• European consortium to make RFID tags more affordable

    To make RFID more popular, there is a need to make them cheaper; a team of major technology companies is confident that the cost will be reduced once the tags can be printed because electrically conductive and semiconducting plastics can be used in high-volume printing processes

  • New camera vastly improves surveillance

    Revolutionary camera design could have far-reaching implications for the military, crime prevention, and enforcement as well as traffic analysis and emergency response support; design is based on an array of light sensitive chips placed at the focal plane of a large multiple-lens system

  • Boeing shows biological detection UAV

    UAVs have been performing more and more military and homeland security missions; Boeing demonstrates the use of its ScanEagle UAV in detecting, intercepting, and flying through simulated biological plumes or clouds to collect airborne agents

  • RAF buys UAVs to fight Taliban

    U.S. forces have been using UAVs with ever-greater lethality against al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters in Afghanistan and Pakistan; the United Kingdom is buying three Reaper UAVs at £10 million each — it will eventually buy twelve — to help British forces in Afghanistan

  • Researchers show principles of mind-reading machine

    Researchers have developed a more sophisticated way to extract visual stimuli from brain signals; they developed a computational model that uses functional MRI (fMRI) data to decode information from an individual’s visual cortex; system may help in decoding dreams, and may offer a more humane interrogation technique

  • Data sharing among local, state, and federal law enforcement grows

    The 9/11 attacks demonstrated the need for more information and intelligence sharing among law enforcement services a the local, state, and federal levels; more and more intelligence sharing systems are being put in place by private companies to help law enforcement cope with — and meaningfully and effectively use — the vast new sources of data now open to them; privacy advocates worry

  • Vidsys, Objectvideo partner to offer security information solution

    Integration of ObjectVideo’s intelligent analytics with VidSys’ Physical Security Situation Management software would improve response by connecting intelligent monitoring to quick investigation

  • Bosch acquires Extreme CCTV

    Video surveillance is a growing market, and Bosch moves in by acquiring Canadian specialist in infrared illuminators

  • Pointer Telocation shows Cellocator CelloTrack

    The GPS-based asset tracking market is growing, and a specialist introduces an advanced system to help companies in asset management, inventory control, loss prevention, and security

  • On needles and haysacks: New way to deal with large datasets

    The ability to gather vast amounts of data and create huge datasets has created a problem: Data has outgrown data analysis; for more than eighty years one of the most common methods of statistical prediction has been maximum likelihood estimation (MLE); Brown University researchers offer a better way to deal with the enormous statistical uncertainty created by large datasets

  • DHS defends handling of Project 28

    Project 28, built by Boeing along twenty-eight miles of the Arizona-Mexico border, was meant to showcase advanced border security technologies which DHS would use in the more ambitious $8 billion border surveillance system along the U.S.-Mexico border; DHS initially said that the project’s technology failed to deliver on its promise, and gave Boeing a three-year extension; DHS now defends its handling of the project

  • RFID technology to help track donated blood

    Donated blood passes through many hands between donation and patient; to date, there is no good way to track donated blood “vein-to-vein,” with the result being many blood transfusion-related problems; RFID technology will help

  • Analyzing e-mail messages to find insider threat

    Researchers develop a technology based on Probabilistic Latent Semantic Indexing (PLSI) to detect changes in the words and terms individuals in an organization use in their e-mail messages — to fellow employees and to outsiders; research shows that certain verbal and terminological changes indicate criminal or even terrorist intent

  • Project 28 falls short of promise, requiring three year extension

    After Boeing delivers Project 28 — a system of cameras, sensors, towers, and software to secure a twenty-eight-mile stretch of the Arizona border — to DHS, department concludes that the project lacks the operational capabilities DHS and Congress expected it to have; first phase of project now extended by three years

  • Computer science helps in combating terrorism

    The University of Maryland develops the SOMA Terror Organization Portal (STOP); SOMA (Stochastic Opponent Modeling Agents) is a formal, logical-statistical reasoning framework which uses data about past behavior of terror groups in order to learn rules about the probability of an organization, community, or person taking actions in different situations