Now, after passing Pentagon tests, the devices are actually approved for use.

Before authorizing any devices for use in security-conscious military environments, the military requires a very specific and detailed implementation and deployment plan. A large part of that is the creation of policy for approved use as per DoD Directive 8100.02, which says that cellular devices are not allowed into areas where classified information is discussed, stored, or processed without written approval.

And until that happened for the Apple devices, the hundreds of thousands of phones and tablets were in administrative limbo.

“Most of them have not been deployed and are still sitting in a warehouse,” a source I talked to a month ago said. “They haven’t yet been able to build an implementation guide on how to use them.”

Today’s decision, however, paves the way for the U.S. military to actually use the devices in secure areas, and potentially expand their purchase order. It marks a turning point away from BlackBerry devices, which have been considered more secure, and which to date have formed the vast majority of government-issued mobile phones.

The problem with clearing smartphones for use in top secret environments is that they are, essentially, full of radios: Bluetooth, WiFi, cellular.

“With standard consumer devices, there’s no way to prove that the Wi-Fi is turned off,” my source told me.

One solution the DoD had previously implemented for iPads was to hand them off to a second party after delivery from Apple to crack open the cases and “snip the Wi-Fi radio” to disable it, and then close them up again. Apparently, the DoD reached a special agreement with Apple to maintain warranty eligibility, which would normally be voided after opening the case.

Today’s approval, however, is for a version of iOS 6 that has likely been customized by Apple and certified by military technologists to ensure security compliance without actually having to snip wires.

Interestingly, according to Bloomberg, the military plans to create its own app store for military applications, which would allow DOD personnel to use commercial hardware but employ tested and approved applications.

photo credits: The U.S. Army via photopin cc, Devindra Hardawar/VentureBeat

They’re working on fixing that.

According to Electronista, the U.S. Department of Defense has ordered 650,000 iOS devices from Apple. The purchase order is pending, and only being held up by the governments’ current budgetary “sequester,” otherwise known as $85 billion in spending cuts. Apparently the sequester will not stop the purchase, however — just slow it down.

650,000 iOS devices will certainly put a nice shine on Apple sales this quarter. While it’s impossible to know exactly how much the order totals up to, a quick back-of the envelope calculation shows it could easily be in the neighborhood of $200 to $250 million:

• 120,000 iPads at $400: $48,000,000
• 100,000 iPad minis at $300: $30,000,000
• 200,000 iPod Touches at $250: $50,000,000
• 210,000 iPhones at $500: $105,000,000

That may be a drop in the bucket for a company that earned over $50 billion last quarter alone, but it’s presumably going to make some sales group very happy. And it marks a significant shift in the U.S. government away from BlackBerry and towards Apple devices.

More than half of these are headed to the battlefield, presumably as part of the Army’s efforts to modernize communication, tactics, and command.

photo credit: The U.S. Army via photopin cc

The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has granted $6 million to Professor Franz Franchetti to develop software that protects unmanned ground vehicles and high-end cars from digital threats. Franchetti is an associate research professor the department of electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University.

“This is an extremely challenging project as we work to develop secure robotic systems that are resilient to cyberattacks,” he said in a statement.

Over the past five years, the U.S. military has focused on unmanned vehicles such as airborne drones because they cost less, are smaller, and allow military personnel to operate them from afar. This removes them from harm’s way and makes high-risk missions more realistic options. However, the technology that helps the vehicles work is also hackable, which provides a significant threat to military security and safety.

A recent study by the U.S. Commerce Department found that cyberthreats cost billions of dollars in lost yearly revenues and threaten not only our economy but our security as well. A Carnegie Mellon release said, “Experts fear a click of a simple computer mouse could ultimately explode a fuel refinery, blind air traffic controllers, or jam an important power grid.”

DARPA supports the development of a number of tech projects, such as a “robo-horse of doom” and funneling $3.5 million into maker-haven TechShop to create “insta-factories for weapons systems.” With this contract, Franchetti’s team will develop verification tools such as virtual high-assurance sensors and automatic software systems “to help computers figure out that they are under attack and to help them survive and continue operating.”

Carnegie Mellon University is a private institution based in Pittsburgh, Penn. that’s well known for its engineering programs. Read the press release. 

Photo credit: The U.S. Army/Flickr

Today, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) is taking aim at the U.S. Department of Defense and a handful of tech companies that block access to websites with LGBT content.

We’re not talking about adult content here; we’re talking about sites like The Trevor Project (youth suicide prevention) or sites dealing with LGBT health issues and legal rights.

The tech company in question is Blue Coat Systems. Blue Coat helps IT admins block potentially harmful or merely distracting web content by filtering out certain categories inappropriate for workplaces, schools, or other institutions with large networks.

For example, you could choose to block sites about gambling, alcohol, and pornography on a high school’s network. Or you could block bandwidth-sucking peer-to-peer sites on a workplace network.

In a statement on its site, Blue Coat specifically says that LGBT sites do not contain explicit or mature content and “are generally suitable for viewing by all age groups” and contain “reference materials, news, legal information, anti-bullying and suicide-prevention information, and other resources for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people or that relate to LGBT civil rights.”

