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Northrup Grumman’s new Cyber Situational Awareness (CSA), which is a set of web-based tools designed to visualize, understand, and share cyber databases being showcase at the WEST 2016 navel conference on February 17.


Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE: NOC) has announced that it will be showcasing key naval capabilities at the WEST 2016 navel conference on February 17, 2016. The corporation will unveil its full-spectrum cyber solutions, biometric defense solutions, unmanned aircraft and much more at the event. WEST 2016 is co-sponsored by AFCEA and the US Naval institute in San Diego. Northrop Grumman is a platinum sponsor of the conference, which is themed “how we make the strategy work.”

The defense contractor will be showcasing its sea serving operations and capabilities that will help the US armed forces combat challenges and difficulties more efficiently. It is also expected to display how it integrates cyber-technology into all of its defense segments. The key highlight of its cyber-suite is its Cyber Situational Awareness (CSA), which is a set of web-based tools designed to visualize, understand, and share cyber databases.

Northrop Grumman is committed to building resilience into its cyber solutions to protect and defend critical information of the armed forces. The cyber solution focuses on delivering complete end-to-end mission capabilities, including situational awareness, real-time mission analytics and damage assessment, and utmost integrated security. The defense contractor’s Blue WASP software tool will also be on display at the conference. The tool alerts navy boats of attacks against US navy vessels.

US Navy fighting the real war that is ramping up by unpluging from certain networks. Well, that is an option; but also very limiting to “sneaker net” information file transfers. Definitely not uncommon across other areas of government.


SAN DIEGO — For the Navy, the best defense against a high-tech enemy may be a low-tech strategy.

After decades of building equipment, aircraft and ships designed to communicate with each other and back to shore, the Navy is now looking to “selectively disconnect” its systems to minimize vulnerability to cyberattacks, said Rear Adm. Lorin Selby, commander of the Naval Surface Warfare Center.

“We’re going back now and trying to selectively disconnect things and slow down some of these connections and only do it where we think it makes sense, where it’s safe to do it,” Selby told an audience at the AFCEA West conference in San Diego. “We’ve got to be more judicious with the things we connect to the internet or to shore, those kinds of vulnerabilities.”

One of the largest drawbacks in robotics is the rigid parts and movements of the robots. Well, soon that maybe changing due to non-Newtonian fluids.


(Inside Science) — By using fluids similar to Silly Putty that can behave as both liquids and solids, researchers say they have created fluid robots that might one day perform tasks that conventional machines cannot.

Conventional robots are made of rigid parts that are vulnerable to bumps, scrapes, twists and falls. In contrast, researchers worldwide are increasingly developing robots made from soft, elastic plastic and rubber that are inspired by worms, starfish and octopuses. These soft robots can resist many of the kinds of damage, and can squirm past many of the obstacles, that can impede hard robots.

However, even soft robots and the living organisms they are inspired by are limited by their solidity — for example, they remain vulnerable to cutting. Instead, researcher Ido Bachelet of Bar-Ilan University in Israel and his colleagues have now created what they call fluid robots that they say could operate better than solid robots in chaotic, hostile environments. They detailed their findings online Jan. 22 in the journal Artificial Life.

This maybe true in the UK. However, I am in the US. In the US, if I have a robot representing me and I lose my case; can I claim improper representation? I believe that I can. Also, which states and counties/ cities recognize a robot as an attorney? What federal/ state/ county/ and city ordinances and laws will need to be changed for robots to be recognized as attorney in the US? Just having a robot that interprets laws is not enough in the US.

http://mic.com/articles/135693/this-robot-lawyer-can-get-you-out-of-a-parking-ticket-for-free


It has already saved people millions of dollars.

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Seeking to “push the limits of what humans can do,” researchers at Georgia Tech have developed a wearable robotic limb that transforms drummers into three-armed cyborgs.

The remarkable thing about this wearable arm, developed at GT’s Center for Music Technology, is that it’s doing a lot more than just mirroring the movements of the drummer. It’s a “smart arm” that’s actually responding to the music, and performing in a way that compliments what the human player is doing.

The two-foot long arm monitors the music in the room, so it can improvise based on the beat and rhythm. If the drummer is playing slowly, for example, the arm will mirror the tempo.

Proving Quantum


New research demonstrates that particles at the quantum level can in fact be seen as behaving something like billiard balls rolling along a table, and not merely as the probabilistic smears that the standard interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests. But there’s a catch — the tracks the particles follow do not always behave as one would expect from “realistic” trajectories, but often in a fashion that has been termed “surrealistic.”

In a new version of an old experiment, CIFAR Senior Fellow Aephraim Steinberg (University of Toronto) and colleagues tracked the of photons as the particles traced a path through one of two slits and onto a screen. But the researchers went further, and observed the “nonlocal” influence of another photon that the first photon had been entangled with.

The results counter a long-standing criticism of an interpretation of quantum mechanics called the De Broglie-Bohm theory. Detractors of this interpretation had faulted it for failing to explain the behaviour of realistically. For Steinberg, the results are important because they give us a way of visualizing quantum mechanics that’s just as valid as the standard interpretation, and perhaps more intuitive.