SUDNEY: Australia’s Customs and Immigration agency has created a new unit to pilot cutting edge technologies following the merger of Customs with Immigration.
The new unit will pool resources to design and implement technologies across the merged agency, such as advanced analytics, biometrics, CCTV and traveller border clearance. The team will be headed by Randall Brugeaud, who was CIO at Customs prior to this.
The agency plans to use facial recognition technology to identify suspicious travellers from CCTV feeds. It will also analyse data from both immigration and customs systems to link passengers to illegal goods being smuggled in.
Once these new services have been put in place, the responsibilities for running them will be handed over to the IT division, headed by the agency’s new CIO Matt Yannopoulos. Yannopoulos was previously CIO of the Immigration Agency.
The Department of Customs and Department of Immigration are will become a single agency from 1 July this year.
