Lifeboat Foundation

Forward-looking: The service department can seem like the slowest part of a dealership, especially when it’s your car getting worked on. But Mercedes-Benz is infusing its dealerships with AR technology to speed up the diagnosis and repair of tricky and complex issues with its Virtual Remote Support, powered by Microsoft’s HoloLens 2 and Dynamics 365 Remote Assist. I visited one of Mercedes’ showcases last week to check out the implementation and get some hands-on time with the HoloLens 2.

For customers that bring in a hard-to-solve problem, it was common for Mercedes-Benz to call in a flying doctor, an expert from HQ that would fly in and get hands-on with an issue. That could take days to arrange, not to mention the costs and environmental impacts associated with flying in these technical specialists from all over the country. All the while, the customer is left without their luxury automobile.

Continue reading “Mercedes-Benz and Microsoft HoloLens 2 show off augmented reality’s impact in the automotive space” »

A hacker has breached the Argentinian government’s IT network and stolen ID card details for the country’s entire population, data that is now being sold in private circles.

The hack, which took place last month, targeted RENAPER, which stands for Registro Nacional de las Personas, translated as National Registry of Persons.

The agency is a crucial cog inside the Argentinian Interior Ministry, where it is tasked with issuing national ID cards to all citizens, data that it also stores in digital format as a database accessible to other government agencies, acting as a backbone for most government queries for citizen’s personal information.

They show how intelligence and body plans are closely linked—and could unlock AI for robots.

NASA released five hours of new recordings.

Five hours of audio taken on the Red Plant by the rover Perseverance reveals the thick sounds of wind, the rover’s own tires, and Ingenuity in the distance.

North Korea fired at least one ballistic missile from its eastern coast on Tuesday morning, according to South Korean and Japanese officials.

The launch took place in the port city of Sinpo, Hamgyong province, at about 10 a.m. local time Tuesday (9 p.m. ET Monday), South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said. In a text to reporters, the JCS said it appeared to be a submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM).

South Korea’s Defense Ministry said the missile is estimated to have been fired from the sea, but has yet to confirm whether it was launched from a submarine. Sinpo is home to a North Korean naval shipyard.

Integrated And Cross-Disciplinary Research Focused on Diagnosing, Treating And Curing Cancers — Dr. Antonio Giordano MD, PhD, President & Founder, Sbarro Health Research Organization.

Dr. Antonio Giordano, MD, Ph.D., (https://www.drantoniogiordano.com/) is President and Founder of the Sbarro Health Research Organization (https://www.shro.org/), which conducts research to diagnose, treat and cure cancer, but also has diversified into research beyond oncology, into the areas of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and other chronic illnesses.

Continue reading “Dr. Antonio Giordano, MD, Ph.D. — President and Founder, Sbarro Health Research Organization” »

This study identifies the predicted seismic expression of the high-to-low iron spin crossover in the deep Earth mineral ferropericlase. A depth-dependent signal is detected in the fastest and slowest regions, related to lateral temperature variations, of several global seismic tomography models.

(2021). Nuclear Technology: Vol. 207 No. 8 pp. 1163–1181.

Focusing on nuclear engineering applications, the nation’s leading cybersecurity programs are focused on developing digital solutions to support reactor control for both on-site and remote operation. Many of the advanced reactor technologies currently under development by the nuclear industry, such as small modular reactors, microreactors, etc., require secure architectures for instrumentation, control, modeling, and simulation in order to meet their goals. ¹ Thus, there is a strong need to develop communication solutions to enable secure function of advanced control strategies and to allow for an expanded use of data for operational decision making. This is important not only to avoid malicious attack scenarios focused on inflicting physical damage but also covert attacks designed to introduce minor process manipulation for economic gain. ²

These high-level goals necessitate many important functionalities, e.g., developing measures of trustworthiness of the code and simulation results against unauthorized access; developing measures of scientific confidence in the simulation results by carefully propagating and identifying dominant sources of uncertainties and by early detection of software crashes; and developing strategies to minimize the computational resources in terms of memory usage, storage requirements, and CPU time. By introducing these functionalities, the computers are subservient to the programmers. The existing predictive modeling philosophy has generally been reliant on the ability of the programmer to detect intrusion via specific instructions to tell the computer how to detect intrusion, keep log files to track code changes, limit access via perimeter defenses to ensure no unauthorized access, etc.

Continue reading “Covert Cognizance: A Novel Predictive Modeling Paradigm” »

(2021). Nuclear Science and Engineering: Vol. 195 No. 9 pp. 977–989.

Earlier work has demonstrated the theoretical development of covert OT defenses and their application to representative control problems in a nuclear reactor. Given their ability to store information in the system nonobservable space using one-time-pad randomization techniques, the new C² modeling paradigm⁶ has emerged allowing the system to build memory or self-awareness about its past and current state. The idea is to store information using randomized mathematical operators about one system subcomponent, e.g., the reactor core inlet and exit temperature, into the nonobservable space of another subcomponent, e.g., the water level in a steam generator, creating an incorruptible record of the system state. If the attackers attempt to falsify the sensor data in an attempt to send the system along an undesirable trajectory, they will have to learn all the inserted signatures across the various system subcomponents and the C² embedding process.

We posit that this is extremely unlikely given the huge size of the nonobservable space for most complex systems, and the use of randomized techniques for signature insertion, rendering a level of security that matches the Vernam-Cipher gold standard. The Vernam Cipher, commonly known as a one-time pad, is a cipher that encrypts a message using a random key (pad) and can only be decrypted using this key. Its strength is derived from Shannon’s notion of perfect secrecy ⁸ and requires the key to be truly random and nonreusable (one time). To demonstrate this, this paper will validate the implementation of C² using sophisticated AI tools such as long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks ⁹ and the generative adversarial learning [generative adversarial networks (GANs)] framework, ¹⁰ both using a supervised learning setting, i.e., by assuming that the AI training phase can distinguish between original data and the data containing the embedded signatures. While this is an unlikely scenario, it is assumed to demonstrate the resilience of the C² signatures to discovery by AI techniques.

Continue reading “Validation of Covert Cognizance Active Defenses” »