A high-powered, specialized team to advance safety and security in Singapore
Singapore, May 29, 2013 – NEC Asia Pacific, a wholly-owned subsidiary of NEC Corporation (HQ: Japan), is the leader of a high-powered international consortium which has won a bid to perform the Singapore Safe City Test Bed project spearheaded by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) and the Singapore Economic Development Board (SEDB), aimed at testing advanced technologies to be used for public safety.
The Safe City Test Bed is an R&D initiative to develop new capabilities to keep Singapore safe and secure. It involves setting up test-beds to enable different government agencies to integrate and analyze data collected from existing sensors and network systems using advanced analytic and information sharing tools.
The test-bed will address a common challenge faced by agencies today, which is the continuous and extensive growth of new technologies in computing, telecommunication, data transportation and, most significantly, the use of digital devices worldwide. This proliferation leads to faster and more seamless access and sharing of information, which is complex and challenging to manage.
The NEC consortium seeks to address these challenges by building a complete, end-to-end inter-agency collaboration infrastructure that utilizes cutting-edge technologies, such as advanced data analytics, risk analysis and relationship modeling, to help multiple agencies understand and correlate information from various sources as well as to optimize resource deployment on the ground.
“We believe that the diverse expertise and capabilities brought together by the NEC AP consortium will be tremendously advantageous as they work together to create new solutions for the fast-growing public safety market. This would also be a good opportunity for NEC to build a new vertical in their Singapore operations,” said Mr Gian Yi-Hsen, Director of the Safety and Security Industry Programme Office at SEDB.
“Through our partnership with NEC in the Safe City project, we hope to create and test solutions that will significantly improve the operational capabilities and efficiencies of our Government Agencies,” said Mr. Anselm Lopez, Director Capability Development and International Partnerships at MHA.
“The Safe City Test Bed offers NEC an ideal platform to conduct R&D, to test our innovations and to eventually bring products to the global market. We are honoured to be chosen despite very stiff competition, and are confident that we have the right technologies and wide range of expertise to make the test-bed a success,” said Mr. Tan Boon Chin, Managing Director at NEC Asia Pacific’s Regional Competency Centre for Public Safety.
NEC is known globally for its safety and security solutions. The company’s biometric fingerprint and facial recognition technologies, which have been used in more than 30 countries, have been ranked No.1 by the US National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST)[1]. The company recently introduced a “Safer Cities” global initiative which offers an advanced and comprehensive suite of safety solutions such as immigration control, city surveillance, national identification, law enforcement, cyber security and emergency and disaster management to governments around the world.
The NEC-led grouping consists of multinationals like ESRI Singapore, iOmniscient Pte Ltd and Oracle as well as G Element Pte Ltd, GreenFossil Pte Ltd, and ZWEEC Analytics Pte Ltd. The solutions proposed in the test-bed are generally experimental and developmental in nature, although the members in the NEC consortium have a wealth of experience deploying similar technologies globally.
[1]Available from Press Release
http://www.nec.co.jp/press/en/1001/2001.html
http://www.nec.co.jp/press/en/1006/3002.html
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Press Contacts at NEC Asia Pacific:
Ms Masako Hirano
DID : +65 6379 2570
Mobile : +65 9018 6652
Email : M-Hirano@NEC.com.sg