Circa 2018
Riding the wind above the Andes Mountains, an experimental glider has set a world record for high-altitude flight.
On Sept. 2, the sleek Perlan 2 glider carried two pilots to 76100 feet, or more than 14 miles, over the El Calafate region in southern Argentina. That’s the highest altitude ever reached by humans aboard an unpowered fixed-wing aircraft, and one of the highest altitudes reached by an aircraft of any description. Only spy planes and specialized balloons have flown higher.
Posted in education, robotics/AI, surveillance, transportation | Leave a Comment on Big Brother gets even bigger: Moscow to create database with residents’ salaries, vehicle information & even school results
Moscow has revealed a plan to spend $2.4 million on a giant database containing information about every single city resident, including passport numbers, insurance policies, salaries, car registrations – and even their pets.
It will also include work and tax details, school grades, and data from their ‘Troika’ care – Moscow’s unified transport payment system, used on the metro, busses and trains.
The new proposal will undoubtedly increase fears about ever-growing surveillance in the Russian capital, where the number of facial recognition cameras has recently been increased.
The arrival of government-operated autonomous police robots does not look like predictions in science fiction movies. An army of robots with gun arms is not kicking down your door to arrest you. Instead, a robot snitch that looks like a rolling trash can is programmed to decide whether a person looks suspicious —and then call the human police on them. Police robots may not be able to hurt people like armed predator drones used in combat— yet —but as history shows, calling the police on someone can prove equally deadly.
Long before the 1987 movie Robocop, even before Karel Čapek invented the word robot in 1920, police have been trying to find ways to be everywhere at once. Widespread security cameras are one solution—but even a blanket of CCTV cameras couldn’t follow a suspect into every nook of public space. Thus, the vision of a police robot continued as a dream, until now. Whether they look like Boston Dynamics’ robodogs or Knightscope’s rolling pickles, robots are coming to a street, shopping mall, or grocery store near you.
The Orwellian menace of snitch robots might not be immediately apparent. Robots are fun. They dance. You can take selfies with them. This is by design. Both police departments and the companies that sell these robots know that their greatest contributions aren’t just surveillance, but also goodwill. In one brochure Knightscope sent to University of California-Hastings, a law school in the center of San Francisco, the company advertises their robot’s activity in a Los Angeles shopping district called The Bloc. It’s unclear if the robot stopped any robberies, but it did garner over 100000 social media impressions and Knightscope claims the robot’s 193 million overall media impressions was worth over $5.8 million. The Bloc held a naming contest for the robot, and said it has a “cool factor” missing from traditional beat cops and security guards.
U.S. Navy Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer, and AI Portfolio Manager, Office of Naval Research.
Brett Vaughan is the U.S. Navy Chief Artificial Intelligence (AI) Officer and AI Portfolio Manager at the Office of Naval Research (ONR).
Mr. Vaughan has 30 years of Defense Intelligence and Technology expertise with strengths in military support, strategic communications, geospatial intelligence (GEOINT), Naval Intelligence and Navy R&D.
He spent two decades in various roles at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), an additional 10 years in intelligence roles in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, and was recently appointed to his current role in 2019.
Mr. Vaughan has Master’s Degrees in Environmental Science from Johns Hopkins University, and in National Security and Strategic Studies from the Naval War College, as well as a Bachelor’s Degree in Geography and Cartography, from University of Mary Washington.
The U.S. Office of Naval Research (ONR) is an organization within the United States Department of the Navy responsible for the science and technology programs of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps.
Established by Congress in 1946, its mission is to plan, foster, and encourage scientific research to maintain future naval power and preserve national security.
The Office of Naval Research carries out its mission through funding and collaboration with universities, other government laboratories, nonprofit and for-profit organizations, and also oversees the Naval Research Laboratory, the corporate research laboratory for the Navy and Marine Corps, which conducts a broad program of scientific research, technology and advanced development, and has a prestigious history, including the development of the first U.S. radar system, synthetic lubricants, and surveillance satellites.
Popular media and policy-oriented discussions on the incorporation of artificial intelligence (AI) into nuclear weapons systems frequently focus on matters of launch authority—that is, whether AI, especially machine learning (ML) capabilities, should be incorporated into the decision to use nuclear weapons and thereby reduce the role of human control in the decisionmaking process. This is a future we should avoid. Yet while the extreme case of automating nuclear weapons use is high stakes, and thus existential to get right, there are many other areas of potential AI adoption into the nuclear enterprise that require assessment. Moreover, as the conventional military moves rapidly to adopt AI tools in a host of mission areas, the overlapping consequences for the nuclear mission space, including in nuclear command, control, and communications (NC3), may be underappreciated.
