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U.S. Agencies Buy Vast Quantities of Personal Information on the Open Market – a Legal Scholar Explains Why and What It Means for Privacy in the Age of AI
The issues pf the protection of personal information in the digital age is increasingly urgent. Today’s commercially available information, coupled with the now-ubiquitous decision-making artificial intelligence and generative AI like ChatGPT, significantly increases the threat to privacy and civil liberties by giving the government access to sensitive personal information beyond even what it could collect through court-authorized surveillance.
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Testing Next Generation Flood and Wildfire Alerting Technology
DHS S&T conducted a demonstration of new technology that integrates unattended flood and wildfire sensors with Integrated Public Alert Warning System (IPAWS) with Open Platform for Emergency Networks (IPAWS-OPEN). These systems have the potential to provide life-saving critical emergency alerts to people in affected areas.
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Tidal Energy Project for Carbon Emission Reduction and Energy Security
The University of Oxford will lead an ambitious £7 million project to help deliver scalable, affordable and sustainable tidal stream energy. The project will address the key challenges that are currently preventing the tidal energy sector from reaching its full potential, with the aim of boosting energy security.
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FireDrone Supports the Firefighters
Researchers are developing a heat-resistant drone that can analyze the source of danger at close range in the event of a building or forest fire. This allows firefighters to optimize the strategy of a high-risk operation before entering the danger zone.
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Four Ways Criminals Could Use AI to Target More Victims
Warnings about artificial intelligence (AI) are ubiquitous right now, but we have been using AI tools for a long time. AI is a tool to increase efficiency, process and sort large volumes of data, and offload decision making – and these tools are open to everyone, including criminals. Observing how criminals have adapted to, and adopted, technological advances in the past, can provide some clues as to how they might use AI.
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Titan Destroyed by “Catastrophic Implosion”
The U.S. Coast Guard announced Thursday afternoon that the Titan submersible was likely destroyed by a catastrophic implosion. The Titan joins a sad, and long, list of lethal maritime accidents.
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Robots Could Help Verify Compliance with Nuclear Arms Agreements
Ensuring that countries abide by future nuclear arms agreements will be a vital task. Inspectors may have to count warheads or confirm the removal of nuclear weapons from geographical areas. Those hotspots could include underground bunkers and require confirmation that no weapons exist in a location at all. Now, researchers have devised an automated way to ensure compliance.
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Scientific and Technological Flows Between the United States and China
What are the potential benefits and risks of U.S.-Chinese scientific research collaboration? What is the nature and volume of scientific researcher flows between the United States and China? What potential threats and benefits have emerged from the recent uptick in scientific collaboration between the United States and China on aerospace engineering research?
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How Molten Salt Could Be the Lifeblood of Tomorrow’s Nuclear Energy
Molten salt has caught the eye of the nuclear industry as an ideal working fluid for reactor cooling, energy transfer, fueling and fission product absorption. Many of the salts being considered are inexpensive, nontoxic, and easily transportable – and table salt is one of the constituents many reactor developers are choosing to use.
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150 Hydrogen-Powered Trucks Ready to Roll on European Roads
Truck manufacturers Daimler Truck, Volvo Group, and Iveco have joined with fuel manufacturers and academic researchers to make heavy transport across Europe more climate friendly. The result: The first of a total of 150 hydrogen-powered trucks will start rolling on European roads next year.
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First Hydrogen Filling Station Opens in Israel
Israel’s first hydrogen fueling spot has opened, heralding the start of clean hydrogen-based transportation in Israel. Pioneering project enables a shift to non-polluting hydrogen fuel cell-based vehicles.
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Boosting Supply Chains by Recovering Valuable Materials from Water
Promoting national security and economic competitiveness will require America’s researchers to find new ways to obtain the materials that we need for many technologies. Traditional mining is fraught with challenges, while water, from the oceans to geothermal brines, is an underexplored resource for providing various materials.
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Microgrids Can Help Communities Adapt to Wildfires
Wildfires have become increasingly frequent due to climate change, with record occurrences in areas not historically prone to them. For some of the most vulnerable communities, clean energy microgrids can be both more effective and cheaper than conventional technologies.
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Google, Cornell to Partner in Online Security Initiative
Most current security-related research is focused on technical challenges, but many of the most significant security failures involve humans and can often be attributed to poor design that fails to take the human factor into account. A partnership between Google and four higher-education institutions will use an interdisciplinary approach to build better foundations for secure systems and ensure that they are deployed in ways that address rather than exacerbate societal problems.
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Railways Could Be Key “Utility Player” for Backup Power
The U.S. electric grid faces simultaneous, evolving pressures. Demand for power from the grid is increasing as people adopt electric cars and building energy is transitioned from gas to electricity. New research points to a flexible, cost-effective option for backup power when trouble strikes: batteries aboard trains.
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More headlines
The long view
Autonomous Vehicle Technology Vulnerable to Road Object Spoofing and Vanishing Attacks
Researchers have demonstrated the potentially hazardous vulnerabilities associated with the technology called LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, many autonomous vehicles use to navigate streets, roads and highways. The researchers have shown how to use lasers to fool LiDAR into “seeing” objects that are not present and missing those that are – deficiencies that can cause unwarranted and unsafe braking or collisions.
Tantalizing Method to Study Cyberdeterrence
Tantalus is unlike most war games because it is experimental instead of experiential — the immersive game differs by overlapping scientific rigor and quantitative assessment methods with the experimental sciences, and experimental war gaming provides insightful data for real-world cyberattacks.
Prototype Self-Service Screening System Unveiled
TSA and DHS S&T unveiled a prototype checkpoint technology, the self-service screening system, at Harry Reid International Airport (LAS) in Las Vegas, NV. The aim is to provide a near self-sufficient passenger screening process while enabling passengers to directly receive on-person alarm information and allow for the passenger self-resolution of those alarms.
Falling Space Debris: How High Is the Risk I'll Get Hit?
An International Space Station battery fell back to Earth and, luckily, splashed down harmlessly in the Atlantic. Should we have worried? Space debris reenters our atmosphere every week.
Testing Cutting-Edge Counter-Drone Technology
Drones have many positive applications, bad actors can use them for nefarious purposes. Two recent field demonstrations brought government, academia, and industry together to evaluate innovative counter-unmanned aircraft systems.
Strengthening the Grid’s ‘Backbone’ with Hydropower
Argonne-led studies investigate how hydropower could help add more clean energy to the grid, how it generates value as grids add more renewable energy, and how liner technology can improve hydropower efficiency.
The Tech Apocalypse Panic is Driven by AI Boosters, Military Tacticians, and Movies
From popular films like a War Games or The Terminator to a U.S. State Department-commissioned report on the security risk of weaponized AI, there has been a tremendous amount of hand wringing and nervousness about how so-called artificial intelligence might end up destroying the world. There is one easy way to avoid a lot of this and prevent a self-inflicted doomsday: don’t give computers the capability to launch devastating weapons.
The Tech Apocalypse Panic is Driven by AI Boosters, Military Tacticians, and Movies
From popular films like a War Games or The Terminator to a U.S. State Department-commissioned report on the security risk of weaponized AI, there has been a tremendous amount of hand wringing and nervousness about how so-called artificial intelligence might end up destroying the world. There is one easy way to avoid a lot of this and prevent a self-inflicted doomsday: don’t give computers the capability to launch devastating weapons.