Oddly enough, Blue Coat’s LGBT category is the only one of its kind that separates a group based on its non-chosen, legally protected status. No categories, for example, group websites with content on people with physical disabilities or people belonging to an ethnic group or even content on women’s issues.

Ergo, LGBT content is the only content of its kind that can be blocked — and blocked it is on military computers, school computers, and other places where legal and health information for gay audiences is not only needed but vital in many cases.

“GLAAD has reached out to Blue Coat Services to discuss its practices around LGBT sites,” a GLAAD rep wrote to VentureBeat via email today, noting that the organization is asking concerned folks to sign an online petition about this issue.

Additionally, the spokesperson continued, the tech community is encouraged to be extra vigilant about site-blocking and to report it.

“GLAAD encourages individuals to report any companies or schools using web-filtering software that blocks LGBT content. Reports can be submitted at GLAAD’s LGBT web filtering page. Of course, all personal information is strictly confidential. We encourage your readers to let us know if their company blocks LGBT webpages.”

In a statement to reporters, DoD officials said, “No filter is perfect, and some sites may have unnecessarily been blocked. The Department Chief Information Officer will work with relevant components to address these situations.”

Image credit: Shutterstock

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, makes really freaking cool horse-robots. Or spider-robots. I’m not sure what this thing resembles, but it’s a human-sized robot that can now do more than trot along and get back up if it falls — it can stalk you.

The horse, otherwise known as Legged Squad Support System (LS3), comes out of a partnership between DARPA and the Marine Corps Warfighting Laboratory, as The Atlantic notes. It now listens to a “leader follow” command, which tells it to follow a target wherever it may go. A description on the YouTube video of LS3 says that its footing and ability to roll and get back up when it falls have also improved. This means it can stalk you in a number of different terrains.

Unfortunately, the horse isn’t exactly quiet. Its gears and mechanical parts make a constant whizzing noise that is guaranteed to bring attention to it. That is, unless you’re stalking someone in the Forest of White Noise, then you’re good.

Of course, some might ask, why not just use a regular, quieter horse? Can a horse stalk your target and potentially be outfitted with cameras or maybe even weapons one day to take out that target? NOPE. Not unless it’s Mister Ed, and really, the most spectacular thing we saw out of him was some advanced vocal cords.

Check out the video for more of what LS3 can do, including galloping and walking through tight hallways:

In honor of Veteran’s Day, I wanted to dedicate Startup Spotlight to entrepreneurs with military experience, or who were working on projects to benefit the veteran community. I found a company that embodies both.

Women Veterans Connect is an online community for women who have served in the military. At its core, it is a network where women veterans can connect, exchange stories, engage with peer mentors, and find relevant information. Jo Ann Martinez founded the organization after serving in the Air Force and receiving strong support from an informal group of women veterans. She realized not everyone had the same access to this network and set out to create WVC.

“I have been immersed in the women’s veterans community since day 1,” Martinez said. “These are all women whose stories I know personally, and I realized that we typically don’t ask for help until we are in crisis. I took on project after project trying to figure out what to do, and it finally came down to stopping, looking back at all the reasons why things failed, and doing the opposite. My expertise was with women’s veterans. I wanted to serve that community for all the mentoring they provided me and I wanted to contribute by helping them successfully reintegrate into the community.”  

After multiple unsuccessful attempts to get something off the ground, Martinez met the Katherine Webster, the woman behind TechCentral SF and VetsInTech. That encounter led her to attend the first ever VetsInTech hackathon in March. Up until this point, Martinez taught herself basic elements of front end development and design, but knew that to launch a fully-featured web-based platform, she would need more education and help. Much to her surprise, her team placed third and she found the bridge she needed from the military world into the technology world.

“I think veterans make great entrepreneurs,” she said. “Military personal go through so many leadership programs, it makes sense. Plus, we have all the work ethic and commitment that is involved. The Air Force core values are integrity, service before self, and excellence in all we do. I still apply this win my everyday life.”

Many members of the military also receive extensive training in math, science, engineering, and logistics, which can provide a solid foundation to learn programming. Furthermore, startup life can be a desirable route for veterans who struggle to find more traditional forms of unemployment.

“People getting out of the military can have a stigma,” she said. “We’ve got employers out there that are not going to say this directly, but they might look at you as a liability. Veterans come back after multiple deployments, some with PTSD, to a weakened economy and it can be really really difficult to get a job. This is why entrepreneurship becomes attractive for us.”

Women Veterans Connect is not only about supporting returned military personnel, but also about supporting women. Technology and the military are both male-dominated industries and part of Martinez’s mission is to encourage women to throw themselves headfirst into these worlds, even when it can be intimidating.

“I had my daughter in the same year that this idea was born,” she said. “It is my mission to not just tell her, but actually show her all of the possibilities that we are capable of as women. In my experience, women are always willing to make more out of less, whereas men are asking for more and getting more. What I hope happens down the road is women veterans show up more and there are more women overall in tech community.”

The WVC officially incorporated as a non-profit in April 2012. It currently focuses its efforts on the 167,000 women veterans in California, but the vision is to expand the platform nationwide and hopefully gain some influence at the government level.

While women veterans comprise a relatively small segment of the population, Martinez strives to make the services and her vision relatable to the rest of the country. She wants to honor the accomplishments of women veterans, beyond their military service, and tell stories that not only provide recognition, but inspiration.

