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TechnologyDHS S&T, BIRD Foundation Announce Awards for Advanced Homeland Security Technologies
The Israel – U.S. Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation the other day announced three awards for collaborative projects totaling $2.3 million to develop advanced technologies for the homeland security mission.
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Help speechCountering Hate Speech by Detecting, Highlighting “Help Speech”
Researchers have developed a system that leverages artificial intelligence to rapidly analyze hundreds of thousands of comments on social media and identify the fraction that defend or sympathize with disenfranchised minorities such as the Rohingya community. Human social media moderators, who couldn’t possibly manually sift through so many comments, would then have the option to highlight this “help speech” in comment sections.
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CybersecurityThings Are about to Get a Lot More Confusing for Cybercriminals
While cyberdeception is not totally new as a way to fend off cybercriminals – researchers have been looking into this technique for a few years now – researchers are now taking a unique approach: using cognitive science to inform how to deceive attackers effectively.
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Nuclear wasteStockpiles of Nuclear Waste Could Be More Useful than We Might Think
Chemists have found a new use for the waste product of nuclear power - transforming an unused stockpile into a versatile compound which could be used to create valuable commodity chemicals as well as new energy sources.
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ResilienceInternational Effort to Improve Urban Resilience
Extreme climate events are severely affecting communities in the U.S. and around the world. The examples are plenty. Bushfires in Australia, wildfires in California, flooding on both U.S. coasts and inland, and much more. In the face of extreme climate events, experts explore developing nature-based solutions.
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Truth decayThe Risks Posed by Deepfakes
This use of a deepfake video is becoming more prevalent. While pornography currently accounts for the vast majority of deepfake videos, the technique can also be used to defraud, to defame, to spread fake news or to steal someone’s identity.
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Snake venomNew Technique to Transform Anti-Venom Production
Snake bites kill more than 120,000 people a year, more than a third of them in India. About 400,000 lose limbs after amputations become necessary to prevent the spread of the venom. The number of people bitten by snakes is increasing as a result of more people living near areas which are snake habitats, but the production of venom antidotes has not changed much since anti-venom was first produced in 1896. Scientists are ready to transform the production of anti-venom after mapping the DNA of the Indian cobra for the first time.
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First respondersResponderCQ Measures Disaster Resilience, Response Capabilities
Disaster response has dominated headlines for years, and technologies to enhance disaster response capabilities are rapidly emerging. Now, a new global dialogue is centering on resilience—how we not only come together to help communities quickly recover, and even thrive, post-disaster, but how we strengthen their defenses against future threats. DHS S&T funded the development of guidance and tools to help communities measure their “Capability Quotient (CQ),” which is the readiness to respond to risk and to respond to disruptions of any kind.
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PerspectiveArtificial Intelligence: China “Uses Taiwan for Target Practice” as It Perfects Cyber-Warfare Techniques
China has already deployed its expertise in artificial intelligence to make China into a surveillance state, power its economy, and develop its military. Phil Sherwell writes that now Taiwan’s cybersecurity chiefs have identified signs that Beijing is using AI to interfere in an overseas election for the first time. It is “a laboratory for China for adaptation and improvement on political warfare instruments which can then be unleashed against other targeted democratic societies,” Michael Cole, editor of the Taiwan Sentinel, said
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Nuclear safetyA New Way to Remove Contaminants from Nuclear Wastewater
Nuclear power continues to expand globally, propelled, in part, by the fact that it produces few greenhouse gas emissions while providing steady power output. But along with that expansion comes an increased need for dealing with the large volumes of water used for cooling these plants, which becomes contaminated with radioactive isotopes that require special long-term disposal. New method concentrates radionuclides in a small portion of a nuclear plant’s wastewater, allowing the rest to be recycled.
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Nuclear safetyHelping Keep U.S. Nuclear Deterrent Safe from Radiation
Advanced modeling speeds up weapons research, development and qualification. It also lets researchers model changes in experimental conditions that increase the total radiation dose, change how fast a device gets that dose, and mix and match destructive elements like neutrons, energy and heat in environments that cannot be recreated in experimental facilities.
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AliensAlien Life Is Out There, but Our Theories Are Probably Steering Us Away from It
If we discovered evidence of alien life, would we even realize it? Life on other planets could be so different from what we’re used to that we might not recognize any biological signatures that it produces.
