Armed with Science | Providing You Information on Military Science and Technology

Digital Forensics Challenge: Collect Your Bonus Points

Filed under Challenge, STEM, Technology by John Ohab on April 8, 2011 at 4:17 pm {no comments}

Attention DC3 Digital Forensics Challenge participants! There are less than 30 days left to receive 20 percent Bonus Points on all submissions.

With the DC3 Challenge’s new Bonus Points System, the solution submitted for each exercise (e.g. 101, 204, 302, etc.) is eligible for the bonus award based on the time it is submitted. Remember, the team’s initial submission is the FINAL submission for that specific exercise. Get your submissions in by May 1 to quality for the Bonus Points.

The DC3 Digital Forensics Challenge is a public, online, and international Challenge held annually by the Department of Defense (DoD) Cyber Crime Center (DC3). The Challenge is a call to the digital forensics community to pioneer new investigative tools, techniques, and methodologies. It encourages innovation from a broad range of individuals, teams, and institutions to provide technical solutions for computer forensic examiners in the lab as well as in the field. The Challenge ends November 2, 2011!

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DARPA Works to Build Computers Inspired by Human Brain

Filed under Life Sciences, Physical Sciences, STEM, Technology by John Ohab on April 8, 2011 at 10:59 am {no comments}

Today’s warfighters possess the ability to meet the dynamic demands of the battlefield by relying on their knowledge and training to make the right decisions in demanding complex situations. In contrast, unmanned systems and electronic devices, while able to collect and process information, are limited in their efficiency and flexibility, and current computer systems can only process information according to their programming.

What if warfighters could access an entirely new class of electronic systems that can meet the demands of dynamic environments?

DARPA’s Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (SyNAPSE) program aims to fundamentally alter conventional designs by developing biological-scale neuromorphic electronic systems that mimic important functions of a human brain. Applications for neuromorphic electronics include robotic and manned systems, and sensory and integration applications such as image processing.

The goal of SyNAPSE is to create electronic systems, inspired by the human brain, that can understand, adapt, and respond to information in fundamentally different ways than traditional computers. While current computers are organized into distinct processor and memory units that function in accordance with their programming, the brain is organized as an intimate and distributed web of very simple processors (neurons) and memory (synapses) that spontaneously communicate and learn their functions.

Using knowledge of the brain’s organization as a platform, SyNAPSE is developing integrated circuits with high densities of electronic devices and integrated communication networks that approximate the function and connectivity of neurons and synapses. This program has also developed tools to support this specific area of hardware development such as circuit design tools, large-scale computer simulations of hardware function, and virtual training environments that can test and benchmark these systems.

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IceBridge teams up with ICEX [VIDEO]

Filed under Uncategorized by Carla Voorhees on April 7, 2011 at 10:42 am {one comment}

Lt. Cmdr. John Woods is a Meteorology and Oceanography Officer (METOC) currently teaching in the Oceanography Department at the United States Naval Academy (USNA). He is part of the Sea Ice Thickness Observation team currently participating in NASA’s Operation IceBridge 2011 (OIB 2011).

Lt. Cmdr. Woods sent us this video of a low level ICEX-IceBridge team flight. This video shows Beaufort Sea in the vicinity of the Applied Physics Lab Ice Station (APLIS). Get caught up on ICEX coverage on Armed With Science and Navy Live now! (more…)

It Doesn’t Take a Rocket Scientist…

Filed under Physical Sciences, STEM by John Ohab on April 6, 2011 at 4:41 pm {one comment}

The X-51A Waverider is designed to ride on its own shockwavem and accelerate to about Mach 6. (Air Force)

This blog post was shared with us by the Chemical Propulsion Information Analysis Center (CPIAC). It is the 14th entry in our 22-part series produced by the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC).

Improving efficiency and expediency when resources are scarce is hardly a new concept. In fact, pick any point in history, and you’ll hear people talking about how they’ve faced similar constraints. Striving for efficiencies in the face of constraints may be an age-old concept, but it’s as important today as it ever was. Reflecting on past successes can remind us of what we can achieve and allow for us to take a fresh look at why we were able to do so.

In the rocket propulsion community, one of our greatest successes is a continuing drive for joint agency collaboration. This is especially true in the development and fielding of new technologies. Why is joint agency collaboration so important you may ask? Because there are few among us who haven’t had that moment in their career when we finally realized that someone else, somewhere out there, was working on the same problem we were – and if we were lucky, they had already solved it, and if very lucky, that they were willing to share. In a time when resources are scarce, joint agency collaboration connects people by tearing down walls and allows for the transition from “silo” to “community.”