For more information about this weekend’s VetsInTech hackathon, click here. 

Startup Spotlight is a new weekly series that features a company with a unique idea or story to tell. If your company would like to be considered, please submit an application at http://venturebeat.com/news-tips/.

Allied Minds, an “alternative investment company” in Boston, has secured a partnership with the DOD to license military-developed technologies, build commercial applications, and create new companies. First-year investment will total $100 million.

“This is a historic opportunity,” Allied Minds CEO Chris Silva told me this morning. “It’s the first time the DOD has ever partnered with a private investment firm.”

Silva has already launched two companies in the new fund, including Allied Communications, which is commercializing high-efficiency spectrum sharing technologies invented by the DOD, and Broadcast Routing Fountains, which is bringing more secure and efficient routing solutions to consumer and government networks. Eighteen more companies will follow in just the first year.

Both exhibit what really excites Silva about the DOD opportunity: already mature technology.

Since one of the roles of the DOD is to provide high-tech solutions for America’s military, the technologies are already in use. They’ve been “enabled,” as Silva puts it, and much of the risk of a new startup — that it is not addressing a real problem, and that its tech doesn’t actually solve the problem — has already been taken out.

Allied Minds invests somewhat like a venture capitalist, but instead of creating a fund, the company forms subsidiaries. The company previously focused on technologies created by university research labs, creating companies like Spin Transfer Technologies, which is commercializing a new kind of “universal” memory chip, a cross between DRAM and Flash, and just took an additional $36 million round of financing.

With the new DOD partnership, Allied Minds has a rich new field of opportunity: innovations from those 50,000 scientists. Silva is focusing investment in five key categories that he believes are “ripe” for commercialization:

• Cyber-security
• Advanced materials
• Data analytics
• Energy
• Power storage

But the opportunity is bigger than Allied Minds, and bigger than its initial $100 million investment. So Silva intends to partner with other investment firms and venture capitalists to reach the goal of 100 companies a year.

“We want to be the spearhead, not necessarily do all them ourselves,” he told me.

Allied Minds is an interesting animal in the evolving world of startups. Not a VC, not an angel, not an incubator or an accelerator, Allied Minds takes an ownership stake in every company it starts, and focuses on speed to market. The relatively mature technology it starts with helps, but the company also provides all the back office support, accounting, legal, HR, and other needs a new company has, plus all the funding needed.

The goal, Silva told me is helping CEOs focus on building the business, not on raising money or building infrastructure.

If successful, those businesses will also return some value to the American consumer — and the American taxpayer.

photo credit: United States Air Force via photopin cc

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Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Imagine being able to predict when a war will break out. Well, scientists are trying, and they’re getting awfully close.

In 2010, when the WikiLeaks scandal broke, a group of friends gathered together at Bitly Inc in New York to try to bring order to the chaotic mess of data WikiLeaks had unleashed.

They used a simple code to extract dates and locations from about 77,000 unclassified reports from both simple stop-and-search operations and battles. This revealed unexpected hot spots: the Pakistani border, and the country’s main highway, which had experienced a series of violent outbreaks.

Recent advances in big data technologies have shown that we’re close to being able to predict exactly when a battle will break out. However there’s one thing that will stymie advances in this field: the inherent unpredictability of humans.

This year, when big data became a buzzword, the team reunited at Bitly’s offices to give the project another shot. This time, they teamed up with the brightest mathematical minds for a more audacious goal: a war zone prediction model. The researchers found a general pattern to the violence in Afghanistan, using it to determine whether an uprising would take place in each province, and its level of intensity.

The model worked with surprising accuracy and didn’t fail even when President Obama changed the rules of the game by sending in 30,000 additional troops.

The project, the results of which were published online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in July, is just one small part of a growing movement to anticipate episodes of armed conflict using algorithmic computational techniques. Still, we have a long road ahead of us before this data is turned into actionable intelligence — a matter of life or death on the battlefield.

As Lt. Gen. Michael Oates, head of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Organization, recently stated, “There is no shortage of data. There is a dearth of analysis.”

Iraq: the first ‘big data war’

Bitly’s research wasn’t the first time a group of renegade scientists brought the power of analytics to a war zone. For the better part of the decade, bringing big data to the battlefield has been the job of civilian researchers.

Cast your mind back to the spring of 2003, when four countries participated in the invasion of Iraq and succeeded in toppling the regime of Saddam Hussein in 21 days. At Oxford University, a young scholar had a theory, one that did not sit very well with centuries of political theory. He wondered whether wars share a single, predictable pattern.

Sean Gourley (pictured), a New Zealand-born graduate student, told me that “during one of those classic Oxford dinner conversations where you sit around these high tables, Harry Potter-style”  he butted heads with James Woolsey, the former director of the CIA.

“I had a hunch that there might be some strong, mathematical pattern that might emerge once we’d looked at Iraq,” he said. “No one had really done it before.”

Using a combination of reports from 130 news sources, SMS-based communications between freelance journalists and photographers stationed in Baghdad, plus any information from the frontlines he could get his hands on, he set to work on an algorithm.

“We were writing software to extract when people were dying and how they were dying …”

Gourley told me that he harbored strong reservations about the research. “My God … we were writing software to extract when people were dying and how they were dying,” Gourley said, admitting that he frequently considered throwing in the towel.

