The restructure follows the acquisitions of TAC and Andover Controls by Schneider-Electric in 2003 and 2004 respectively. Tour Andover Controls has 2,700 employees worldwide and total estimated revenues in 2004 of $700m. The company’s entire product portfolio – encompassing security systems (intruder alarms, CCTV and access control), building management systems (automated heating, ventilation, lighting, electricity, safety and energy consumption management systems) and services (energy consultancy, exception and management reporting, remote access) – operate through fully integrated, open technologies. Benefits include reduced system lifecycle costs, as a shared technology infrastructure demands less operation, maintenance and engineering resource; more efficient building management, enabled through the provision of a single user interface and automated exception reporting; and the guarantee of backwards compatible and future proof platforms, allowing for upgrades and changes as necessary whilst avoiding the need to ‘rip and replace’. “The completion of this restructure presents a tremendous opportunity for us to revolutionise the buildings automation market,” said Derek Duffill, UK managing director, Tour Andover Controls. “Our product portfolio and systems expertise is critical to this ambition, but as important is our ability as an organisation to work with customers throughout the lifecycle of their property assets, delivering value at every stage, from design onwards. It is through this ‘customer for life’ strategy and a dedication to using innovation to reduce building lifecycle costs that we will continue to deliver the world’s most cost effective safe, comfortable and environmentally efficient buildings.

Designed through expertise in the broadcast and professional video markets where image resolution, display, modular design and flexibility is critical, Zandar MultiViewers provide one integrated interface for the security monitoring of multiple video and data sources. They offer a flexible large split-screen display that not only provides the operator with crystal clear images of the multiple sources being monitored, but also creates a virtual monitor wall, thereby eliminating the need for bulky monitor stacks in the control room. Combined with matrix switchers and DVRs, the MultiViewers provide the integrated security surveillance systems required for intelligence led problem solving for police, community, business and government institutions today. “Over the past year, security industry investment into MultiViewers has increased rapidly and has spurred our decision to exhibit at IFSEC for the very first time,” comments Deirdre Smith, CEO at Zandar Technologies. “The show is an excellent platform to showcase Zandar’s high quality range of MultiViewer products and we are confident our newest security solution, the Predator VC16, will generate enormous interest within the industry” Unlike the current range of multiplexers and DVRs, the Predator VC16 seamlessly handles 16 video inputs (including composite and s-video and up to four computer sources) and manipulates them for display on a single large screen using a projector or display device. The MultiViewer processes information in full motion and in real time, producing high resolution images of up to SXGA (1280 x 1024 pixels). Enhanced viewing for operators is achieved and the MultiViewer eliminates the restrictions of desktop viewing commonly associated with CRT monitors. Screen layouts can be flexibly managed to suit the needs of every security system with the availability of presets. Network control software can be utilised for larger control rooms where more than one Predator VC16 MultiViewer is installed and requires centralised control. Designed for future expansion, unlike multiplexers or screen-splitters, the unit can be expanded to add four additional composite video or S-video channels or four RGB HV or DVI computer graphic inputs. Up to 20 sources can be monitored.

Many integrators face new challenges of getting high-quality video over a variety of networks to meet customers’ demands for securing remote sites and branches. The situation is more complicated when different parts of a security team have different priorities for surveillance video – e.g. high frame rate or picture resolution. NiceVision Version 9 introduces networking technology which adapts to network conditions and provides the image quality for each security task without compromising network performance. NICE will show how NiceVision combines video transmission and analysis to deliver more effective security in networked control rooms. End-users and consultants will see how NiceVision improves control room efficiency, enabling faster, more accurate handling of security events. Tim Giles, product marketing manager for NiceVision observed “Customers tell us that security staff increasingly suffer from visual overload – they simply face too many images to monitor and make sense of them all. NiceVision Version 9 improves security by highlighting situations that need immediate attention.” NICE will also demonstrate its vision of how businesses can understand their customers better by analysing interactions with the physical environment, for example in bank branches and shopping centres, or transportation hubs. Together with CISCO Systems, NICE’s “Branch of the Future” vision highlights the convergence of security and MIS with the ability to analyse physical factors such as foot-fall and queue trends and deliver insights that inform operations and marketing as well as security. Giles commented “We see many businesses looking for ways to improve customer satisfaction in retail outlets, branches or even city centres. NiceVision delivers precisely the kind of insights needed to make rapid, fully-informed decisions which can directly improve business performance.” Visitors to IFSEC can also hear Cameron MacQuarrie, NICE’s business development manager for EMEA, explaining how NICE solutions can “Transform surveillance video into an enterprise asset” on the IBM sponsored HUB in the Network Advantage area.

