ASSOCIATED PRESS
Gov. Linda Lingle spoke with Albert del Rosario, ambassador to the United States from the Philippines, at the state Capitol. Ambassadors from the 10 countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations met with Lingle Tuesday in advance of an inaugural summit on homeland security issues.
Exhibitors show off the
latest in high-tech safety
As head of a small technology company in American Samoa, Gerhard Sword would probably go bankrupt if he had to travel to various Asia and Pacific Rim countries to tout his passport authentication system.
In Hawaii this week, he has a captive audience -- the state has done the work of gathering officials from throughout the region for a summit to promote security initiatives and business opportunities for companies such as Sword's Express Electronics.
"I'm looking forward to talking to a lot of people about our system," Sword said yesterday at the opening of the inaugural Asia-Pacific Homeland Security Summit & Exposition. "Hopefully, we can start to put in some of the systems around the Asia-Pacific region."
The exposition allows technology developers such as Sword to showcase their products to an interested audience.
Sword's system needs just four seconds to perform 27 authentication checks on a single passport and is already in use in American Samoa, a U.S. Territory about 2,300 south of Hawaii.
"We're a very small business in American Samoa and we'd like to let people know that we are developing software there for border security," Sword said.
Jackson Kemper III, a representative for Sterling, Va.-based Cryptek, also is in town to showcase his company's transportable satellite communications system. The module, about the size of a small file cabinet, can transmit high-quality, encrypted data securely from virtually anywhere.
"Here, it's just a very prestigious group of industry and government leaders from around the Pacific region," Kemper said. "It's a good chance for a small company like Cryptek ... to get exposure to a lot of people in one place that we would never really have a chance to get."
Even military units are exhibiting their research and development projects.
James Grosse is an investigator with the Army's Research, Development and Engineering Command's Simulation Technology and Training Center in Orlando, Fla.
Standing in front of a 6-foot video screen that looked more like a giant video game, he demonstrated how the Army uses virtual reality to train emergency response teams without having a physical impact on the environment.
On the video screen, bodies writhed and convulsed on the steps of City Hall in Philadelphia, the site of a simulated chemical attack. The technology allows response workers to experience a scenario without having to use actors or fake chemical agents.
"We don't have to pollute the environment," Grosse said. "We can do it in a virtual world like this."
He, too, is appreciative of the audience that the summit has provided for his unit.
"It's a very good benefit to get folks to see this kind of technology and actually start to push it up through their chains of command to say, 'We've seen this, we've seen what it can do, we need to get this product out there right away,"' he said. "This kind of conference is very helpful in getting our message out."