To make matters more complicated, reports from various news media often conflicted. As we know now, war reporting is notoriously inaccurate and is even less viable when comparing one armed conflict to another. In Afghanistan, for example, rural environs and a depleted number of reporters on the field led to less coverage than in the Iraq conflict. This remains a problem for researchers today.

Gourley told me they learned that the best approach was for humans and algorithms had to work hand-in-hand. By then, a team of physicists were working with him to see him through this crazy experiment, and they were investigating other conflict areas, including Sierra Leone. According to Gourley, the senior-level military personnel were keeping a watchful eye on their progress.

However, his frequent attempts to convince a contact at the Pentagon to hand over data fell on deaf ears. As a foreign national, he was not able to access official U.S. military reports.

This proved to be a blessing in disguise. At that time, the military’s analysts were typically trained in political science, not computer science, and their reports were spotty at best. “They couldn’t write a python script if you paid them,” Gourley joked. After the WikiLeaks scandal, he discovered that his datasets were superior to the U.S. military’s. “It turns out that we had 80 percent of what they had; they only had 70 percent of what we had,” he explained.

The results, published in Nature in 2009, found that insurgent wars follow an approximate power law, in which the frequency of attacks decreases with increasing attack size to the power of 2.5. That means that for any insurgent war, an attack with 10 casualties is 316 times more likely to occur than one with 100 casualties.

This may seem like a boring set of numbers, but for the first time, it revealed an underlying pattern to war. “It shows that there is something going on in the way these wars are fought that is common to all,” Neil F. Johnson, a physicist at the University of Miami who participated in the research, told Nature.

In the course of his research, he and his team collected data on 54,679 “violent events” reported in nine different conflicts, including those in Iraq, Afghanistan, Peru, and Colombia.

What’s next for the big data wars?

The Gourley and Bitly research are first steps in bringing objective quantitative analysis to realms that were once subjective. Big data will play a growing role in maintaining global security as the Department of Defense reshuffles budgets and priorities. According to Forbes, the amount of data from drones and other surveillance technology has risen 1,600 percent since 9/11.

To step up the research, the U.S. military recently made a $250 million bet on big data. In May, U.S. Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta put forward a review of the country’s national defense, spotlighting information processing as a growing priority.

For Gourley, who ultimately left academia to form big data startup Quid, this research will have far-reaching consequences, and not just for the military. If these algorithms work, they may change the very nature of war.

Key Image via Shutterstock 

But I can’t resist this one. And it is, after all, news. Even the BBC agrees.

The U.S. Army has successfully tested a lighting laser gun. Yeah. How cool is that: lighting, laser, and gun, all in one weapon.

Gotta be an Al Qaeda car

Here’s how they describe it: a “device that will shoot lightning bolts down laser beams to destroy its target.” I sure hope the grunt who gets to use it first is of Scandinavian origin and has a name like “Thor.”

This is how it works: a very brief but incredibly intense laser beam paints the target. By intense, the army means 50 billion watts of optical power … about 500 million times more powerful than the light bulb illuminating your room.

By some trick of physics, very intense laser beams focus themselves in air. And when they are intensive enough, laser beams generate an electro-magnetic field “strong enough to rip electrons off of air molecules.” Army scientists explain it all right here.

Thor wishes he had an LIPC

That does two things. First, it creates free electrons … the raw material for a lightning bolt. Second, and just as important, it creates a channel of plasma along the path of the laser beam.

(Plasma is just ordinary matter stripped of some of its electrons.)

As you might have guessed when reading “channel,” plasma is a highly efficient conductor of electrons … much more efficient than the surrounding ordinary air.

And given that lighting bolts are just lots and lots of electrons desperately seeking a cool place to crash for the night but soon, you have just created everything you need to aim lightning.

In fact, you’ve created a weapon straight out of science fiction or fantasy: a lightning laser gun.

DARPA has outdone itself again.

But not really in the naming department. Some unimaginative army pencil-pusher has labeled this fantastical machine the Laser-Induced Plasma Channel (LIPC).

Doesn’t quite have the ring of a BFG, does it?

Image credits: Thor/ShutterStock, Lightning/ShutterStock

Today DARPA took a break from funding next-generation weapons systems, advanced hypersonic aircraft, and frickin’ laser beams to put $3.5 million into TechShop, the paradise for “inventors, makers, hackers, tinkerers, artists … and anyone else who wants to be able to make things that they dream up but don’t have the tools, space or skills.” TechShop currently operates 5 locations around the US, giving members access to a vast array of tools, building space, and lessons.

In authentic military tradition, the project has a funky acronym: iFAB. The Instant Foundry Adaptive through Bits partnership between TechShop, DARPA, and the Department of Veteran Affairs is intended to “create a foundry to rapidly design and reconfigure manufacturing capabilities to support the fabrication of a wide array of military vehicles.”

In other words, DARPA wants to create insta-factories for weapons systems and military vehicles. Think a pop-up shop that follows the military through a battle zone: instead of new equipment manufacturing, repairs, and upgrades taking place thousands of miles away, military hardware could be built and serviced near the war zone and returned to battle within days.

