Security

• Seoul adopts AI for suicide prevention on Han Bridge: Uni boffins train machine learning model on rescue teams' data

  System trains itself to spot suicidal behavior and alert a controller
  Laura Dobberstein Thu 1 Jul 2021 // 10:45 UTC

  

  South Korea's capital and largest metropolis has turned to AI for suicide detection and prevention on popular bridges along the prominent Han River, according to the system's developers at the Seoul Institute of Technology (SIT).

  There are 27 bridges that cross the Han River, also known as the Hangang river, in the Seoul National Capital Area (​divided into Seoul, Gyeonggi, Incheon). Many of the city's pedestrians walk on them every day. Unfortunately, only counting suicide attempts from Seoul bridges, researchers said there are an average of 486 people trying to end their lives in the Han's waters every year, translating to a large amount of required rescue resources.

  With the current setup, which according to an SIT document went live in February, the bridges are monitored by an array of CCTV screens at a control centre, with each small box depicting a different part of the bridge. An employee watches these screens for unusual behaviour that may require interference or a rescue worker. The AI collaboration between SIT and Seoul Fire and Disaster Headquarters is aimed at helping the technicians to better shift their focus by using machine learning to alert them to the scenes most likely to need intervention.

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• Battery recycling boosted by dentist-style ultrasonics, if manufacturers can cooperate

  New technique quicker and greener, but needs batteries to be designed for dismantling
  Gareth Halfacree Thu 1 Jul 2021 // 10:02 UTC

  

  Boffins have laid claim to a "ground-breaking invention" which they say will make it considerably easier to recycle batteries from electric vehicles, laptops, and the like – an ultrasonic delaminator.

  Electric vehicles may come with impressive green credentials, at least while they're being driven, but as any laptop owner knows batteries come with a finite lifespan. End-of-life EV batteries may find a second use as backing storage for power grids but there will come a time when they need to be recycled – and the current process is neither clean nor easy.

  Enter ultrasonic delamination, a new technique for separating the materials in lithium-ion batteries for reuse, as discovered by researchers at the Faraday Institution, the University of Leicester, Swansea University, and the University of Birmingham.

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• Exoskeleton startup wants to slap robot arms on schoolkids

  For educational purposes, of course
  Gareth Halfacree Thu 1 Jul 2021 // 09:15 UTC

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  Exoskeleton startup Auxivo is aiming to encourage the next generation of cyborgs with the launch of an educational kit dubbed the EduExo Pro, a complete exoskeleton for one arm.

  Founded in 2019 as a spin-out from the Rehabilitation Engineering Lab at ETH Zürich, Auxivo's industrial products – the LiftSuit and CarrySuit, with the more powerful CarrySuit Advanced on the way – are designed to assist workers with lifting and carrying tasks.

  Its EduExo range, by contrast, focuses less on functionality in the workplace and more on making the entire concept of exoskeletons mainstream through education. A crowdfunding campaign launched in May 2017 brought the original EduExo to life: a low-cost, 3D-printed partial exoskeleton driven by an Arduino microcontroller.

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• Openreach to UK businesses: Switch is about to hit the fan. Prepare for withdrawal of the copper-based phone network now or risk disruption

  PSTN to be axed in 2025
  Matthew Hughes Thu 1 Jul 2021 // 08:30 UTC

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  UK businesses must prepare for the retirement of the copper-based phone network that may cause devices to stop working.

  Or so said BT-owned Openreach as it urged businesses to audit their systems for devices that use the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN), which is scheduled to be switched off in December 2025. While some products may function normally after the transition, others won't.

  In the case of any ambiguities, Openreach told customers to contact the vendor that manufactured their device and seek clarification. Addressing this issue ahead of the switchover may limit disruption, it said.

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• Data collected to promote public health must never be surrendered to police

  Voluntary location-tracking to crimp COVID is too good a tool to waste
  Mark Pesce Thu 1 Jul 2021 // 07:26 UTC

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  Column Five years ago I visited Shanghai, to see what the future might look like. I came back wondering how the rest of us had missed QR codes.

  In Shanghai every billboard, poster, and newspaper advertisement bore QR codes, all linking off to their respective web sites. It felt simultaneously old-fashioned (QR codes had been around for years, but never taken off anywhere else) and startlingly new — a QR code makes an excellent partner to a smartphone’s camera. I returned home to Australia and a life without QR codes, where we relied on humans typing away at tiny glass keyboards to enter data.

  COVID-19 changed all of that.

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• 5G innovation will transform the post-pandemic economy and light up every industry

  Digital economy is the driving force for the global economy, Huawei’s Ryan Ding tells MWC
  Huawei Thu 1 Jul 2021 // 06:36 UTC

  Sponsored Innovation in ICT is becoming a key driver of the global economy and its value is moving beyond the telecoms industry, the head of Huawei’s carrier business told MWC Barcelona 2021 this week.

