Awards

Click here to view a full list of all recipients.

Key Note Presentations

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Abstracts and Papers

Listed below are all the presenters in alphabetical order, with their presentation titles.  If you click on the word ‘abstract’, ‘paper’, 'presentation' or 'poster' to view these documents.

* Indicates that there is no presentation available.

Key Note Presenters

Dr Soames Job     

Dr Soames Job is the Managing Director of Global Road Safety Solutions Pty Ltd. Soames has a wealth of road safety expertise including successful leadership of practical delivery, policy and research.

Soames has been involved in road safety in many countries and provided training and guidance for road safety staff in extended workshops, as well as road safety work, in Brazil, India, Kuwait, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Poland, New Zealand, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, and USA.  Mainly as member of a team, Soames has won 25 national and international awards in road safety. Soames has over 350 scientific publications and was first listed in Who’s Who in World in 1997, for his contributions to research and health psychology.

The current Safer Journeys Action Plan contains a strong focus on safer speeds and much is happening in this space. Soames will challenge us all to understand why speed is at the heart of a safe road system from a practical evidence based perspective, and why we need to focus both on low level speeding and matching speeds to road function, design, use, and serious crash rate in order to reduce the burden of serious road trauma. Click here to view his full bio.

Professor Glenn Lyons

Glenn is the Founder of the Centre for Transport & Society at the University of West England, Bristol, UK and was its first Director until August 2010 when he was appointed as Associate Dean, with responsibility for research, in CTS’s parent Faculty of Environment and Technology. Glenn continues his research as a member of CTS in his capacity as Professor of Transport & Society.

Having originally conducted research in the areas of artificial neural networks, driver behaviour and urban traffic management, the prevailing theme of his research today is transport and society. This encompasses the three-way interactions between telecommunications, personal travel and social participation. He has a longstanding expertise concerning traveller information services and the role of the Internet and from 2002-2007 was academic advisor to the Department for Transport's Transport Direct Programme. Glenn is enthusiastic about developing understanding in the areas of travel behaviour and travel demand management. The need to understand the underlying reasons for our patterns of travel and how they change and to explore opportunities to positively influence these patterns is increasingly important as society's dependence on the car remains as strong as ever. Click here to view his full profile.

Glenn has been seconded to the Ministry of Transport, NZ as Strategy Director and will be working in NZ for the month of March 2014.

Dave Ferguson

Dave Ferguson leads the vision, learning, and mapless driving team for Google's self-driving car program. His algorithms have been used by a number of real-world robotic systems including the Mars Exploration Rovers, subterranean mine mapping robots, driverless cars, and robot manipulators. From 2006 - 2007 Dave was the planning lead for "Boss", Carnegie Mellon University's winning entry in the DARPA Urban Challenge. From 2006 - 2008 Dave was the co-lead of the Personal Robotics project at Intel Research, which resulted in "Herb", an autonomous mobile manipulation robot for indoor assistance. He received his BSc(Hons) degree in Maths and Computer Science from Otago University in 2001, and his Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2006.

Most of us use a car every day. But unlike airplanes, which have been flying on autopilot for decades, cars are still driven manually - just the way they were driven 100 years ago. This talk will discuss the Google Self-Driving Car Project, an attempt to develop passenger vehicles that are able to drive themselves. Building on early research in the 90's in Germany and the US, and more recently the DARPA Challenges, driverless car technology has now advanced to be within reach of commercial application. Dave will describe some of the underlying artificial intelligence approaches that go into driverless vehicles and some of the potential benefits such vehicles could provide.

Sam Johnson

Sam Johnson is a contagiously energetic social entrepreneur focused on finding innovative ways to bring people together, build strong teams and inspire action on the things that matter.
In 2010 Sam started the internationally acclaimed Student Volunteer Army that mobilised 11,000+ students via Facebook to clean up Christchurch following the devastating earthquakes.

Throughout the past three years Sam and the Volunteer Army team have led positive change around the world through the disaster response deployments to Japan and New York, working with UNESCO in developing the ‘Youth Beyond Disaster’ forums, and supported Christchurch through ‘The Concert’ – an initiative where four hours volunteer time, not money, earned 8,500 people access to a music concert.
Sam and the teams he works with are examples of what positive change can occur when we share responsibility for community development and disaster preparedness, and harness the resources available to make a difference in the world.

Click here to read Sam’s full bio.

Geoff Dangerfield

Geoff became the first Chief Executive of the NZ Transport Agency in August 2008.  He was previously Chief Executive of the Ministry of Economic Development and Deputy Secretary to the Treasury, and began his public sector career with the Ministry of Works and Development.

The Transport Agency has an ambitious land transport investment programme that includes delivering major state highway improvements, operating and maintaining the road network as one integrated national network and making it easier for road users to make smarter, safer, more resilient and efficient choices about how they use the network.  Our work is building on more than 100 years of investment and engineering ingenuity that has shaped New Zealand's land transport infrastructure, and it will help set us up for the next 100 years.

