Inicio

Enlaces

sábado, 14 de noviembre de 2015

‘Jihadi John’ and the Future of the Biometrics Terror Hunt

The future of the biometrics dragnets that identified an Islamic State executioner is on a hilltop in West Virginia


Intelligence


On Thursday, the Washington Post and BBC publicly identified Mohammed Emwazi, a British-educated, Kuwaiti-born man in his mid 20s, as “Jihadi John,” the Islamic State frontman who executed several hostages on camera, to the world’s horror.



We will not comment on ongoing investigations and therefore are not in a position to confirm or deny the identity of this individual,” the FBI said Thursday.

Denials aside, FBI director James Comey said months ago that they knew John’s identity.

If the FBI has in fact identified Jihadi John, the victory was, in part, a product of the FBIs growing collaboration with the Department of Defense — a relationship that will grow much more cozy in the coming years, in the black cherry tree dotted hills of Clarksburg, West Virginia.

About four hours away from WashingtonD.C. sits the headquarters of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division, or CJIS, which houses the bureau’s Biometric Center of Excellence. The center is not a place so much as a program begun in 2007 that plays a key role in making use of all the biometric data that comes into the FBI’s possession. That’s every fingerprint, every image, and every phone message that anyone sends to the FBI.

“Bottom line for us … if any of our divisions, whether it be our counterterrorism division, our criminal division, if at any time during their investigations they develop biometrics … they submit it through our system,” Stephen L. Morris, assistant director of the CJIS, told Defense One at a recent conference in Washington. In terms of identifying John, he said, “I’m not going to tell you how we did it,” but added, “You have to have something to search … you can have images with faces but if you’re not capturing it in the right way, if there’s not data in that image to make a comparison, it’s just not useful.”

This, in part, is why the biometric center plays a role in bringing parties, and their biometric databases, together. The FBI’s system is called the Next Generation Identification, or NGI. It includes photos, aliases, physical characteristics and, of course, fingerprints. Today, it’s completely interoperable with the military’s Automated Biometric Identification System, or ABIS, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Automated Biometric Identification System, or IDENT. The center also works with the State Department and allied law enforcement agencies around the world. The FBI and Britain’s MI5 have been working together to identify John.

Obtaining a biometric record on a suspect to match against a terrorist video of a masked jihadi is not something done easily or robotically. It requires old school investigation, either sifting through lots of hours of collected video footage and comparing that to crime videos (such as beheadings), or going out into the field to find voice samples on suspects to match against crime videos, or both.

This is where the Defense Department’s extensive library of biometric signatures, gathered on the field in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, can play a role in future investigations. The department’s biometrically enabled watch list, or BEWL, houses more than 200,000 records.

“I can’t speak enough about our relationship with the Department of Defense. After 9/11, our mission in life changed. It was all about national security, our partnership with DHS and DOD — to say it expanded is an understatement,” Morris said at a recent biometrics conference in Washington, D.C.“Their ABIS system was connected with our system, so they have a small group of folks who are out there [in West Virginia] in charge of their system. Having them co-locate with us has been very important.”
That important relationship is about to get a lot more intimate. Later this year, the FBI is going to open a $328 million, 360,000-square foot Biometric Technology Center next to the current CJIScampus. The Defense Department will get about 40,000 square feet in the building, which will also consolidate the FBI’s biometric workers and operations. “Anything and everything we do will be run out of that building,” said Morris.

In September of last year, the FBI announced that the $1.2 billion dollar NGI system was fully operational (it was rolled out in increments over a period of years). If it works according to plan, it will provide law enforcement with a very fast and reliable sense of exactly who they are talking to, what threat that individual may pose, and what records they’ve left — fingerprints, voiceprints, etc. — in what places.

But fingerprints don’t help you catch everyone. Voice recognition played a key role in the identification of Jihadi John, according to published reports. The FBI’s biometric center site lists voice recognition as one of its key modalities, or areas of study, along with DNA and others, but fingerprints and more traditional biometric signatures make up a bulk of the records it manages.

Voice, in many ways, represents a crucial gap in biometrics collection for both the Defense Department and law enforcement. In a noisy environment it can be very hard to get a dataset to do matching against, a huge technical issue that the government is actively looking to solve

In Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers have compiled huge datasets of people that they have come across, including finger scans, pictures, and iris scans. Any of those can serve as a reliable red flag for a Turkish border guard, or, for that matter, a New York cop with a suspect in the chair. But they don’t do much against a villain broadcasting terror from a safely fortified mountaintop in Syria.

