Archive for the 'Rise of the Machines' Category
New Jet-Powered Drone Can Kill 1,800 Miles From Home Base
February 22nd, 2014Via: Wired: The Avenger (formerly Predator C), whose prototype flew its first flight in 2009, is operationally ready after a new round of tests completed last month, according to its maker, General Atomics. Based on the company’s more well-known MQ-9 Reaper drone, Avenger is designed to perform high-speed, long-endurance surveillance or strike missions, flying up […]
Google’s Project Tango: Indoor 3D Mapping and Tracking
February 20th, 2014Because tracking you outside is so 1990s. It’s not enough for the Legion of Doom to be able to track your every move outside. It now wants to map your indoor world, in 3D, and where you are in it. NSA/NGA will love this. Coincidence: Tango: Tango (U.S.) NATO phonetic alphabet for the letter “T” […]
“A Robotic Wingman of Sorts”: Heavily Armed Drones May Accompany U.S. Fighter Pilots Into Combat
February 15th, 2014Via: U.S. Naval Institute: Could the U.S. Navy’s future Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) aircraft have an air-to-air role? The service’s director of air warfare Rear Adm. Mike Manazir posed that it could during a Dec. 20 interview with USNI News. Manazir contemplated the possibility that that the UCLASS, which is primarily being […]
After 5 Rejections, Apple Accepts App That Tracks U.S. Drone Strikes
February 13th, 2014Via: Mashable: Persistence, it turns out, does pay off. After rejecting it five times, Apple has finally approved an app that tracks every U.S. drone strike and sends a push notification to users every time a flying robot carries out a deadly mission around the world. Josh Begley, the data artist and developer who made […]
Much of the Editing Work on Wikipedia Is Done by Bots
February 13th, 2014Via: MIT Technology Review: Less well known is Wikidata, an information repository designed to share basic facts for use on different language versions of Wikipedia. Wikidata therefore plays a crucial role in lubricating the flow of information between these online communities. Maintaining all this data is a difficult job. It requires significant editing and polishing, […]
DARPA’s Experimental Spaceplane XS-1
February 12th, 2014Via: space.com: The United States military is making progress toward developing a new unmanned space plane, which it aims to begin flight-testing in 2017. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) plans to award the first design contracts for the vehicle project — known as Experimental Spaceplane, or XS-1— in May or thereabouts, officials said. […]
Foxconn Working With Google on Robotics
February 11th, 2014Via: Wall Street Journal: People familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal that Foxconn has been working with former Android executive Andy Rubin since last year to carry out the U.S. company’s vision for robotics. To speed up robot deployment at its own factories, Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou met with Rubin in Taipei […]
We Track ‘Em, You Whack ‘Em
February 11th, 2014Via: First Look: The National Security Agency is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes – an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people. According to a former drone operator for the military’s Joint Special Operations […]
U.S. Army Tests Fully Autonomous Convoy
January 31st, 2014Via: Wired: U.S. Army convoys will soon be able to roll into even the roughest of unfriendly foreign urban areas and combat zones without the worry of loss of life, thanks to new technology that will make large vehicles fully autonomous. In demonstrations earlier this month at Fort Hood, Texas, the U.S. Army Tank-Automotive Research, […]
Google and DeepMind Technologies
January 30th, 2014Via: MIT Technology Review: How much are a dozen deep-learning researchers worth? Apparently, more than $400 million. This week, Google reportedly paid that much to acquire DeepMind Technologies, a startup based in London that had one of the biggest concentrations of researchers anywhere working on deep learning, a relatively new field of artificial intelligence research […]
