By Stephanie Kanowitz
Apr 16, 2021
Public safety answering points (PSAPs) in California can get real-time crash notifications through an agreement between a cloud-based emergency response platform and General Motors’ OnStar emergency system.
Announced at the end of March, the collaboration between OnStar and RapidDeploy gives 911 call takers in the state immediate data about accidents that they can use to improve response – for instance, dispatching several ambulances to a multi-vehicle pileup.
“For us, it’s about saving lives and protecting property,” said Budge Currier, California’s 911 emergency communications branch manager at the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES). “That’s our return on investment. We’ll save lives and improve response times.”
By Jason Maderer
Apr 16, 2021
A snake-like robot can now slither its way through water, allowing it to inspect ships, submarines, and underwater infrastructure for damage.
Researchers from the Biorobotics Lab in the School of Computer Science’s Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University tested the hardened underwater modular robot snake (HUMRS) last month in the pool, diving the robot through underwater hoops, showing off its precise and smooth swimming, and demonstrating its ease of control.
“We can go places that other robots cannot,” says Howie Choset, professor of computer science. “It can snake around and squeeze into hard-to-reach underwater spaces.” Choset and Matt Travers, co-directors of the Biorobotics Lab, led the work.
By Nathan Klein
Apr 16, 2021
Computers are good at answering questions. What’s the shortest route from my house to Area 51? Is 8,675,309 a prime number? How many teaspoons in a tablespoon? For questions like these, they’ve got you covered.
There are certain innocent-sounding questions, though, that computer scientists believe computers will never be able to answer – at least not within our lifetimes. These problems are the subject of the P versus NP question, which asks whether problems whose solutions can be checked quickly can also be solved quickly. P versus NP is such a fundamental question that either designing a fast algorithm for one of these hard problems or proving you can’t would net you a cool million dollars in prize money.
By GCN Staff
Apr 12, 2021
Kentucky is planning to equip all the commonwealth’s 120 county clerks with Yubikey devices to enable two-factor authentication that will better protect the state’s voter registration system from unauthorized access.
Users insert a Yubikey token into the USB ports on their laptops and touch its button to verify they are a local human user and not a remote hacker.
The Yubikeys will be made available thanks to a federal grant obtained via a joint partnership of the Kentucky Secretary of State, the mayor of Lexington, Ky., the Kentucky Office of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley ranked nine technologies according to technical vulnerability, attractiveness to nation-state attackers and potential impact of a successful attack.