“Supporting initiatives that expand the number and diversity of talent contributing to the nation’s defense is critical to DARPA’s efforts in advanced manufacturing,” DARPA director Kaigham Gabriel said in a statement. “The resources made available through this effort enables more people to ‘make,’—the DNA of creativity and innovation.”

According to BusinessWeek, the funding will enable TechShop to open two new locations in Washington, DC, and Pittsburgh, joining locations already in Menlo Park, Raleigh, San Francisco, San Jose, and Detroit.

The Veteran Affairs also gains from the partnership. TechShop announced that, as part of the partnership, 2000 one-year memberships which typically cost over $1000 each, will be made available to veterans. Jonah Czerwinski, director of the VA’s Center for Innovation, said that iFAB supports the VA’s goal of “finding new ways of providing veterans with resources that help them serve an important role in America’s economy.”

Photo credit: cell105/Flickr

Today, Facebook is announcing new military-specific tools for service members in crisis, struggling military family members, and veterans in need of assistance.

The social network has partnered with the Department of Veterans Affairs and with Blue Star Families (a support organization for military families) to create a special set of military crisis content.

The lives of military members and their spouses and children aren’t easy. Orders can take military families halfway around the globe on what seems like a moment’s notice, and it’s hard to tell if a support system is going to be there for them when they land.

In recent years, more and more military families have relied on Facebook to create and maintain a virtual replica of the real-life relationships that gave them strength in times of uncertainty or turmoil. Sometimes, those online connections are to natal families; sometimes, those ties are to closer-than-family friends they meet at various bases around the country and even the world.

In fact, a recent Blue Star survey found that 86 percent of military family members use Facebook every single day. The same survey showed high rates of suicidal ideation in both service members (9 percent) and military family members (10 percent).

When you’re depressed and far from any place you could call a real home, Facebook may be the closest thing you’ve got — and it might be your best chance at strengthening the human connections that can help pull you back into a healthy and meaningful life.

So now, in addition to having access to Facebook’s existing suicide-prevention tools, military families and service members will have access to military-focused counseling services, including the Veterans Crisis Line, which is accessible via phone, instant message, or SMS.

“The Facebook platform, which is used on a daily basis by so many of our families, will be a critical means of helping our military community live long, healthy, and successful lives after they have sacrificed so much for our safety and way of life,” wrote a Blue Star spokesperson in a blog post this morning.

“The Facebook engineering team worked on a customized solution to identify military families and military personnel,” a Facebook rep told VentureBeat in an email. “As a result, friends and families that report content as harmful or suicidal will receive specific information about crisis services for our nation’s military.”

Facebookers, Blue Star reps, and folks from the VA and the Wounded Warriors Project will be participating in a Facebook Live event to discuss and explain the new tools. The stream will begin at 3 p.m. Eastern Time.

That’s why the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is doing research into vision in a program known as Mind’s Eye. James Donlon (pictured right), program manager for the Mind’s Eye project, said at the recent Embedded Vision Alliance summit in San Jose, Calif., that vision systems being tested now aren’t that bad at recognizing patterns such as a person about to be hit by a car that is backing up. But they still make mistakes that are sometimes comical, like mistaking a stationary object for a person or focusing on the wrong thing in a scene.

The Mind’s Eye research has been going on for about 18 months and is about half-way complete. After three years, the various vision projects will lead to lab prototypes that can eventually be brought to market. The systems being developed will do things like recognize someone walking, touching an object, or taking other actions. If the research pans out, we could see robots and other machines getting much better at the vision-based tasks that humans are best at.

“The difference between how a machine can describe a scene and how a person would describe that scene is quite vast still,” Donlon said. “Solving this is what the Mind’s Eye program is about. So far, humans are still best at this.”

The program has about 15 teams working on various approaches. Donlon spoke to the Embedded Vision Alliance, which has a lot of chip makers as members, because technologists still need to make vision much more computationally feasible. But the task also requires a lot of software smarts aimed at making the hardware smarter. The technology starts with recognition, description, prediction and filling gaps in information, and anomaly detection.

To teach machines how to filter out useless information, the Mind’s Eye researchers are showing all sorts of scenes to the computer-driven machines so that they can understand what is happening. Tracking people moving in a parking lot is doable today.

“What we need to be able to do to make truly robust systems is to enable the systems to recognize anything without advance training,” Donlon said. “I’m absolutely thrilled at the progress we have made, but we are nowhere near where we need to be in the informativeness of the vision analysis or the efficiency of the computing. There are plenty of ludicrous results that go along with the good results.”

In military situations, better vision systems could enable more sensors on a battlefield to interpret meaningful actions, such as an enemy troop movement. Right now, that information is funneled to a command center like the one pictured. But DARPA wants to be able to move the intelligence to the edge of the network, so a camera sensor can send information directly to a soldier that needs it, Donlon said.

Soldiers looking at command screens spend so much time looking at them that they may miss what is important and fail to pass on that information to soldiers in the field.

Right now, the military uses scout robots like those made by iRobot, pictured left, to do reconnaissance ahead of troops so that it can warn them of ambushes or other dangers. The robots have cameras on board, can point at an area, and remain concealed. They can then send back video footage that can be understood by human interpreters. But sending out the right video at the right time is critical.

“This takes some human scouts out of harm’s way and creates more situational awareness,” Donlon said. “It ought to be possible to put the intelligence on the sensors, on the edge. The soldier can then be on the look out for anomalies.”

