07 April 2010

Guest speakers for the 7th UKA Officials Conference have been announced, with England and Wales Cricket Board National Selector Geoff Miller already confirmed as keynote speaker and Deltatre now confirmed to deliver a technology infrastructure at sports events session.

As part April being earmarked as ‘Month of the Official’ the conference will take place at the St John’s Hotel in Solihull on Sunday 18 April 2010, entitled “do computers bite” and will consist of workshops and presentations, as well as discussion and the inaugural Official’s Official Awards ceremony.

Miller will focus on his experiences of how technology has had an affect on cricket, since adopting initiatives such as the third umpire and referrals system in all formats of the game;

“Technology has changed the sport of cricket dramatically in many different ways; Referrals, Hot Spot, Hawkeye and the like, help to take the ‘accept the umpires decision ‘out of the game,” he explains.

With a number of sports wrestling with the advances in technology within the sport and how to integrate new methods into field of play, Miller will be looking to highlight a key debate to conference delegates; “Is that for better or for worse?”

With technology the theme for this year’s conference the key focus, UKA’s TV events technology company Deltatre have also been confirmed to deliver on this subject, bringing with them a wealth of knowledge, experience and expertise from providing results and timing solutions to athletics and other sports events across the globe.

Events Operations Manager, George Hawes commented on what he is looking to focus on during the conference:

“I’ll be talking about our role as the data partner on UKA Major Events, primarily based around our database, talking about what information that we keep on it e.g. entries, athlete info, etc, the creation of start lists as well as technical ones, and then also how this info is then used across the various platforms, such as linkage to FEBs, server, CIS, media, TV etc as well as the upload to the websites. I hope to give Officials a valuable insight as to our overall setup on site at UKA events, and how companies like Deltatre need to be at the cutting edge of technology in order to deliver world class events”

Places are still available for the conference; delegates looking to register their place can do so online at http://www.uka.org.uk/competitions/officials/officials-conference-2010/