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Category: military – Page 273

ALIAS envisions a custom, drop-in, removable kit that will promote the addition of high levels of automation into existing aircraft, enabling operation with reduced onboard crew.

The program intends to exploit the considerable advances made in aircraft automation systems over the past 50 years, and similar advances in remotely piloted aircraft automation, to help reduce pilot workload, augment mission performance and improve aircraft safety.

As an automation system, ALIAS aims to support execution of an entire mission from takeoff to landing, even in the face of contingency events such as aircraft system failures.

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US military scientists have used electrical brain stimulators to enhance mental skills of staff, in research that aims to boost the performance of air crews, drone operators and others in the armed forces’ most demanding roles.

The successful tests of the devices pave the way for servicemen and women to be wired up at critical times of duty, so that electrical pulses can be beamed into their brains to improve their effectiveness in high pressure situations.

The brain stimulation kits use five electrodes to send weak electric currents through the skull and into specific parts of the cortex. Previous studies have found evidence that by helping neurons to fire, these minor brain zaps can boost cognitive ability.

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Optalysys’s technology performs a mathematical function called the Fourier transform by encoding data, say a genome sequence, into a laser beam. The data can be manipulated by making light waves in the beam interfere with one another, performing the calculation by exploiting the physics of light, and generating a pattern that encodes the result. The pattern is read by a camera sensor and fed back into a conventional computer’s electronic circuits. The optical approach is faster because it achieves in a single step what would take many operations of an electronic computer.

The technology was enabled by the consumer electronics industry driving down the cost of components called spatial light modulators, which are used to control light inside projectors. The company plans to release its first product next year, aimed at high-performance computers used for processing genomic data. It will take the form of a PCI express card, a standard component used to upgrade PCs or servers usually used for graphics processors. Optalysys is also working on a Pentagon research project investigating technologies that might shrink supercomputers to desktop size, and a European project on improving weather simulations.

In 2015, Optalysis built a prototype that achieves a processing speed equivalent to 320 Gflops and it is incredibly energy efficient as it uses low-powered, cost effective components.

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This is what scares me; autonomous warfare.

WASHINGTON: DARPA is taking another step toward building autonomous electronic warfare systems with a small contract award to BAE Systems.

Artificial intelligence and autonomy loom large in the Pentagon these days. And electronic warfare, much more quietly, dominates a great deal of thinking across the services these days after we’ve watched how the Russians operate against Ukraine and in Syria. So DARPA’s additional $13.3 million award announced today is worth noting.

Why does all this matter? One of the biggest challenges facing the F-35 program, for example, is the creation of a huge digital threat library (known as mission data files) for the airplane. It includes electronic spectrum information for a wide array of emitters — radar, radio and other sources.

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Come “ask me anything” right now!!! I’m trying to answer all questions I get asked:

Hi Reddit,

Thank you for having me here. My name is Zoltan Istvan, and I’m a futurist, journalist, and science fiction writer. I’m also the 2016 Presidential candidate for the Transhumanist Party.

For the last 725 days, I have been campaigning full time to spread transhumanism and life extension policies across America and the world. While I never expected to win the US Presidency, my campaign has received a lot of attention—both good and bad—for its emphasis on radical science, technology, secularism, and futurist ideas.

During my campaign, I’ve spoken on transhumanism at the World Bank, consulted with the US Navy on artificial intelligence, got a chip implanted in my hand, interviewed with underground group Anonymous, and drove a coffin-shaped bus called the Immortality Bus across America to deliver a Transhumanist Bill of Rights to the US Capitol. My 20-point political platform has many futurist policies in it, but some of the most important ones are supporting a Universal Basic Income, classifying aging as a disease, legalizing all drugs, creating a Transhumanist Olympics, and taking money from the military and giving it to science.

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We have already seen the HoloLens mixed reality headset put to military use by the Israeli Defense Force for advanced battlefield planning.

Now Ukrainian company LimpidArmor has shown off a new application for the augmented reality device on the actual battlefield to improve the field of view of tank commanders without exposing them to additional risk. The technology was shown off at the Arms and Security show, held in Kiev from 11 to 14 October.

LimpidArmor’s hardware and software system uses a HoloLens integrated with a helmet and cameras mounted around the tank to give commanders a 360 degree view of their environment in both optical and thermal and makes this available in real-time.

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