform; Construction Safety Taskforce - CRC for Construction Innovation; Critical Infrastructure Advisory Council; Green Building Council of Australia; Joint Building Standards Policy Board of Standards Australia; MIPIM – Asia Pacific Advisory Committee; and,Shopping Centre Council of Australia.

He retired as chair of the Development Assessment Forum in 2005 and is helping establish a global real estate policy alliance.

The Property Council employs 85 people around the country and has annual revenue of twenty five million dollars.

Professor Brian Lovell, NICTA and School of Information Technology & Electrical Engineering, University of Queensland

Brian C. Lovell was born in Brisbane, Australia in 1960. He received the BE in electrical engineering in 1982, the BSc in computer science in 1983, and the PhD in signal processing in 1991: all from the University of Queensland (UQ).

Professor Lovell is Research Leader in National ICT Australia and Research Director of the Security and Surveillance Research group in the School of ITEE, UQ. He was President of the Australian Pattern Recognition Society 1995-2005, Senior Member of the IEEE, Fellow of the World Innovation Forum, Fellow of the IEAust, and voting member for Australia on the governing board of the International Association for Pattern Recognition since 1998.

Professor Lovell was Technical Co-chair of ICPR2006 in Hong Kong (Computer Vision and Image Analysis), and is Program Co-chair of ICPR2008 in Tampa, Florida. In March 2005, he was awarded Number 1 author at UQ with almost 35,000 copies of his papers downloaded from the UQ library archive. His research interests are currently focused on optimal image segmentation, real-time video analysis, and face recognition.

Dr Henry Larkin, School of Information Technology & Electrical Engineering, UNSW@ADFA

Anton van den Hengel is the Director of the Australian Centre for Visual Technologies, and was Head of the Video Surveillance and Analysis Program within the CRC for Sensor Signal and Information Processing for 6 years. Dr van den Hengel's research interests include large-scale video surveillance, video processing for unmanned vehicles, and 3D modelling from image sets. The large-scale video surveillance project focuses on the tracking of targets through surveillance networks with hundreds to tens of thousands of cameras, and has recently demonstrated methods by which the topology of a 1000 camera network may be estimated in real time.

Russell completed bachelors degrees in both Science and Biomedical Engineering (first class honours) from Flinders University in 2000. Following this he under took a PhD in Neuroscience at the Department of Physiology, University of Adelaide. In 2004 Russell joined the Insect Vision Laboratory at the University of Adelaide where he is currently an ARC Research Fellow (Industry).

Russell’s current research interest is modelling biological visual processing; specifically the calculation of self-motion and tracking of small targets in complex backgrounds under realistic lighting conditions. His research has attracted worldwide media attention with numerous news articles and invited presentations.

A/Prof Massimo Piccardi, Department of Computer Systems, Faculty of Information Technology, University of Technology, Sydney

Massimo Piccardi (M.Eng. 1991, Ph.D. 1995) is an associate professor with the Faculty of Information Technology, University of Technology, Sydney (UTS), where he leads the Computer Vision Research Group.

His main research interests are in computer vision, pattern recognition and video analysis, with applications to video surveillance, human-computer interaction and multimedia.

He has been the author or co-author of more than a hundred scientific papers on international journals and conference proceedings. He has also been the recipient of many competitive research grants and the principal investigator in several research projects mainly in the area of video surveillance.

Dr. Piccardi is a Senior Member of the IEEE and the IEEE Computer Society and a member of the International Association for Pattern Recognition.