UA professor of chemistry M. Bonner Denton holds the new technology that will allow the creation of pocket-sized explosive-detection devices. The new device is about 1,000 times more sensitive than the equipment currently used in airports to discern explosives. Rather than analyzing a swab from a person’s briefcase, the new technology could detect the traces of explosives left in air that passes over a person who has handled explosives. “This is a form of tricorder,” said M. Bonner Denton, the professor of chemistry at UA in Tucson who’s spearheading the new technology. Denton said combining such technology with a walk-through portal would make it simple to screen 100 percent of passengers. The new device can be pocket-sized. The analyzers currently used in airports are about the size of a table-top microwave oven. Denton, UA scientist Roger Sperline and Christopher Gresham and David Jones of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, N.M. are working on developing a hand-held analyzer capable of detecting small traces of explosives or illicit drugs. Such a device could be used at border crossings, Denton said. “This is more sensitive than dogs’ noses. It does not suffer from overexposure or a case of sinus. One can store it in the cabinet, then grab the unit, turn it on – and it’s running. And it tells you what material has been detected. Dogs just tell you something’s been detected.” Denton will talk about this and other portable detection instruments on Monday, March 14, at 2 p.m. Eastern Time (11 a.m Pacific Time) at the 229th American Chemical Society national meeting in San Diego. His talk, “Advanced Instrumental Technologies and Their Impact on Homeland Security and on Forensic Science,” will be given in Room 25C of the San Diego Convention Center. Detecting explosives or drugs means sorting through an environmental mish-mash of chemical signals to pick out the one chemical of interest. That’s what a drug-sniffing dog’s nose does – picks out the chemical signature of a drug from the chemicals that come from the dirty laundry, candy, food stains, fabrics, toothpaste and everything else inside someone’s luggage. To do the same thing to detect explosives, machines at airport screening stations use a technology called ion mobility spectrometry. Ions, or charged molecules, move when placed in an electric field. The speed at which an ion moves depends on its size and shape, so each ion has a characteristic speed. The airport analyzers snatch a collection of chemicals gathered from a person’s luggage, put those chemicals into an electric field and then search for any ion that has a speed that indicates “explosive.” The machine needs a certain number of molecules to accurately detect and identify a specific chemical. If there are very few molecules of a particular substance, the machine cannot distinguish that molecule from all the others in the mix. Denton realized that one place to improve detection was the electronics of ion mobility spectrometers. So he adapted circuitry originally developed for use in infrared astronomy. The new device, called a capacitive transimpedance amplifier, improves the readout circuitry in ion mobility spectrometers. “This change in readout electronics is key to the vastly improved sensitivity. It boosts the signal while lowering the noise,” Denton said. “This is the first radical change in ion detection since the 1930s.”