Some of the men fighting with ISIS today have probably left their fingerprints in a few places where Western law enforcement could pick them up and share them. Technology, by itself, won’t find those places. But, once the data is found, it can make positive identification much faster and easier, as it apparently has withISIS’s most infamous fiend.


No hay quien escape al nuevo radar holográfico


RT.COM - La empresa británica Aveillant ha creado un radar que no tiene partes móviles y es capaz de escanear continuamente los 360º del entorno externo, de modo que nada escapará de su vista.


El nuevo radar, denominado 'Theia', es holográfico: el invento permite obtener imágenes con efecto tridimensional. El avance presenta especial interés porque es capaz de realizar un escaneo detallado sin estrechar el ángulo de visión ni perder detalles en otras direcciones, haciendo que nada se escape de su vista, detalla el informe publicado en la página web de la empresa, Aviation Week

Su versión más potente, Theia 384A, genera simultáneamente 2304 rayos. El radar está compuesto por 12 paneles de antenas radiantes puestas en forma de cono que le aseguran una visión de 360°, informa la empresa fabricante Aveillant. De este modo, cada antena genera 192 rayos. Asimismo, cada panel consiste en cuatro módulos de transmisión/recepción, un complejo de administración de programas y un sistema de tratamiento de datos, junto con la interfaz Ethernet de intercambio de información.

La versión anterior de este radar, el Theia 64A, consiguió detectar el 97% de aeronaves durante los ensayos realizados en el condado británico de Norfolk.

El desarrollo de estos radares se lleva al cabo por encargo de la Dirección de Aviación Civil del Reino Unido, que necesita radares de control que funcionen continuamente y con la misma frecuencia.
 

https://actualidad.rt.com

Yihadistas anuncian las capitales mundiales que serán sus próximos blancos

RT.COM - Los terroristas del Estado Islámico han anunciado en Twitter las capitales mundiales donde preparan una serie de nuevos ataques, escribe el diario británico 'Daily Express'.


Entre los potenciales futuros blancos de los yihadistas se encuentran Londres, Washington y Roma.
La última vez que Londres fue sacudido por un atentado terrorista fue en julio de 2005, cuando 52 personas murieron en un ataque de terroristas suicidas vinculados a Al Qaeda.
El mes pasado Andrew Parker, jefe del MI5, admitió que el servicio de seguridad "nunca puede estar seguro" en la revelación de todas las tramas terroristas contra el Reino Unido, informa 'Daily Express'.
Por su parte, Washington, al igual que otras ciudades importantes de EE.UU., ha reforzado las medidas de seguridad tras los ataques terroristas en la capital francesa.
Este 13 de noviembre ha sido marcado con una serie de ataques en París. La capital francesa se ha visto sacudida por seis ataques coordinados: varias explosiones cerca del Estadio de Francia, tiroteos en dos restaurantes, en un bar, en un centro comercial y una toma de rehenes en una sala de conciertos.


Ola de atentados sacude París
Este viernes 13 de noviembre ha sido marcado con una serie de ataques en #París. La capital francesa se ha visto sacudida por ataques coordinados: varias explosiones cerca del Estadio de Francia, tiroteos en dos restaurantes, en un bar, en un centro comercial y una toma de rehenes en una sala de conciertos. El presidente francés, François Hollande, ha declarado que el Estado Islámico está detrás de estos ataques. El líder galo ha anunciado un duelo nacional de tres días por los atentados que se cobraron la vida de al menos 127 personas y dejaron 250 #heridos.#ISIS
Posted by RT Play en Español on sábado, 14 de noviembre de 2015

https://actualidad.rt.com

Robonaut 2 Technology Suite Offers Opportunities in Vast Range of Industries

A Dream Realized

Robonaut 2 launched up to the ISS on February 24th, 2011, fulfilling a 15 year dream to put a humanoid robot into space.