Rob Merrifield

Rob has worked primarily on road construction, management, and maintenance for most of his 50 years of work experience. Since 1982, Rob has helped administer funding of local authority roading for National Roads Board (NRB) and lead technical audit teams charged with assessing councils’ needs in the field and advising on better maintenance techniques.  Rob has always had a strong interest in the historic development of transportation and has built up a deep understanding of the significance and impacts of applying mechanical power to the transportation task. He has been involved for a long time in the NZ rail heritage movement.

The beginnings of rail technology are incredibly old – they can be traced back some 5,000 years in the Middle East and around the Mediterranean Sea. Railways, as we understand them, were an established technology in 1604. The big changes making modern cities possible began from 1801.  The application of steam power in lieu of the draft horse (or ox) made an enormous difference to what was possible in the world of transportation. Rob will explore and expand on the significance of this and some of the impacts on New Zealand, its development, its economy, and way of life since that time, just 212 years ago.

Click here to view Rob's full bio and overview of his presentation.

Ron Fisher, B.E, M.Eng Sc, MPENZ

Ron Fisher’s whole career has been with the former Ministry of Works, from an initial start as a draughting cadet in 1949, then university in Christchurch to study engineering, followed by field work on logging roads in the Kaiangaroa forest and back to university in Sydney to study traffic engineering. On his return to NZ, Ron worked on various planning studies in the Wellington and Wanganui regions and progressively worked up through the ranks to become  Director of Roading and a member of the National Roads Board in 1983. Following retirement, Ron has undertaken consulting work for the World Bank in Tanzania and Mozambique.

The development of New Zealand’s transport infrastructure is a difficult task to present in a brief paper. Initially, both communication and transport links within NZ were along rough tracks which had originally been developed by NZ Maori over time. With the arrival of European settlers, coastal communities developed which were serviced by coastal shipping routes thus avoiding the problems of  land transport over the  predominantly hilly terrain.
With population increases and associated vehicle growth, Government saw the need to play a more active role in the provision of effective access and henceforth introduced legislation to achieve this objective.  Progressive steps culminated in the passing of the Main Highways Act in 1922 and the establishment of the Main Highways Board in 1924. Ultimately, the Board  was replaced by the National Roads Board in 1954.
The  establishment of the new Board and its funding system commenced a new era in the progressive development of the New Zealand roading system. During the1980’s Government introduced many reforms to the public sector that impinged on the Board. The outcome was the passing of the Transit NZ Act 1989 which saw the dissolution of the Board and the end of an era.
Ron’s presentation will provide an informative overview of this critical period of NZ history in the development of NZ’s Transport Infrastructure

Steven Newman, CEO, EROAD

Steven Newman has headed two of New Zealand’s leading technology companies: EROAD, where he is now CEO/Director, and Navman. EROAD is a fully integrated technology, road charging and services company, which Steven took to commercialisation in 2009 with a world first, a national GPS/cellular-based road charging system. Since commercial launch EROAD has won two NZ Hi-Tech Awards, been ranked 10th on the Deloitte Technology Fast500 Asia Pacific 2012, fifth on the Green 50 list, and reached the Fast50 2013. Prior to joining EROAD Steven had a long and successful association with Navman, which, as COO and CEO, he helped establish as a leading international brand within the marine electronics and consumer car navigation sectors. During his tenure at Navman the company was also the recipient of multiple awards, including NZ Supreme Exporter of the Year, Manufacturing Exporter of the Year, Hi-Tech Company of the Year, Hi-Tech Deal of the Year and Deloitte / Management Top 200 Awards – Best Growth Strategy.

The Next Century. Future transport systems will save lives, time and money, and contribute to national and regional economic growth and improved environmental outcomes for New Zealand. The challenges facing our transportation infrastructure aren’t unique to New Zealand. They’re issues like congestion, safety, rising oil prices and requirements around efficiency and productivity. There are solutions that are also not unique to New Zealand; and some have already been implemented in other countries that have a more urgent need to address challenges around deteriorating infrastructure, congestion and rapid population growth. Steven’s presentation will look to address these issues and the challenges being faced in the coming years.

Greg Ellis, Conference MC

Greg graduated from Victoria University in 1992 with a BA in Theatre and Film. During 1993 Greg trained as a Primary School Teacher and in 1994 graduated with a  Diploma in Secondary teaching from Christchurch College of Education. Greg has taught in secondary schools in New Zealand and England. He has taught comedy and improvisation throughout the country for 17 years at secondary and tertiary levels. He has held the Secondary Schools, University, National and Commonwealth Theatresports titles. He has represented New Zealand at Theatresports twice - firstly as part of a Commonwealth competition in 1992 and then at the World Championships in 2006.

Greg has appeared in movies, television and radio drama and comedy. His years of experience and understanding interaction with an audience makes him ideally suited for his continuing work on numerous television studio shows.

Greg looks forward to MC'ing the conference for the fourth year.

Key Dates