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Sarah Brown, Media Manager

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E: sarah@bigbrownchairmedia.com.au

LOCATE15 CONFERENCE ANNOUNCES SPEAKERS FOR THE

SECURING OUR NATION, DISASTER & EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT STREAM
Locate15 is Australia and New Zealands leading spatial event being held at the Brisbane
Convention and Exhibition Centre 10-12 March. Locate15 is designed to energise the location
industry, inspire both producers and consumers of location information, and drive greater
awareness, adoption and innovation.
The Securing our Nation, Disaster & Emergency Management stream at Locate15 will present
not only innovative spatial technologies used to improve response time but also the ways
response teams receive data, manage recovery efforts and the overcome challenges
encountered in these complex situations.
Stream Key Speaker:
Matt Thomas Infrastructure & Traffic, Sensing City, Christchurch New
Zealand
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. He has been working
Christchurch City Council in support of their Capital Programme Group,
and the Canterbury Earthquake Rebuild Authority in prioritisation frameworks and decision
modelling.

Stream Presentations and Speakers:

AFP Response to MH17 Disaster in the Ukraine
James Harris, Australian Federal Police
There were a large number of Australian Citizens and residents on board Malaysian Airlines
Flight MH17, which triggered Australias response as a humanitarian mission to recover the
remains. Australia sent a large contingent to Holland and the Ukraine to undertake the
recovery of human remains and the identification of these remains through the AFPs DVI
capability.
Mr Harris will present an outline of the complexities of the situation, including the technical
difficulties in supplying support to teams highly isolated in extreme risk situations with little or
no communications; the multi-agency response; timeline pressures, the products created and
delivered; and the feedback from international partners.
Spatiotemporal changes in economic activity following the Canterbury earthquakes.
Chris Bowie and Vivienne Ivory, Opus Research, Opus International Consultants
Businesses take care to locate themselves in the best place. What happens when their
locations are forcibly changed? This paper presents initial findings of the recent changes in
economic activity in Christchurch, New Zealand following the 2010-2011 earthquakes. Using
multiple formal and informal secondary datasets we developed area indicators of the physical
and economic neighbourhood environments (numbers of merchants, number of businesses,
damage to land and buildings), and examined their relationship with neighbourhood levels of
economic activity (retail and accommodation and food expenditure). We found initial increases
in business numbers to the less damaged west and north of the city, but also continuing
change as the city rebuilds. Multiple general linear regression analyses compared changes over
time and across neighbourhoods after adjustment for indicators of land and building damage
within neighbourhoods.

Emergency Vehicle Priority a safer, faster response

Justin White, Public Safety Business Agency
The innovative Emergency Vehicle Priority (EVP) technology is an intuitive and dynamic system
that provides emergency response vehicles with priority access through a controlled road
network. EVP automatically interrupts normal traffic signal operations, providing a green traffic
light signal to emergency response vehicles in advance of their arrival allowing them to
proceed through the intersection without needing to stop or slow down, when safe to do so.
EVP capability is delivered by the Public Safety Business Agency and the Department of
Transport and Main Roads, supported by Queensland Ambulance Service, Queensland Fire
and Emergency Service, Queensland Police Service and local authorities in each rollout area.
Delivery of Australian Fire and Disaster Feed via Cloud Services
Brett Madsen, Permuto and Kristin Milton, Geoscience Australia
Emergency Management Australias mission is to provide situation awareness data for
government. The Australia Fire Service feed is a proof of concept project by Geoscience
Australia that aims to consolidate the current multiple state emergency feeds into a single
CAP_AU standard feed.
The entire process will be hosted on an FME Cloud instance and will allow this process to run
outside of any internal government IT infrastructure, utilising Amazon AWS and is fully scalable
with demand and will store the data, so end users can view time series data.
Realtime information helps emergency responders to see the whole picture
Peter Timmers, Public Safety Business Agency, Information and Data Services
Ensuring resources are swiftly dispatched to bushfire hotspots is a critical focus for emergency
responders. To meet this crucial need, the Public Safety Business Agency (PSBA) has
implemented an innovative Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology solution to
strengthen their mitigation efforts during a fire event.
At the start of the 2014 bushfire season, the PSBA and Queensland Fire and Emergency

Services (QFES) replaced their laptop-based mapping system with iPads equipped with a new
app, which has significantly improved their ability to monitor and understand fire behaviour.
PSBA and QFES are working on projects to develop additional emergency management
strategies and replace existing mobile GIS systems with the new app including Rapid
Damage Assessment, fuel hazard assessment and community engagement.
Using geospatial & social crowd source data with cloud technology to support an emergency
response in a zombie apocalyptic scenario
Michael Fitzpatrick, 1Spatial
Mr. Fitzpatrick will use a zombie apocalypse scenario to demonstrate how spatial data can be
combined in real time with crowd-sourced social media content and be managed by a range of
web services and technologies such as, Google Maps Engine, PostGIS, FME Cloud and Web
Based Collaboration tools. The response scenario will demonstrate the potential of a
seamless, machine-to-machine interaction over a network, combined with on-the-fly data
integration. This zombie scenario will demonstrate how it is possible to establish an effective
emergency management response that could be applied to a wide range of real world
situations.
Exhibition Opportunities
There are a limited number of exhibition stands available for Locate15. If you are interested in
showcasing your business please contact Caryn Morgan caryn@cmaevents.com.au, call +61 02
9810 2701 or visit http://www.locateconference.com/sponsor.