AI may be used in ways that do not directly involve or are not immediately recognizable to senior decisionmakers. These areas of AI application are far left of an operational decision or decision to launch and include four priority sectors: security and defense; intelligence activities and indications and warning; modeling and simulation, optimization, and data analytics; and logistics and maintenance. Given the rapid pace of development, even if algorithms are not used to launch nuclear weapons, ML could shape the design of the next-generation ballistic missile or be embedded in the underlying logistics infrastructure. ML vision models may undergird the intelligence process that detects the movement of adversary mobile missile launchers and optimize the tipping and queuing of overhead surveillance assets, even as a human decisionmaker remains firmly in the loop in any ultimate decisions about nuclear use. Understanding and navigating these developments in the context of nuclear deterrence and the understanding of escalation risks will require the analytical attention of the nuclear community and likely the adoption of risk management approaches, especially where the exclusion of AI is not reasonable or feasible.
Artificial intelligence helped co-pilot a U-2 “Dragon Lady” spy plane during a test flight Tuesday, the first time artificial intelligence has been used in such a way aboard a US military aircraft.
Mastering artificial intelligence or “AI” is increasingly seen as critical to the future of warfare and Air Force officials said Tuesday’s training flight represented a major milestone.
“The Air Force flew artificial intelligence as a working aircrew member onboard a military aircraft for the first time, December 15,” the Air Force said in a statement, saying the flight signaled “a major leap forward for national defense in the digital age.”
Easy Aerial claims its Albatross UAS is a tethered machine that has an unbreachable data connection.
Drone startup Easy Aerial has launched a new unmanned aerial system (UAS), called Albatross, a tethered device with unlimited flight time and an unbreachable data connection.
The drone hexacopter can carry an 8.5 lb payload capacity with three hardpoints, two on the side that can carry up to 4 lb and the bottom hardpoint that can carry payloads of up to 8 lb. The side payload stations feature standard mounting as well as Picatinny rails that support a wide range of applications such as floodlights, communications relays, loudspeakers and cyber-related and other commercial and military electronic systems. The bottom hardpoint is designed for gimbaled cameras or large ISR loads such as radar or communication jammers.
Because of these features, the system works in applications such as commercial, public safety, firefighting, military, border patrol, perimeter, and infrastructure overwatch and surveillance operations.
This is the moment a bright meteor crossed the sky over Brazil and exploded.
The phenomenon was captured on camera by the Heller and Jung Space Observatory early Monday as it entered the Earth’s atmosphere.
The center’s surveillance system, located in the city of Taquara, recorded the meteor exploding some 462 miles away near the border between Rio Grande do Sul and Uruguay approximately at 2:31am local time.
AI designed to be aware of it’s own competence.
Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador interviews Dr. Jiangying Zhou, DARPA program manager in the Defense Sciences Office, USA.
Ira Pastor comments:
On this episode of ideaXme, we meet once more with the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), but unlike the past few shows where we been spent time with thought leaders from the Biologic Technology Office (BTO), today we’re going to be focused on the Defense Sciences Office (DSO) which identifies and pursues high-risk, high-payoff research initiatives across a broad spectrum of science and engineering disciplines and transforms them into important, new game-changing technologies for U.S. national security. Current DSO themes include frontiers in math, computation and design, limits of sensing and sensors, complex social systems, and anticipating surprise.
Dr. Jiangying Zhou became a DARPA program manager in the Defense Sciences Office in November 2018, having served as a program manager in the Strategic Technology Office (STO) since January 2018. Her areas of research include machine learning, artificial intelligence, data analytics, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) exploitation technologies.
Prior to joining DARPA, Dr. Zhou was a senior engineering manager in the Information Sciences Division at Teledyne Scientific and Imaging, LLC. During her more than ten-year tenure at Teledyne, Dr. Zhou worked on many contract R&D programs from U.S. government funding agencies as well as commercial customers in the areas of sensor exploitation, signal and image processing, and pattern recognition. Dr. Zhou also served as director of R&D of Summus Inc., a small start-up company specializing in contract engineering projects for U.S. Department of Defense and commercial customers in the areas of video and image compression, pattern recognition, and computer vision. Dr. Zhou began her career as a scientist at Panasonic Technologies, Inc., Princeton, New Jersey, where she conducted research in the areas of document analysis, handwriting recognition, image analysis, and information retrieval.
Dr. Zhou received a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Science, both in computer science, from Fudan University. She received a doctorate in electrical engineering from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Dr. Zhou is a member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Society and also a member of the Upsilon Pi Epsilon international honor society for the computing and information disciplines.