A recent visiting professor of mathematics at MIT and a Hollywood math consultant, Dr. Jonathan D. Farley realized that experts could make potentially grave errors by overestimating their effectiveness at breaking up terrorist cells. “They’re asking the wrong question and getting the wrong answer,” Farley explains. It’s an easy mistake to make, since most government operatives don’t use lattice theory to analyze social networks. Lattice theory, which includes Boolean algebra, is Farley’s favorite conceptual realm, and his talent at it has earned him great acclaim. (In 2003, he solved a problem posed by MIT’s Richard Stanley in 1981.) He used to joke that it has no practical purpose whatsoever, but after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Farley wondered if pure math actually could save lives. He remembered the opening line in the movie “A Beautiful Mind” about John Nash: “Mathematicians won the war.” And, he remembered Palestinian leader George Habash’s words: “Terrorism is a thinking man’s game.” Being a thinking man, Farley says, “it’s better to fight smarter, not harder,” and fighting Al Qaeda with abstract theory could more accurately assess our vulnerability to future attacks than current methods. As a bonus, it could also prevent financial resources from being wasted on phantom fears at the expense of real dangers. “People often view terrorist cells as a graph, with members as nodes connected to each other if they have a direct communications link,” Farley says. “But they’re leaving out the most important part, the hierarchy,” he says. “Terrorist cells have chains of command (partially ordered sets) from leaders to midlevel operatives to the workers who carry out orders.” As simplified examples, the graph theory would conclude that blocking four intersections along Massachusetts Avenue between Kresge Auditorium and Harvard Square could prevent MIT students from driving to the square. But students could use side streets to bypass the blocked intersections. Likewise, the graph theory would show that capturing four members of a 15-member terrorist cell arranged as a binary tree gives a 93 percent chance the cell has been disabled. Even without knowing the captives’ positions in the hierarchy, it’s still possible to plug in the “cut sets” that could break the command chain into a probability formula, and that probability is, unhappily, only 33 percent. “Lattice theory won’t tell you how to fight the terrorists, but it might tell you if you’ve won the battle,” Farley says. Farley’s hypothesis, published in late 2003, interests several military researchers, including Rebecca Goolsby of the Office of Naval Research. “With covert missions, there’s a lot of missing data, and some of it is wrong,” she says. “Jon came up with a new approach and drew up good questions” for approaching these “very muddy” issues in an analytical way. An associate professor of mathematics at Vanderbilt University, Farley was a Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professor in the MIT Department of Mathematics from January 2003 to December 2004. He is also the co-founder of a mathematical modeling consulting firm. “Our ultimate goal is to develop software so that law enforcement experts without these rigorous mathematical skills can ask–and answer–these same analytical questions about security.”

Headed by an executive team consisting of Marcell Pavlovec (group managing director) and Glenn Morris (executive chairman), the seasoned management team has a strong financial background and a proven track record in business consolidation. The previous owner of the Advanced Group, Advanced Group Company Pty Limited (AGC) was placed into Voluntary Administration, however, ACH saw enormous potential in acquiring the business to continue offering its specialised services in the fields of building automation and technology, integrated security and mechanical services. “The Advanced Group has a strong foundation consisting of four successful, established and strategically aligned businesses that have been providing its specialised services to clients for many years,” says Group Managing Director, Marcell Pavlovec. “We plan to steer the company forward to realise the opportunities that exist for our client base, through the cross-pollination of our four business streams”. Together with an enhanced balance sheet and the financial backing of the ANZ Banking Group Limited, the Advanced Group is now firmly positioned to meet its financial commitments and continue to meet customer objectives in the delivery of its core services. The operationally qualified and accredited ASS team, supported by strong business and financial management, will continue to work on projects within their niche segments to satisfy and exceed customer expectations. Headed by Managing Director, Bruce Armstrong, Advanced Security Systems will continue to ‘partner’ with their customers to achieve their corporate goals in electronic security. “Our focus on people, communication and technology is a differentiating factor in the Advanced business. We look forward to offering our customers the best possible service as part of the ACH team”, says Bruce Armstrong, Managing Director, Advanced Security Systems. As Advanced Security Systems continues to move forward in light of these developments the main objectives of ACH will be to: * Continue to offer the best possible delivery of management and technical services to its customer base. * Produce more efficient processes and outcomes to build our relationships with our staff, customers, subcontractors and suppliers. * Actively promote and capitalise upon core competencies that will result in the improvement of the delivery of our project and service/system offerings. * Be an ‘employer of choice’ and take advantage of the substantial spend of the Advance branding and further leverage that investment in our pursuits. * Initiate, reinforce and support a culture that develops the right and most appropriate leadership skills in the segments in which we trade. * Trade at a high level of corporate governance befitting of that expected in an industry like the Security Industry. Whilst the former Executive Chairman of ASS, Mr. Sam Rahim, will no longer participate in the activities of ASS, the new Executive Team would like to acknowledge his contribution over the last twenty years having been involved in building a business as a specialist provider of integrated security systems and services. The new Executive Team will continue the operations of ASS headquartered from the existing Stanmore premises and will look to substantially expand and improve the business of ASS. “Whilst we enjoy the reputation and recognition of being an innovator in the design and development of truly integrated front-end electronic control security systems, we acknowledge that the last number of months have provided for a major distraction to our business”, says Marcell Pavlovec, “However, the challenges of management change and uncertainty of parent company support have now been removed and we intend to refocus on the business until we are considered in our market the first choice for customers; the ultimate corporate goal being to be acknowledged as the unopposed market leader.

