If successful it would revolutionize battlefield surveillance, night vision, and terrestrial & space imaging plus many commercial applications: https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2022-09-02
Category: surveillance – Page 9
Iran’s recent seizure of unmanned US Navy boats shined a light on a pioneering Pentagon program to develop networks of air, surface and underwater drones for patrolling large regions, meshing their surveillance with artificial intelligence.
The year-old program operates numerous unmanned surface vessels, or USVs, in the waters around the Arabian peninsula, gathering data and images to be beamed back to collection centers in the Gulf.
The program operated without incident until Iranian forces tried to grab three seven-meter Saildrone Explorer USVs in two incidents, on August 29–30 and September 1.
It will be reconfigured to meet testing needs.
The giant drone, RQ-4 RangeHawk, will soon be used to support the development of hypersonic missiles in the U.S., its manufacturer, Northrop Grumman, said in a press release.
Hypersonic missiles are the newest frontier in the weapons race, with countries like Russia and North Korea laying claims to have successfully demonstrated this technology. The U.S. hypersonic missile program has faced a few hiccups with repetitive test failures. Last month, the U.S. Air Force confirmed that its Air-launched Rapid Response Weapon (ARRW) had been successfully tested, almost after a year after similar claims from Russia.
GRAND FORKS, N.D. – Aug. 24, 2022 – Northrop Grumman Corporation’s (NYSE: NOC) RQ-4 RangeHawk is poised to support the SkyRange program’s U.S. hypersonic missile flight tests from its Grand Sky facility near Grand Forks, North Dakota. SkyRange is the Department of Defense Test Resource Management Center’s (TRMC) unmanned high-altitude, long-endurance, responsive mobile flight test system.
Over the past decade, digital cameras have been widely adopted in various aspects of our society, and are being massively used in mobile phones, security surveillance, autonomous vehicles, and facial recognition. Through these cameras, enormous amounts of image data are being generated, which raises growing concerns about privacy protection.
Some existing methods address these concerns by applying algorithms to conceal sensitive information from the acquired images, such as image blurring or encryption. However, such methods still risk exposure of sensitive data because the raw images are already captured before they undergo digital processing to hide or encrypt the sensitive information. Also, the computation of these algorithms requires additional power consumption. Other efforts were also made to seek solutions to this problem by using customized cameras to downgrade the image quality so that identifiable information can be concealed. However, these approaches sacrifice the overall image quality for all the objects of interest, which is undesired, and they are still vulnerable to adversarial attacks to retrieve the sensitive information that is recorded.
A new research paper published in eLight demonstrated a new paradigm to achieve privacy-preserving imaging by building a fundamentally new type of imager designed by AI. In their paper, UCLA researchers, led by Professor Aydogan Ozcan, presented a smart camera design that images only certain types of desired objects, while instantaneously erasing other types of objects from its images without requiring any digital processing.
A documentary exploring how artificial intelligence is changing life as we know it — from jobs to privacy to a growing rivalry between the U.S. and China.
FRONTLINE investigates the promise and perils of AI and automation, tracing a new industrial revolution that will reshape and disrupt our world, and allow the emergence of a surveillance society.
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* At Long Last, Mathematical Proof That Black Holes Are Stable * Who Gets to Work in the Digital Economy? * Mice produce rat sperm with technique that could help conservation.
* Quantum computer can simulate infinitely many chaotic particles * Radar / AI & ML: Scaling False Peaks * Cyber security for the human world | George Loukas | TEDx.
* Can Airbnb Outperform a Potential Recession? | WSJ * San Diego joins other cities in restricting cops’ use of surveillance technology * Blue Origin launches crew of 6 to suborbital space, nails landings.
Space junk, 1962–2022 🛰️
Posted in satellites, surveillance
🗑️ Space junk (space debris, space pollution, space waste, or space garbage) is defunct man-made objects in space (mainly in Earth orbit) that no longer serve a useful function.
👀 And here is how its number has changed over the past 60 years.
*As of January 2021, the US Space Surveillance Network reported 21,901 artificial objects in orbit above the Earth, including 4,450 operational satellites. However, these are just objects large enough to be tracked.
#spacejunk #satellites #earth
As organizations increasingly look to employ drones for everything from deliveries to pest control to surveillance, safety in the skies is becoming an issue that demands more attention. Regulations around drones and their flight vary widely between countries and regions, but to really start scaling the technology there will need to be more standardization in terms of who can fly where, how fast, how high, etc.
The UK is taking the lead on drone mobility, with an announcement this week of plans to build a 165-mile (265 kilometer) “drone superhighway.” Project Skyway is being led by Altitude Angel, a UK aerospace and unified traffic management company, and involves a consortium of other stakeholders, including British Telecommunications Group.
So how do you build a highway in the air? Picture a corridor of airspace running between various cities, with drones zooming back and forth in the designated segments of sky. The differentiating factor here is that rather than each drone using its own onboard sensors to navigate the route, they all tap into a ground-based network of sensors. This network brings together data from multiple sources to create a real-time, high-resolution moving map of the airspace and guides drones to their destinations.
Radar gets a major makeover
Posted in military, surveillance
If radars wore pants, a lot of them would still be sporting bell-bottoms.
Significant aspects of radar haven’t fundamentally changed since the 1970s, said Kurt Sorensen, a senior manager who oversees the development of high-performance radio frequency imaging technologies at Sandia National Laboratories. Like a record player, most military-grade systems are still analog.
Now, Sandia is giving radar a major digital makeover. Researchers are working to replace legacy analog radars commonly used by the military with a new, digital, software-defined system called Multi-Mission Radio Frequency Architecture. The overhauled design promises U.S. warfighters unprecedented flexibility and performance during intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operations, even against sophisticated adversaries.
The government doesn’t need to watch you to know exactly who you are. The market for data about our most intimate selves is booming.