Spin-off benefits coming: Expert

By PETER ESILA
PAPUA New Guinea must be prepared for business spin-offs in the coming years, because once the internet becomes cheap, high-tech companies will want to make their presence known in this part of the region, says an expert.
Brendan Doyle, of the Remote Monitoring Technology (RMT), a company specialising in Remote Monitoring Technologies, was speaking at the Security Congress in Port Moresby yesterday.
He said his company has been talking with some mining companies in the country about remote monitoring technology as opposed to CCTV.
“Situational awareness is not about having thousands of videos.”
“Remote monitoring is not conventional.”
He said remote monitoring towers with 360deg revolving cameras capture what you want to see and sends it straight to your phones applications.
“So you might have all these cameras in different places, in the middle of nowhere, so what happens is that we set them up and we register them and we get an alert so what we do is that we set up with motion-learning remote-sensing so we pick up anything that moves,” Doyley said.
“But you as a customer do not want everything because sometimes it might be a bird or a kangaroo, so you want to know what you want to see.”
The company has experience with Santos mines in New South Wales.
He said the system at RMT is all about putting images and videos from any location in a position where massive computer processing power is applied in real time to discern what the subject of an image is, and whether it is relevant to a situation.
“The value of cameras in remote locations is vastly improved if the technology can report on events that occur automatically,” Doyle said.
“Motion-sensed images are often reporting false positives or pictures of subjects not relevant to the user.
“Using the power of Machine Learning, images are analysed to identify meaningfull content such as identifying vehicles, people and animals.
“We do have fixed cameras in the swamps, road monitoring and during that time, in the last 10 years, we have understanding on how you can supply power in remote locations.
“So when the opportunity came for us to come to PNG, we thought that a lot of attributes of the environment and the climate of what you do here actually lends itself pretty well to our technology sets.
“We have been working with some of the mining companies.”
Wayne Duckwoth, the director of sales and strategy, said: “We are talking to people in Lae at the moment in relation to different stuff happening over there, so we have got some people who want to be partners in the business here so we are just coming to see just what is needed here, and there is a big need for it because there is a lot of remote areas.
“But we also need to talk to the government in relation to internet because it is not all that good, for our service, you are going to require some coverage of the internet, and also we have got an issue here, we are very good with power in relation to solar, hydro.”