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Argument: China syndromeThe Chinese Threat to U.S. Research Institutions Is Real
The Chinese government is pursuing a comprehensive, well-organized, and well-funded strategy to exploit the open and collaborative research environment in the United States to advance their economic and military expansion at our expense. Josh Rogin writes that for too long, U.S. research institutions have been asleep to Beijing’s efforts.
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Water securityOn-Demand Drinking Water from Air
Providing potable drinking water to deployed troops operating in low resource or contested environments is no simple undertaking. Logistics teams face great risk delivering water and often incur what would otherwise be preventable casualties. Low-power extraction technologies could capture potable water from ambient arid air, giving deployed troops greater mission flexibility.
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PerspectiveDARPA Wants Smart Suits to Protect Against Biological Attacks
DARPA, the Pentagon’s research arm, wants to accelerate the development of innovative textiles and smart materials to better and more comfortably protect humans from chemical and biological threats.
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The long view
Perspective: AIAI Could Be a Disaster for Humanity. A Top Computer Scientist Thinks He Has the Solution.
Stuart Russell is a leading AI researcher who co-authored the top textbook on the topic. He has also, for the last several years, been warning that his field has the potential to go catastrophically wrong. In a new book, Human Compatible, he explains how. AI systems, he notes, are evaluated by how good they are at achieving their objective: winning video games, writing humanlike text, solving puzzles. If they hit on a strategy that fits that objective, they will run with it, without explicit human instruction to do so.
Perspective: New warWhy America Isn’t Equipped for the New Rules of War
Sean McFate is a former paratrooper in the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division; he’s also worked as a private military contractor in West Africa. Today he’s a professor at the National Defense University and Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. His book The New Rules of War, published earlier this year, dissects the ways warfare must change in order for America to succeed. MIT Technology Review’s war reporter Janine di Giovanni sat down to ask him about his vision for the future of conflict.
Perspective: China syndromeBeijing Will Give You Cold War Nostalgia
America’s twenty-first-century competition with China is likely to be more dangerous and more complex than the U.S. Cold War with the Soviet Union. Walter Russell Mean writes that this is the result of two factors: First, China’s economic power makes it a much more formidable and resourceful opponent than the Soviet Union was., and, second, the technological environment has changed dramatically in the past generation.
Perspective: AIRussia’s AI Quest is State-Driven — Even More than China’s. Can It Work?
The Russian government, more than Western governments and more than China’s, is working hard to position itself as a facilitator and promoter of innovation in artificial intelligence. Vladimir Putin said that the technology will lead whoever masters it to global advantage. Samuel Bendett writes that “Those who doubt that this uniquely state-heavy approach can succeed would do well to remember that today’s internet and mobile telecommunications grew out of Pentagon-funded research, that the Soviet Union led the Space Race for a decade, and that U.S. astronauts currently ascend to orbit atop Russian rockets.”
Perspective: Climate threatsTechnologies to Manage Climate Change Already Exist – but U.K. Needs to Scale Up Efforts Urgently
In the U.K., climate change is being tackled by taking baby steps. Andreas Busch writes that this is unfortunate, because “The world already has effective engineering solutions to manage climate change and to limit global temperatures from rising above 1.5°C – a target set by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But there is a desperate lack of conviction from politicians and society to address the climate emergency.”
Perspective: Quantum computingA Quantum Computing Future Is Unlikely, Due to Random Hardware Errors
Earlier this fall Google announced that it had demonstrated “quantum supremacy” – that is, that it performed a specific quantum computation far faster than the best classical computers could achieve. IBM promptly criticized the claim, saying that its own classical supercomputer could perform the computation at nearly the same speed with far greater fidelity. “So how can you make sense of what is going on?” Subhash Kak, a professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, asks. “As someone who has worked on quantum computing for many years, I believe that due to the inevitability of random errors in the hardware, useful quantum computers are unlikely to ever be built.”
Argument: China syndromeThe Chinese Threat to U.S. Research Institutions Is Real
The Chinese government is pursuing a comprehensive, well-organized, and well-funded strategy to exploit the open and collaborative research environment in the United States to advance their economic and military expansion at our expense. Josh Rogin writes that for too long, U.S. research institutions have been asleep to Beijing’s efforts.
Argument: China syndromeThe Chinese Threat to U.S. Research Institutions Is Real
The Chinese government is pursuing a comprehensive, well-organized, and well-funded strategy to exploit the open and collaborative research environment in the United States to advance their economic and military expansion at our expense. Josh Rogin writes that for too long, U.S. research institutions have been asleep to Beijing’s efforts.