These kinds of technologies could have both military and civilian applications. You could, for instance, use the vision systems with surveillance cameras for private corporations. Vision could also be useful in car safety. Google is working on a self-driving cars project, for example, in hopes of reducing the more than a million car accidents a year.

“DARPA has a [history] of pioneering technologies that have become important applications,” said Jeff Bier, chief executive of market research firm BDTI and founder of the Embedded Vision Alliance, which has 19 corporate members from Analog Devices to Texas Instruments. “We hope that’s going to happen in this category as well.”

Developers for the Mind’s Eye program include: Carnegie Mellon University, Co57 Systems, Colorado State University, Jet Propulsion Lab/Caltech, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Purdue University, SRI International, SUNY at Buffalo, Netherlands Organization for Applied Sceintific Research, University of Arizona, UC Berkeley, USC, General Dynamics Robotic Systems, iRobot, and Toyon Research.

[Photo credits: DARPA, Dean Takahashi]

DARPA, the U.S. military’s research arm, is getting ready to issue a call to arms — specifically, humanoid arms on a new kind of robot.

DARPA’s Grand Challenge, a prize competition for technological innovation that could be useful in military applications, began in 2004 as the military’s way of crowdsourcing new designs for driverless cars. Now, DARPA is preparing to proclaim a new Grand Challenge.

This time around, the military is looking for a better humanoid robot: a bipedal machine for use in all kinds of terrain and environments, up to and including industrial disasters.

DARPA program manager Dr. Gill Pratt announced the new objective at the Defense Threat Reduction Agengy’s Industry Day. According to sources present at that event, Pratt, whose specialty is in robotics and human/machine collaboration, said DAPRA plans to grant funding to six hardware teams and twelve software teams in the Grand Challenge.

In addition to the robots themselves, DARPA is looking to fund environmental simulations and will be working with unpaid hardware and software teams, as well.

DTRA Industry Day attendees report that DARPA is looking for a robot that can do the following:

• Navigate itself into a open-frame utility vehicle, hop into the driver’s seat, and drive the vehicle to a specified location.
• Exit the vehicle, unlock a door, and go through the door.
• Safely travel down a 100 meter-long hallyway littered with debris.
• Climb a ladder
• Fix a gas-leaking pipe
• Replace a broken pump

The U.S. military has been showing off new robotics projects in a big way lately. Just last month, the Navy held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a state-of-the-art new robotics lab, complete with a range of realistic testing environments (rainforest, desert, wave pool, etc.) and a few humanoid bots, as well.

More details on the DARPA Grand Challenge should be coming soon, so stay tuned to the DARPA newsroom for upcoming information.

The U.S. Navy has just taken the wraps off a sexy new robotics facility. The bots created and refined there will be automated wonders, some of them amphibious, some able to fight fires or fly, and ever so much more.

The Naval Research Laboratory has opened its Laboratory for Autonomous Systems Research (LASR — see what they did there?), what the Navy is calling the “nerve system” for research on autonomous robotics to help the Navy and Marine Corps in their missions and to get new robotic tech to the front line as soon as possible, according to a statement released by NRL today.

LASR will be home to researchers working in intelligent autonomy, sensor systems, power and energy systems, human-system interaction, networking and communications, and platforms.

Some of the bots being built at LASR include small autonomous air and ground vehicles, at least one swimming bot, and specialized robots for fighting fires aboard ships.

Yes, we say with a measure of impatience, but can they sing and dance? The Navy’s number-one export to date is, in our book, singing and dancing sailors, and it’d take a heck of a robot to top that.

The new, $17.7 million dollar facility got its official ribbon-cutting ceremony just two weeks ago, nearly two years after ground was initially broken on the site. The facility includes a wide range of environments for testing, from simulated deserts and rainforests to a 45-by-25-foot pool with a wave generator capable of producing directional waves.

The Navy said the number and type of research robotics projects will increase as researchers register to use the new LASR facility.

“It’s the first time that we have, under a single roof, a laboratory that captures all the domains in which our Sailors, Marines and fellow DOD service members operate,” said Rear Adm. Matthew Klunder, chief of naval research, in today’s release. “Advancing robotics and autonomy are top priorities for the Office of Naval Research. We want to reduce the time it takes to deliver capability to our warfighters performing critical missions. This innovative facility bridges the gap between traditional laboratory research and in-the-field experimentation-saving us time and money.”

Here are some images of the robots and their new home:

Recruiters need to turn toward to the military for security analysts, a background not generally spotlighted by the industry, according to EMC executive vice president Art Coviello.

“We won’t stop every individual attack,” said Coviello at the RSA conference in San Francisco Tuesday, “We need to tap more military experience and military intelligence … they need to be offensive in their mindset, constantly evaluating external intelligence.”

While technical knowledge is very important, the natural instincts U.S. veterans can bring to security may help drive the industry further in both tactics and mindset. Members of the military are trained to be discerning, but unafraid of acting when necessary.

The next wave of security protection needs to be agile and offensive, said Coviello, as well as take advantage of “Big Data.” This is a balancing act. In order to stop an attack in the act, security measures must work at network speeds.