Eighty-three new products and services were entered into this program, which was established more than a decade ago to identify and showcase innovation in electronic security products and services. Sixteen judges, representing various segments of the industry, viewed and selected the winning products. The ISC-West 2005 New Product Showcase winners are: * Achievement Award for Honorable Mention given to Pacom Systems, Sarasota, FL, for their RTUSignal. * Product Achievement Award for Access Control given to Software House, Lexington, MA, for their Software House Multi-Technology Reader. * Product Achievement Award for Asset Tracking given to Servision, Jerusalem, Israel, for their IVG-400. * Product Achievement Award for Biometrics given to A4 Vision, Sunnyvale, CA, for their A4 Vision 3D Facial Enrollment Camera. * Product Achievement Award for Business Services given to SDC, Westlake Village, CA, for their Access System Design & Project Management Website. * Product Achievement Award for CCTV given to ELMO USA, Plainview, NY, for their PTC400C. * Product Achievement Award for Digital Video given to 3VR Security, San Francisco, CA for their 800i. * Product Achievement Award for False Alarm Reduction given to Security Labs, Noblesville, IN, for their Security Labs VIR-100. * Product Achievement Award for Fire Detection/Prevention given to UltraGuard, Norwalk, CT, for their UltraGuard COSYS1212-4. * Product Achievement Award for Home Automation given to M&S Systems, Dallas, TX, for their DMC3-4. * Product Achievement Award for Integrated Systems given to Hirsch Electronics, Santa Ana, CA, for their Velocity Interop. * Product Achievement Award for Intrusion Detection/Prevention given to Honeywell, Syosset, NY, for their LXL-1000. * Product Achievement Award for Monitoring given to Digital Security Controls, Concord, Ontario, Canada, for their Tl-250. * Product Achievement Award for Software given to Honeywell, Syosset, NY, for their LobbyWorks. * Product Achievement Award for Wireless given to Cypress Computer Systems, Lapeer, MI, for their WiFi Duprex/DPX-7212. * Judges Choice Award for Commercial Products given to i3DVR International, Scarborough, Ontario, Canada, for their i3-SRX48032 ARM. * Judges Choice Award for Residential Products given to UltraGuard, Norwalk, CT, for their UltraGuard COSYS1212-4. * And the Best-of-Show Award, titled the Innovation Award, given to A4 Vision, Sunnyvale, CA for their A4 Vision 3D Facial Enrollment Camera.

The MultiScope III, with its intelligent automatic data analysis, client server architecture and easy integration, represents a core component in networked systems for protecting and supporting complex operations. The aim is to demonstrate that a bespoke state-of-the-art system makes sound economic sense in terms of total cost of ownership. The user gathers and manages information more efficiently and gets more for his money if his security infrastructure provides extra services such as automatic gate-keeping or process monitoring.

The lens uniquely provides high performance in both the UV and visible wavebands, which enable investigators to identify and focus on a target in the visible and then quickly slide the UV filter across to take images in the UV without having to refocus. By using a novel telescopic focusing mount the lens gives a large movement in an extremely compact form. This provides the lens with the capability to image objects from infinity to 1:1.25 magnification without using add-on adapters. Offering a wide field of view (8.3° at 1:1.25 magnification up to 16.6° at long object distances) the lens offers unmatched high-resolution macro images for fingerprinting and human skin damage applications in particular. Because of its wide field of view and the high transmission qualities of the lens coatings used the Forensic UV Lens is considerably more light efficient than other longer focal length lenses offering an identical view. The Forensic UV Lens offers a true high-resolution crime site macro viewing capability by imaging onto a RUVIS scope with a 1:1 lens magnification whilst exactly matching the optical resolution of both lens and image intensifier.