  Ongoing innovation in 5G, in particular, will bring more value to operators, the ICT industry, and the global economy, and will light up the future of every industry, Huawei executive director and president of carrier BG Ryan Ding told the audience.

  Ding said the pandemic has created a new normal in which the digital economy is the driving force for the global economy. ICT infrastructure, as the cornerstone of the digital economy, is playing an increasingly important role. Ding said that the value of ICT now transcends the telecoms industry and has transformative implications for the global economy as a whole.

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• You, robo-car maker, any serious accidents, I want to know about them, stat – US watchdog

  NHTSA sets 24-hour deadline for reporting significant crashes
  Katyanna Quach Thu 1 Jul 2021 // 02:25 UTC

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  America's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will now require details of any and all crashes involving self-driving cars from automakers within one day of them knowing about the accident.

  “NHTSA’s core mission is safety,” Steven Cliff, acting administrator of the transportation watchdog, said this week. “By mandating crash reporting, the agency will have access to critical data that will help quickly identify safety issues that could emerge in these automated systems.”

  The new rules [PDF] apply to vehicles classified between Level 2 and 5 autonomy. That means serious prangs involving everything from Tesla’s Autopilot and FSD-enabled cars to Waymo’s driverless taxi test fleets must be disclosed to the NHTSA on the double.

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• NASA reaches for graph DB to find people, skills for Moon and Mars missions

  Fixing the talent pipeline so that finding rocket scientists doesn't have to be rocket science
  Lindsay Clark Thu 1 Jul 2021 // 01:32 UTC

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  NASA has been set the ambitious targets of taking humans back to the Moon by 2024, then to later make the order-of-magnitude leap on to Mars. Even for the globally renowned space agency, it is a struggle.

  According to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) it still isn't quite sure how much this will cost, nor how long it will take to get the equipment ready. Hardware challenges abound, including testing an electric ion propulsion system for the orbiting capsule, dubbed Gateway.

  On top of all that, there is the question of whether NASA has the right people in place to take on the Moon mission and the trip to the Red Planet beyond. Trying to come up with some answers is David Meza, senior data scientist within the agency’s people analytics group, who has begun employing graph database technologies to try and help.

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• Robinhood hit with record $70m bill by financial watchdog for outages, misleading investors

  FINRA cites suicide of man who was 'inaccurately' told by the app he was $750k in debt
  Katyanna Quach Thu 1 Jul 2021 // 00:40 UTC

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  Robinhood, the app that looks like the lovechild of a stock-trading platform and a video game, was hit with a record $70m bill by a US watchdog for causing investors to lose millions in total from misleading financial information and system outages.

  The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) ordered the software biz to cough up $57m in fines plus pay back $12.6m to customers to cover their losses with interest.

  “The fine imposed in this matter, the highest ever levied by FINRA, reflects the scope and seriousness of Robinhood’s violations, including FINRA’s finding that Robinhood communicated false and misleading information to millions of its customers,” Jessica Hopper, the head of FINRA’s Department of Enforcement, said in a statement.

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• Who in America is standing up to privacy-bothering facial-recognition tech? Maine is right now leading the pack

  'This technology is too dangerous to be regulated, it shouldn’t be used at all'
  Thomas Claburn in San Francisco Thu 1 Jul 2021 // 00:06 UTC

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  Feature The State of Maine has enacted what the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) describes as the strongest state facial-recognition law in the US amid growing concern over the unconstrained use of facial-recognition systems by the public and private sector.

  The Maine bill, LD 1585 [PDF], forbids state officials from using facial-recognition technology, or entering into agreements with third parties to do so, except under a relatively limited set of circumstances having to do with serious crimes and searches of vehicle registration data. It imposes the sort of broad limitations that civil liberties advocacy groups have been advocating.

  "Maine is showing the rest of the country what it looks like when we the people are in control of our civil rights and civil liberties, not tech companies that stand to profit from widespread government use of face surveillance technology,” said Michael Kebede, policy counsel at the ACLU of Maine, in a statement.

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• Former NASA astronaut and Shuttle boss weigh in on fixing Hubble Space Telescope

  We're still keeping everything crossed that the engineers extract a rabbit from a hat once again
  Richard Speed Wed 30 Jun 2021 // 22:43 UTC

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  Updated The outlook continues to look a little bleak for NASA's veteran Hubble telescope as a former astronaut and a Space Shuttle manager weighed in on repair options and the possibility of a fix.

  NASA has remained silent on the fate of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) since an admission last week that back-up computer hardware exhibited the same behavior as the primary payload computer system, which unexpectedly halts and puts the spacecraft goes into safe mode, suspending scientific operations. Engineers have since spread the fault-finding net a little wider.

  Writing on Twitter, former astronaut Clay Anderson gave voice to the fears of many, saying that he believed the observatory was "beyond repair."

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