There’s a “window of vulnerability” that cyber criminals are able to exploit. Often holes are plugged as a responsive measure — after the attack has already taken place. But no one wants to wait around to be on the defensive once attackers to come in.  In order to best prepare against an attack, security analysts must use “Big Data” to detect patterns and potentially prevent attacks from happening in the first place.

Coviello sees the current industry relying more heavily on defensive mechanisms, since it is scared to admit hackers are coming. The industry needs people who are wired to do both.

“Never have we witnessed so many high-profile attacks in one year,” said Coviello. ”We need even more from security because, quiet frankly, we’re at serious risk for failure.”

Scientists at the Pentagon have just published some fascinating (understatement) research on “temporal cloaking”.

As the team noted in Nature,

“To achieve spatial cloaking, the index of refraction is manipulated to flow light from a probe around an object in such a way that a ‘hole’ in space is created, and the object remains hidden. Alternatively, it may be desirable to cloak the occurrence of an event over a finite time period, and the idea of temporal cloaking has been proposed in which the dispersion of the material is manipulated in time, producing a ‘time hole’ in the probe beam to hide the occurrence of the event from the observer.”

Translated into lay-nerd terms, these scientists figured that light allows us to see objects, so to make an object or event invisible, all you have to do is keep the light from hitting it (a key component of other existing invisibility technology). And to keep it invisible for a period of time, you have to speed up the front end of a beam of light while slowing down the back end, creating a gap.

And these blessed souls have found a way to do precisely that.

Here’s a look at how the experiments went down:

Don’t expect to see invisibility “time holes” in your corner Army Navy surplus store any time soon, though. The experiments occurred inside a fiber-optic cable over the course of a few picoseconds. Still, the team noted in its conclusions, “These results are a significant step towards the development of full spatio-temporal cloaking.”

Stay tuned for Star Trekian cloaking devices, invisibility cloaks and other optical camo coming soon-ish to a top-secret military lab near you.

The Pentagon and the U.S. army are showing off some fancy new equipment in the form of a next-generation helicopter.

These gadgets-in-the-sky will include integrated sensors, faster speeds, automatic “pilotless” flights, better countermeasures and lower overall costs.

The military is looking at a 2018 timeframe, according to Dave Weller, the science and technology program manager for the Aviation Program Executive Office. The Army is looking toward a demo craft in 2013 and test flights taking off in 2017.

Here are some specifics the military is aiming for with these new air vehicles:

• Sensors that are integrated into the airframe
• High-speed targeting capabilities
• Optionally automated/autonomous flight
• A human machine interface for on-board navigation, sensing and threat detection
• Teaming of manned and unmanned aircraft, including remote control from inside the manned craft
• Automatic avoidance of obstacles using sensors
• Hovering and pivoting with tilt-rotor aircraft technology
• Diagnostic sensors to streamline repairs

Except for the high-speed targeting functions, it sounds a lot like a soccer mom’s Audi: super intelligent, loaded with sensors, and practically (or in some cases, actually) able to drive itself.

“Overall, what we are trying to do is look at a range of solutions such as radar, electro-optical equipment, lasers, sensors, software, avionics and communications equipment and see what the right architecture is and how we would integrate all these things together,” said Systems Integration Division chief Ray Wall Ray Wall in a statement.

Several military personnel stated the Army has approached the future ‘copters with capabilities in mind rather than solutions to specific problems; as a couple representatives noted, the Army is, at this point, looking to the aviation and defense industries for solutions to the problems it is experiencing.

Manning’s hearing will begin December 16, 2011, at Fort Meade, Maryland, and is expected to last around five days.

The majority of the proceedings will be open to the public, except when classified information is being discussed.

The accused’s lawyer says the hearing is being held “to evaluate the relative strengths and weaknesses of the government’s case as well as to provide the defense with an opportunity to obtain pretrial discovery.”

Manning’s attorneys will be able to call witnesses as well as cross examine the government’s witnesses, all of whom will be testifying under oath and whose words may later be used in a criminal trial.

Manning was first arrested in Iraq in May 2010. He was suspected of giving restricted information from the Secret Internet Protocol Router Network to WikiLeaks employee and hacker Adrian Lamo. In July 2010, Manning was charged with transferring government data to a personal computer and with unauthorized sharing of national defense data.

The information Manning is said to have passed onto Lamo included 250,000 U.S. diplomatic cables, video footage of a airstrike in Iraq in July 2007 and video footage of an airstrike in Afghanistan in May 2009. Both video clips showed U.S. military killing unarmed men, women and children.

Manning’s arrest set off a string of online hacktivist activities and resultant arrests. The back-and-forth, tit-for-tat attacks have pulled parties from the loosely organized group Anonymous to U.S. government officials and political pundits into the fray.

We’ll keep you posted on Manning’s initial hearing as more details become available.

While I’m proud of my family’s service to Uncle Sam, veterans do need better ways to transition from military to civilian life — and the military isn’t very good at offering those tools.

To help veterans get into civilian careers faster and more smoothly, today both Google and LinkedIn announced new job-search tools just for current and former military personnel. Google has unveiled a new job search engine for vets, and LinkedIn is earmarking job postings that might be better suited to veterans.

Currently, around 850,000 military veterans are unemployed — that’s around 12 percent of post-9/11 vets. After their service to the country, many vets feel they’re left high and dry when it comes to civilian employment.

