Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder turned philanthropist, has called for a global response team to be set up to carry out surveillance for pathogens that can potentially ring in the next pandemic, Financial Times reported.
Long before COVID-19 struck, Gates warned the world of an imminent pandemic and the need to prepare ourselves to face it. Gates has been vocal about the long delays involved in the vaccine development process and the lack of equity in vaccine distribution in the world. So far, he has also been right about how the COVID-19 pandemic will play out and has pandemic avoiding strategies in his new book.
One afternoon in the fall of 2019, in a grand old office building near the Arc de Triomphe, I was buzzed through an unmarked door into a showroom for the future of surveillance. The space on the other side was dark and sleek, with a look somewhere between an Apple Store and a doomsday bunker. Along one wall, a grid of electronic devices glinted in the moody downlighting—automated license plate readers, Wi-Fi-enabled locks, boxy data processing units. I was here to meet Giovanni Gaccione, who runs the public safety division of a security technology company called Genetec. Headquartered in Montreal, the firm operates four of these “Experience Centers” around the world, where it peddles intelligence products to government officials. Genetec’s main sell here was software, and Gaccione had agreed to show me how it worked.
He led me first to a large monitor running a demo version of Citigraf, his division’s flagship product. The screen displayed a map of the East Side of Chicago. Around the edges were thumbnail-size video streams from neighborhood CCTV cameras. In one feed, a woman appeared to be unloading luggage from a car to the sidewalk. An alert popped up above her head: “ILLEGAL PARKING.” The map itself was scattered with color-coded icons—a house on fire, a gun, a pair of wrestling stick figures—each of which, Gaccione explained, corresponded to an unfolding emergency. He selected the stick figures, which denoted an assault, and a readout appeared onscreen with a few scant details drawn from the 911 dispatch center. At the bottom was a button marked “INVESTIGATE,” just begging to be clicked.
Face recognition tools are computational models that can identify specific people in images, as well as CCTV or video footage. These tools are already being used in a wide range of real-world settings, for instance aiding law enforcement and border control agents in their criminal investigations and surveillance efforts, and for authentication and biometric applications. While most existing models perform remarkably well, there may still be much room for improvement.
Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have recently created a new and promising architecture for face recognition. This architecture, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, is based on a strategy to extract facial features from images that differs from most of those proposed so far.
“Holistic methods using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and margin-based losses have dominated research on face recognition,” Zhonglin Sun and Georgios Tzimiropoulos, the two researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore.
SpaceX revealed a new business segment called Starshield aimed at U.S. national security government agencies. “While Starlink is designed for consumer and commercial use, Starshield is designed for government use, with an initial focus on three areas: Earth observation, communications and hosted payloads,” the company said on its website.
This is a big deal as SpaceX is currently burning through $2 billion/year as it works to develop Starlink and Starship. So SpaceX wouldn’t mind some extra cash!
WASHINGTON — SpaceX on Dec. 2 revealed a new business segment called Starshield aimed at U.S. national security government agencies.
This sector of SpaceX intends to leverage the Starlink internet constellation in low Earth orbit to develop products and services — including secure communications, remote sensing and space surveillance payloads — that are in growing demand by U.S. defense and intelligence organizations.
“While Starlink is designed for consumer and commercial use, Starshield is designed for government use, with an initial focus on three areas: Earth observation, communications and hosted payloads,” the company said on its website.
In recent years, many smartphone users have become concerned about the privacy of their data and the extent to which companies might have access to this data. As things stand today, the applications that users can run on their phone and what they can do with these applications is determined by a few big tech companies.
Researchers at ETH Zurich have recently set out on a quest to change this current trend, through the development of a new smartphone architecture called TEEtime. This architecture, introduced in a paper pre-published on arXiv, allows users to flexibly choose what resources on their smartphone they will dedicate to legacy operating systems, such as Android or iOS, and which they wish to keep for their own proprietary software and data.
“This work was inspired (in part) by our experiences in developing (Swiss) contact tracing applications, where we quickly noticed how limited we are as researchers/developers in accessing some basic services on ‘our’ phones,” Srdjan Capkun, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore.
Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has linked an exploit framework that targets now-patched vulnerabilities in the Chrome and Firefox web browsers and the Microsoft Defender security app to a Spanish software company.
While TAG is Google’s team of security experts focused on protecting Google users from state-sponsored attacks, it also keeps track of dozens of companies that enable governments to spy on dissidents, journalists, and political opponents using surveillance tools.
The search giant says the Barcelona-based software firm is one of these commercial surveillance vendors and not just a provider of custom security solutions as it officially claims.
LONDON (AP) — The World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say measles immunization has dropped significantly since the coronavirus pandemic began, resulting in a record high of nearly 40 million children missing a vaccine dose last year.
In a report issued Wednesday, the WHO and the CDC said millions of children were now susceptible to measles, among the world’s most contagious diseases. In 2021, officials said there were about 9 million measles infections and 128,000 deaths worldwide.
The WHO and CDC said continued drops in vaccination, weak disease surveillance and delayed response plans due to COVID-19, in addition to ongoing outbreaks in more than 20 countries, mean that “measles is an imminent threat in every region of the world.”
High-Risk, High-Payoff Bio-Research For National Security Challenges — Dr. David A. Markowitz, Ph.D., IARPA
Dr. David A. Markowitz, Ph.D. (https://www.markowitz.bio/) is a Program Manager at the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA — https://www.iarpa.gov/) which is an organization that invests in high-risk, high-payoff research programs to tackle some of the most difficult challenges of the agencies and disciplines in the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC).
IARPA’s mission is to push the boundaries of science to develop solutions that empower the U.S. IC to do its work better and more efficiently for national security. IARPA does not have an operational mission and does not deploy technologies directly to the field, but instead, they facilitate the transition of research results to IC customers for operational application.
Currently, Dr. Markowitz leads three research programs at the intersection between biology, engineering, and computing. These programs are: FELIX, which is revolutionizing the field of bio-surveillance with new experimental and computational tools for detecting genetic engineering in complex biological samples; MIST, which is developing compact and inexpensive DNA data storage devices to address rapidly growing enterprise storage needs; and MICrONS, which is guiding the development of next-generation machine learning algorithms by reverse-engineering the computations performed by mammalian neocortex.
Previously, as a researcher in neuroscience, Dr. Markowitz published first-author papers on neural computation, the neural circuit basis of cognition in primates, and neural decoding strategies for brain-machine interfaces.
The Biden administration unveiled a set of far-reaching goals Tuesday aimed at averting harms caused by the rise of artificial intelligence systems, including guidelines for how to protect people’s personal data and limit surveillance.
The Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights notably does not set out specific enforcement actions, but instead is intended as a White House call to action for the U.S. government to safeguard digital and civil rights in an AI-fueled world, officials said.
“This is the Biden-Harris administration really saying that we need to work together, not only just across government, but across all sectors, to really put equity at the center and civil rights at the center of the ways that we make and use and govern technologies,” said Alondra Nelson, deputy director for science and society at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “We can and should expect better and demand better from our technologies.”