Nearly 50 individual technologies available for licensing

Mobility

NASA JSC has developed a series of Centaur rovers to carry the Robonaut upper bodies and other payloads. Centaur 1 was developed for work with the Robonaut R1B humanoid upper torso in 2006. Centaur 2 rover was developed in 2010 by the Human Robotics Systems (HRS) Project as part of the Exploration Technology Development and Demonstration Programs, and has now been integrated with the Robonaut R2A torso. This combination mixes state-of-the-art robotic mobility with the world’s most advanced dexterous manipulation system. Hybrid rover/arm systems, commonly referred to as mobile manipulation, represent a new domain of robotics research. Mobile manipulation is an important new Space Technology with multiple applications for improving life here on Earth. NASA’s new Centaur2/Robonaut2 system is an ideal testbed for this research and positions the agency as the technological leader.



Researchers at NASA's Johnson Space Center (JSC), in collaboration with General Motors and Oceaneering, have designed a state-of-the-art, highly dexterous, humanoid robot: Robonaut 2 (R2). R2 is made up of multiple component technologies and systems -- vision systems, image recognition systems, sensor integrations, tendon hands, control algorithms, and much more. R2's nearly 50 patented and patent-pending technologies have the potential to be game-changers in multiple industries, including logistics and distribution, medical and industrial robotics, and beyond.

What is a Robonaut?

R2 ISS Checkout - Handshake in Space

A Robonaut is a dexterous humanoid robot built and designed at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. Our challenge is to build machines that can help humans work and explore in space. Working side by side with humans, or going where the risks are too great for people, Robonauts will expand our ability for construction and discovery. Central to that effort is a capability we call dexterous manipulation, embodied by an ability to use one's hand to do work, and our challenge has been to build machines with dexterity that exceeds that of a suited astronaut.

There are currently four Robonauts, with others currently in development. This allows us to study various types of mobility, control methods, and task applications. The value of a humanoid over other

designs is the ability to use the same workspace and tools - not only does this improve efficiency in the types of tools, but also removes the need for specialized robotic connectors. Robonauts are essential to NASA's future as we go beyond low earth orbit and continue to explore the vast wonder that is space.

Robonaut 2 or R2, launched to the International Space Station on space shuttle Discovery as part of the STS-133 mission, it is the first dexterous humanoid robot in space, and the first US-built robot at the space station. But that was just one small step for a robot and one giant leap for robot-kind.


Initially R2 will be deployed on a fixed pedestal inside the ISS. Next steps include a leg for climbing through the corridors of the Space Station, upgrades for R2 to go outside into the vacuum of space, and then future lower bodies like legs and wheels to propel the R2 across Lunar and Martian terrain. A four wheeled rover called Centaur 2 is being evaluated at the 2010 Desert Field Test in Arizona as an example of these future lower bodies for R2.

Robonaut 2

In the current iteration of Robonaut, Robonaut 2 or R2, NASA and General Motors are working together with assistance from Oceaneering Space Systems engineers to accelerate development of the next generation of robots and related technologies for use in


the automotive and aerospace industries. Robonaut 2 (R2) is a state of the art highly dexterous anthropomorphic robot. Like its predecessor Robonaut 1 (R1), R2 is capable of handling a wide range of EVA tools and interfaces, but R2 is a significant advancement over its predecessor. R2 is capable of speeds more than four times faster than R1, is more compact, is more dexterous, and includes a deeper and wider range of sensing. Advanced technology spans the entire R2 system and includes: optimized overlapping dual arm dexterous workspace, series elastic joint technology, extended finger and thumb travel, miniaturized 6-axis load cells, redundant force sensing, ultra-high speed joint controllers, extreme neck travel, and high resolution camera and IR systems. The dexterity of R2 allows it to use the same tools that astronauts currently use and removes the need for specialized tools just for robots.

STS-133 Launch February 2011
One advantage of a humanoid design is that Robonaut can take over simple, repetitive, or especially dangerous tasks on places such as the International Space Station. Because R2 is approaching human dexterity, tasks such as changing out an air filter can be performed without modifications to the existing design.

Another way this might be beneficial is during a robotic precursor mission. R2 would bring one set of tools for the precursor mission, such as setup and geologic investigation. Not only does this improve efficiency in the types of tools, but also removes the need for specialized robotic connectors. Future missions could then supply a new set of tools and use the existing tools already on location.