Former Marine Scot Ellison II has a typical story to share. He told us via Twitter, “There were required classes from the Marine Corps in transitioning out. But once I was out, I was on my own and had no help. I was jobless for the first two months of being out before I got work. And the work wasn’t desirable; it was enough to pay bills and support my family. Technically still struggling after four years.”

Google and LinkedIn hope the new tools will alleviate both the pressures of a military-to-civilian transition, and to ease the current jobs crisis.

LinkedIn announces, “We’ve joined forces with the White House to tag job postings on LinkedIn that could be filled by veterans. These tagged job postings will be accessible to the White House’s newly launched Veteran’s Job Bank and across veterans-oriented federal websites to make it easier for veterans to source opportunities relevant to them.”

Later this week, the company will be launching a microsite for veterans to find tips and tools for getting new jobs. And this Friday, which is Veterans’ Day, LinkedIn will be hosting a Veterans Hackday at its Silicon Valley headquarters.

As for Google, the search giant is working with the National Resource Directory, a special listings service for veterans, to create a customized job search engine for veterans. This engine will “identify veteran-committed job openings” on job sites around the web.

Finally, the White House itself is getting involved with the launch of MyNextMove.org, a site where vets can find their dream jobs, explore new career options, or even find a job similar to the work they did in the military.

This site uses data from the Occupational Information Network (O*NET) system, which the White House says is “the most comprehensive source of information on the knowledge, skills, abilities, work tasks, tools, technology and other important requirements needed to perform work for over 900 occupations covering the entire U.S. economy.” So far, more than 40,000 businesses and 150,000 workers have contributed data to O*NET’s collection.

Image courtesy of trevorsnyder.

As new types of threats consistently emerge in the digital landscape, the U.S. military has to be ready to deal with more sophisticated attacks. Cyber warfare is not covered by the Rules of Armed Conflict, which is based on a series of international treaties like the Geneva Conventions. U.S. military officials said they will use this proposal to come up with a consensus among allies.

The report specifies how cyber attacks would be evaluated:

If a cyber attack produces the death, damage, destruction or high-level disruption that a traditional military attack would cause, then it would be a candidate for a “use of force” consideration, which could merit retaliation.

The proposal will likely cause a debate over the certainty of a cyber attack’s origin and which specific types of a attack would constitute the use of force — issues the Pentagon has not yet addressed.

Frankly, I think the U.S. government and its allies are severely behind the curve on this issue. In 2008, a Pentagon computer network was breached by an attack believed to have originated in Russia. Why this hasn’t been a more pressing issue since that time is baffling to me.

The popular 2007 movie Live Free or Die Hard depicts a group of cyber terrorists attacking U.S. government computers. As silly as the movie is, it’s not hard to imagine a sophisticated group of hackers exploiting weaknesses in U.S. government systems and shutting down important services. Having a defined military response to attacks of this nature is an important step to deterring future attacks.

The fallout from whistle-blower site’s release of secret government documents hit the removable media industry today. The military has decided to ban the use of DVDs, CDs, thumb drives and other removable media that can transfer data from a computer to a portable device. Anyone who violates the order faces court-martial.

That’s because U.S. Army private Bradley Manning is suspected of downloading hundreds of thousands of files from the Defense Department and giving the files to WikiLeaks. The Pentagon wants to disable removable media on all computers with classified data. Can major corporations, who also value their secrecy, be far behind? In all likelihood, the crackdown won’t last. But you can bet there are plenty of people who are thinking about designing computer systems where it’s impossible to steal data and get away with it.

Hackers continued to come to the defense of WikiLeaks. Headed by a group called Anonymous, the hackers are attacking the sites of companies that have cut ties to WikiLeaks, bringing down sites belong to Visa, MasterCard, PayPal Amazon, and others.

While WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is in jail in England, awaiting extradition to Sweden on sex charges, WikiLeaks continues to operate. WikiLeaks itself has been under attack as well. But the organization distanced itself from the cyber attackers.

In a Tweet, Wikileaks spokeswoman Kristinn Hrafnsson said: “We neither condemn nor applaud these attacks. We believe they are a reflection of public opinion on the actions of the targets.”

Marcia Hoffman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation said in an interview with NPR that it’s sad that attackers are defending the free speech rights of WikiLeaks by trying to silence the speech of anti-WikiLeaks corporations.

Meanwhile, Ars Technica reported that Dutch police have arrested a 16-year-old teen associated with the revenge attacks on the companies. The unnamed teen’s computers were seized after it was found that some of the attacks originated in the Netherlands.

It’s hard to say where this is all going. The Google Trends chart shows there is enormous interest in the subject of WikiLeaks at the moment.

WikiLeaks will likely find it harder to operate in the future, and the U.S. government will likely find it impossible to crush WikiLeaks and maintain its ideals of freedom. For now, both the Obama administration and the hackers themselves would do well to heed the voice of the Economist, which has weighed in with this advice about whether it makes sense to crack down extremely hard on WikiLeaks.

“The best lessons to bear in mind are those learned in such costly fashion during the past decade of the ‘war on terror’. Deal with the source of the problem, not just its symptoms. Keep the moral high ground. And pick fights you can win.”

[top photo: techchee]