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OTTAWA — A Chinese telecommunication company secretly diverted Canadian internet traffic to China, particularly from Rogers subscribers in the Ottawa area, says an Israeli cybersecurity specialist.

The 2016 incident involved the surreptitious rerouting of the internet data of Rogers customers in and around Canada’s capital by China Telecom, a state-owned internet service provider that has two legally operating “points of presence” on Canadian soil, said Yuval Shavitt, an electrical-engineering expert at Tel Aviv University.

Shavitt told The Canadian Press that the China Telecom example should serve as a caution to the Canadian government not to do business with another Chinese telecommunications giant: Huawei Technologies, which is vying to build Canada’s next-generation 5G wireless communications networks.

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The University of Michigan has come up with a temperature sensing “computer” measuring just 0.3mm — so small it beats the one developed by IBM.

It is about a tenth the size of IBM’s former record-setter, and so sensitive that its transmission LED could instigate currents in its circuits.

The term “computer” is used loosely by the university, as it continues to question what exactly a computer is. It does have a processor, but unlike a full-sized computer, it loses all data when it loses power.

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Now, this is awesome. A stationary robot, two mobile robots, and a human cooperating to perform a task. The humanoid robot also interprets human gestures and obeys those commands.

More information: http://www.co4robots.eu/


The Co4Robots MS2 scenario consists on collaborative grasping and manipulation of an object by two agents, the TIAGo mobile manipulator and a static manipulator; and a collaborating mobile platform and stationary manipulator to facilitate loading and unloading tasks onto the mobile platform.

Another step forward in robotics self-awareness. This robot learns it’s own kinematics without human intervention and then learns to plot solution paths.


Columbia Engineering researchers have made a major advance in robotics by creating a robot that learns what it is, from scratch, with zero prior knowledge of physics, geometry, or motor dynamics. Once their robot creates a self-simulation, it can then use that self-model to adapt to different situations, to handle new tasks as well as detect and repair damage in its own body.

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A saying from one of my favorite movies is, “Tie two birds together and even though they have four wings they cannot fly.” Can’t say the same about flying drones.

“We perform outdoor autonomous flying experiment of f-LASDRA, constructed with multiple ODAR-8 links connected via cable with each other. Each ODAR-8 can compensate for its own weight, rendering f-LASDRA scalable. Utilizing SCKF with IMU/GNSS-module on each link and inter-link kinematic-constraints, we attain estimation accuracy suitable for stable control (5cm: cf. 1-5m w/ GNSS).”


We perform outdoor autonomous flying experiment of f-LASDRA (flying Large-size Aerial Skeleton with Distributed Rotor Actuation), which is constructed with multiple ODAR-8 links (https://youtu.be/S3i9NspWtr0), connected via flexible cable with each other. Each ODAR-8 link can generate omni-directional force/torque and also compensate for its own weight, thereby, rendering the f-LASDRA scalable w.r.the number of links.