A New ‘Super Event’ for Physical, Digital and Virtual Document Security

Reconnaissance International, organisers of the Optical Document Security™ and Digital Document Security™ conferences, have announced that these are to be combined into one new ‘super-event’ for physical, digital and virtual documents – Optical & Digital Document Security™ – which will take place in-person in Vienna from 17-19 January 2022.

The Optical Document Security Conference, held every two years since 1996, is well-known to the currency community as a highly respected technical event which has seen the first public announcement of many now common optical security features. Digital Document Security, a spin-off event, was quickly recognised as an essential bridge between the physical and digital ‘document’ security worlds.

In combining the two events, Reconnaissance is recognising that the physical – or tangible – document and digital worlds are no longer separate. Will the digitisation of transactions and identity verification supplant the well-recognised physical documents that have traditionally been used or will they co-exist in a symbiotic relationship?

This new event will focus on the why and how of this question and the critical need to achieve the highest levels of security and data protection in the digital domain, as have been achieved in the physical domain.

ODDS will be the platform to bring together the thousand-year experience of the banknote and ID document world with the fast-moving field of digital financial transactions, virtual ID and digital identity verification. People involved in the digital transaction, identity and authentication communities and specifiers, designers, producers and issuers of secure documents will find ODDS a valuable forum to explain, learn, network and explore possibilities.

The presentations at the ODDS conference will be selected by a committee of specialists and experts to ensure that this merged conference maintains the high quality that has made ODS and DDS such respected events. Conference Chairman will be Ian Lancaster, co-founder and former CEO of Reconnaissance, who has been involved with ODS from its beginnings, serving as Chairman since 2016, as well as chairing the DDS conference.

Due to the broader scope of the event, the programme will take place in two streams or tracks, one focusing on the more traditional topics of what was ODS, and the other on the new areas of digital and virtual security.

The former stream will cover topics that have typically been the lynchpin of the ODS events –security image design, novel optical technologies, new material developments, benchmarking, unique identifiers, analytics, ergonomics and the engagement with human senses. Topics in the digital and virtual stream will include the security of online and NFC financial transactions. The plenary (combined) sessions will cover smartphones, analogue versus digital features, machine learning and AI.

There will also be two pre-event workshops – one focusing on physical document security technologies and the other on digital.

Commenting on the return of in-person events, of which ODDS will be one of the first in the industry, Ian Lancaster said: ‘digitisation is a key aspect of this conference, and digitisation in all aspects of our lives has taken a quantum leap over the past year. But only face to face can the informal yet constructive discussions take place that will enable us to take these issues of personal and payment security – never more critical than now – forward and shape them in a post-COVID world’.

The Call for Papers for ODDS has just been published, with a deadline of 31 July.

www.opticaldigitalsecurity.com