Joint institutions Breakfast

The NZCS is collectively organising the Joint Institutional Breakfast. The guest speaker, Professor Emeritus Bob Hodgson, a highly regarded New Zealand academic, engineer, and entrepreneur, will enlighten us with some perspectives on how we can make New Zealand more resilient.

Abstract:
As a group of people, representative of those most able to improve the resilience of our national infrastructure, we need to recognize that past practices have been found wanting and in need of systematic improvement. In some areas the fundamentals of reliable design have not been fully respected and in others they have been ignored. For example, the failure of regional communications caused by the East Coast floods and the incident when a single point failure disabled all the engines of the inter-island ferry Kaitaki together make a sorry litany.

Speaker Profile:
R M (Bob) Hodgson, Emeritus Professor, Massey University, Distinguished Fellow Engineering New Zealand is a recognized expert in image processing, human factors, and systems engineering. His very full academia career includes a strong record in scholarship, teaching and administration with about forty masters and PhD degrees supervised to completion. He has published widely.

Most of his R&D work has been in co-operation with industry. He has made an outstanding contribution to Engineering New Zealand, having served on numerous Boards and committees, Engineering New Zealand and NZQA degree accreditation panels, and six International Washington Accord Panels. He was also a founding member of the New Zealand Council of Engineering Deans.

Professor Hodgson is the Technical Director of a start-up science and engineering company, Veritaxa Limited. The company has won worldwide recognition for the Classifynder technology that uses image processing combined with AI to extract information from microscopic images applied to palynology. About twenty systems have been exported.