The project is led by the Robotics Systems Technology Branchin the Software Robotics and Simulation Division at Johnson Space Center's Engineering Directorate.


http://robonaut.jsc.nasa.gov

El vídeo que desvela el traje de `Iron Man´ que llevarán los soldados de EE.UU.



Onemagazine.es - Se llama TALOS, pero comúnmente es conocido como `el traje de Iron Man´. Para crearlo, el Pentágono ha recibido con los brazos abiertos las ideas de decenas de instituciones, a las que se les indicaron los requisitos que pedía para su desarrollo el Mando de Operaciones Especiales.


Un total de 56 corporaciones, 16 agencias gubernamentales, 13 universidades y 10 laboratorios nacionales han participado en la creación del traje de soldado definitivo. ElInstituto Tecnológico de Massachusets (MIT, por sus siglas en inglés) y el RDECOM (la agencia de investigación y desarrollo de la US Army) encabezan el proyecto. 
El traje cuenta con una armadura exterior que repite los movimientos del militar, proporcionándole más fuerza al realizarlos. Con ella, el soldado puede pasar a través de unaráfaga de balas y salir indemne. Además, en función de las necesidades, puede pasar del estado sólido al líquido en milisegundos, si se le aplica para ello un campo magnético o unacorriente eléctrica. 

Gracias al ordenador de a bordo que el traje incorpora, el soldado tendría más información con la que responder a las situaciones que se le presenten. Por otro lado, un panel en contacto con la piel monitoriza su temperatura, la interna del cuerpo, el ritmo cardiaco y los niveles de hidratación. Y, en caso de necesidad, el traje TALOS proporcionaría al soldado el calor, el agua y el oxígeno que necesite.

El almirante William H. McRaven, comandante del Mando de Operaciones Especiales del Ejército estadounidense, ha anunciado que ya hay listos tres prototipos que las fuerzas que manda comenzarán a probar en junio de este año. Estarían listos para usarse en el campo de batalla en agosto de 2018. McRaven espera que estos trajes supongan un aumento revolucionario en la supervivencia del soldado y en su capacidad destructora.

Con la intención de facilitar el desarrollo del TALOS, McRaven habló con el secretario de Estado de Adquisiciones del Pentágono, Frank Kendall, para tener permiso para dar un premio a la persona o empresa que tuviese la mejor idea para algunos de los problemas con que se encuentra el desarrollo del traje que debe permitir que sea ligero para que llevarlo no limite la movilidad del soldado, como baterías de bajo peso para alimentar los equipos del traje o los sistemas de protección balística para evitar las heridas.


http://www.onemagazine.es

China piensa poner a Iron Man en Marte

Onemagazine.es - Se llama Xiaotian y es un robot casi idéntico al superhéroe de las películas de Marvel. Sus misiones estarán en la Luna, Marte y los vehículos espaciales chinos.


El superhéroe robótico Iron Man es un ídolo de masas en China. Prueba de ello es que la película'Iron Man 3' recaudó 112 millones de euros en el país asiático. Pero su Gobierno y la Corporación de Ciencia y Tecnología Aeroespacial de China han ido un paso más allá y han creado el robot Xiaotian –en chino, ‘Pequeño Cielo’-, un autómata claramente inspirado en el famoso robot deMarvel.

Xiaotian será un participante clave en el programa espacial chino. Luce los mismos colores rojo y dorado de Iron Man y, justo en el punto del pecho en el que el robot de ficción monta el ‘Reactor Arc’ –donde Iron Man almacena una poderosa fuente de energía-, Xiaotian luce un emblema circular. Sus principales tareas pasarán por operar durante aterrizajes lunares, a bordo de estaciones espaciales o de vehículos no tripulados. La agencia de noticias Xinhua asegura que el robot puede llevar a cabo “complejas tareas de manipulación”, durante su participación enalunizajes o en misiones a estaciones espaciales y sondas no tripuladas.

Pero China ha realizado toda una declaración de intenciones al presentarlo en la misma feria industrial de Shanghái en la que ha dado a conocer la nave espacial que va a enviar al Planeta Rojo en 2020. La respuesta china al robot Robonaut de la NASA ya está lista para despegar. Mientras tanto, los chinos esperarán con expectación la próxima entrega de la saga de Iron Man:'Capitán América: Civil War' se estrenará el próximo 6 de mayo de 2016

http://www.onemagazine.es