A Harvard research team's prototype of a portable exosuit is made of cloth components worn at the waist and thighs. A computer that's built into the shorts uses an algorithm that can sense when the user shifts between a walking gait and a and running gait. A Harvard research team's prototype of a portable exosuit is made of cloth components worn at the waist and thighs. A computer that's built into the shorts uses an algorithm that can sense when the user shifts between a walking gait and a and running gait. Say the word "exosuit" and superheroes come to mind -- somebody like Tony Stark from Marvel Comics, whose fancy suit enables him become Iron Man.

A revolutionary lightweight exosuit that makes walking and running easier has been developed. Scientists say their pioneering design - weighing just five kilos (11 lbs) - could be worn by soldiers, firefighters or rescue workers. They say it could help keep them fresh by lightening the load of their jobs and assist them in negotiating difficult terrain. The portable gear may also improve mobility and quality of life for the elderly and people suffering from neurodegenerative disorders. A revolutionary lightweight exosuit (pictured) that makes walking and running easier has been developed.

Video applications and analytics are routinely projected as a stressing and significant service of the Nationwide Public Safety Broadband Network. As part of a NIST PSCR funded effort, the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness and MIT Lincoln Laboratory have been developing a computer vision dataset of operational and representative public safety scenarios. The scale and scope of this dataset necessitates a hierarchical organization approach for efficient compute and storage. We overview architectural considerations using the Lincoln Laboratory Supercomputing Cluster as a test architecture. We then describe how we intelligently organized the dataset across LLSC and evaluated it with large scale imagery inference across terabytes of data.

In this paper, we study the adversarial robustness of subspace learning problems. Different from the assumptions made in existing work on robust subspace learning where data samples are contaminated by gross sparse outliers or small dense noises, we consider a more powerful adversary who can first observe the data matrix and then intentionally modify the whole data matrix. We first characterize the optimal rank-one attack strategy that maximizes the subspace distance between the subspace learned from the original data matrix and that learned from the modified data matrix. We then generalize the study to the scenario without the rank constraint and characterize the corresponding optimal attack strategy. Our analysis shows that the optimal strategies depend on the singular values of the original data matrix and the adversary's energy budget. Finally, we provide numerical experiments and practical applications to demonstrate the efficiency of the attack strategies.

The UK's privacy watchdog has opened an investigation into the use of facial recognition cameras in a busy part of central London. The information commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, announced she would look into the technology being used in Granary Square, close to King's Cross station. Two days ago the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, wrote to the development's owner demanding to know whether the company believed its use of facial recognition software in its CCTV systems was legal. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) said it was "deeply concerned about the growing use of facial recognition technology in public spaces" and was seeking detailed information about how it is used. "Scanning people's faces as they lawfully go about their daily lives in order to identify them is a potential threat to privacy that should concern us all," Denham said.

Robots are about to go underground -- for a competition anyways. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the branch of the U.S. Department of Defense dedicated to developing new emerging technologies, is holding a challenge intended to develop technology for first responders and the military to map, navigate, and search underground. But the technology developed for the competition could also be used in future NASA missions to caves and lava tubes on other planets. The DARPA Subterranean Challenge Systems Competition will be held August 15 – 22 in mining tunnels under Pittsburgh, and among the robots competing will be an entry from a team led by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) that features wheeled rovers, drones, and climbing robots that can rise on pinball-flipper-shaped treads to scale obstacles. "By investing in this competition, we are investing in our future," Leon Alkalai, manager of the JPL Office of Strategic Planning, said in a statement.

As we continue to move forward in digital transformation, an increasing number of companies are discovering the promise of robotic process automation (RPA). In a nutshell, RPA allows companies to gain efficiencies and (hopefully) save money by automating routine tasks. RPA is what I'd call the low-hanging fruit of artificial intelligence. It's governed by structured input. Its processes are mundane and rule-based.

DefCon is an annual conference hosted every summer in Las Vegas, Nevada, where thousands of hackers from around the world congregate to learn on new technology vulnerabilities and cyberattacks. Over the past weekend in Las Vegas, Nevada, thousands of hackers congregated at the 27th annual DefCon, the world's oldest and largest running hacker convention, to learn from their peers about the latest hacking techniques. During the show, there were sessions like "Say Cheese, How I Ransomwared Your DSLR Camera" by Check Point Software security researcher Eyal Itkin (more on that in a later post), "Defeating Bluetooth Low Energy 5 For Fun", "Breaking Google Home" or "Reverse Engineering 4G Hotspots For Fun, Bugs, And Net Financial Loss". And if that's your thing, then check out the conference's schedule here as well as the event's media server where most of the presentations are available for free. In this report, I'll focus on the presentation titled "Black Mirror: You Are Your Own Privacy Nightmare–The Hidden Threat of Paying For Subscription Services" given by security expert Cat Murdock on how she used information from online subscription services like Netflix, Apple Music or Spotify to access a banking account and steal confidential financial information.

As a child of refugees, my parents' narrative is missing huge gaps of information. In our data rich world, archivists are finally piecing together new clues of history using unmanned systems to reopen cold cases. The Nazis were masters in using technology to mechanize killing and erasing all evidence of their crime. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Treblinka, Poland. The death camp exterminated close to 900,000 Jews over a 15-month period before a revolt led to its dismantlement in 1943.

Women are not inherently better at multi-tasking - and that's according to scientists. A study examining the long-asserted myth has proved that men are just as capable of juggling numerous jobs simultaneously. In fact, despite years of claims to the contrary, it transpires that both genders are equally able, or unable, to do more than one task concurrently. A team of researchers led by Dr Patricia Hirsch of Germany's Aachen University reached the conclusion after analysing 48 men and 48 women, with an average age of 24, in letter or number identification tasks. Some participants were asked to pay attention to two tasks at once, known as concurrent multitasking.