However, collaboration is not without its challenges. How do you find others working on the same problem as you? How do you convince them to share? Here lies one of those frustrating intersections of engineering, organizational structure, and cultural sociology. Despite all the frustration, the rocket propulsion community has greatly benefited from those willing to set aside their differences and work together for the betterment of the community.

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DARPA: Can You Outsmart an Enemy Submarine Commander?

Filed under Education & Culture, Technology by John Ohab on April 5, 2011 at 6:21 pm {3 comments}

Can you best an enemy submarine commander so he can’t escape into the ocean depths?

If you think you can, you are invited to put yourself into the virtual driver’s seat of one of several Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW) Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel (ACTUV) configurations and show the world how you can use its capabilities to follow an enemy submarine.

DARPA’s ACTUV program is developing a fundamentally new tool for the Navy’s ASW toolkit and seeks your help to explore how best to use this tool to track quiet submarines. Before autonomous software is developed for ACTUV’s computers, DARPA needs to determine what approaches and methods are most effective. To gather information from a broad spectrum of users, ACTUV has been integrated into the Dangerous Waters^TM game. DARPA is offering this new ACTUV Tactics Simulator for free public download.

This software has been written to simulate actual evasion techniques used by submarines, challenging each player to track them successfully. Your tracking vessel is not the only ship at sea, so you’ll need to safely navigate among commercial shipping traffic as you attempt to track the submarine, whose driver has some tricks up his sleeve.

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IceBridge: Ridiculously Adorable Arctic Animals Captured on Video

Filed under Earth Sciences, Life Sciences, Videos by Carla Voorhees on April 5, 2011 at 11:54 am {no comments}

Lt. Cmdr. Woods shared these videos and photos of Arctic hares and foxes with us here at Armed With Science. They are super cute! Hope everyone’s ready for some squee-worthy pictures and video!

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SENDSim: A New Platform for Understanding Behavior in Cyberspace

Filed under Cyber Security, Social Sciences, STEM, Technology, Videos by John Ohab on April 4, 2011 at 9:40 am {no comments}

By Carl Hunt, Greg Amis and Rick Raines

As reported in Armed with Science last October, DoD’s Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering’s Rapid Reaction Technology Office (RRTO) has been working with the U.S. Air Force Institute of Technology’s Center for Cyberspace Research (CCR) on a project called, “Science Enhanced Networked Domains and Secure Social Spaces” (SENDS). The main mission of SENDS is to examine operational and security challenges the United States faces in the use of cyberspace within the global environment. The focus of these examinations is both broad and innovative. RRTO and CCR have supported this project since late 2009.

SENDS partner Icosystem Corporation is delivering a major component of the SENDS Project: a modeling and simulation platform to understand the behaviors of network users and information technologies as they interact within cyberspace. These simulations help visualize the interdependencies that arise with the convergence of these two sources of vulnerability. As the SENDS Project progresses, we’ve been covering developments in the new SENDS website but now that we are within four months of concluding the Pilot, we want to share the status of this task as a preview.

We call the simulation environment for the SENDS Project SENDSim. In brief, SENDSim is an agent-based simulation and experimentation environment designed to help experts better understand cyberspace security challenges by providing a platform for understanding threats, evaluating solutions, and communicating the benefits of a principled security plan to non-technical decision makers. (more…)

Whiteout in Greenland

Filed under Earth Sciences, Videos by Carla Voorhees on April 2, 2011 at 10:00 am {3 comments}

Sunday was a gray and windy day at Thule Air Base. The wind started to blow around 20 knots, dropping the wind chill to around minus 40 degrees. Unfortunately, the weather looked to get worse before better, threatening our proposed flight to Fairbanks, Alaska. We did some quick adjustments to the GPS ground stations to ensure they would not fly away if the weather did turn worse, and then we hunkered down.

Screenshot from TV weather channel for Thule AFB. Wind gusting to over 103 knots at VORTAC which is on top of hill behind Main Base. (Photo by Lt. Cmdr. Woods)

I was woken up by a knock on my door around 4:30AM from the building manager stating that the base was in “Condition Charlie” which means no one is allowed out of the building. Needless to say, the airport was closed, and there would be no flight. I turned on the base weather channel to take a look at what the weather sensors were reading and later in the morning they peaked out at wind gusts over 100 knots. Being stuck inside with the wind howling outside and snow blowing horizontal making whiteout conditions gave a strong sense of being helpless.

At least I was stuck inside a nice lodging facility with heat and protection, unlike early explorers in this region, and the local Inuit’s who still live and hunt in these conditions daily. I passed the time with a run on the treadmill, some laundry and repacked my bags for another proposed flight to Alaska. The weather forecasters on base mentioned that the weather could possibly break overnight.

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