News Briefs

The U.S. Defense Department announced today that in October 2016 it successfully demonstrated one of the world’s largest microdrone swarms at China Lake, California. The demonstration consisted of 103 Perdix drones launched from three F/A-18 Super Hornets. The microdrones demonstrated advanced swarm behaviors such as collective decision making, adaptive formation flying and self-healing.  

The Naval Air Systems Command and the Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO) are partnering on the effort. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter created the SCO in 2012 to boost Defense Department innovation.

Brigham Young University (BYU) is developing a web middleware tool that will improve the Internet website authentication process and online security. TrustBase, an open-source product, will support mobile and desktop operating systems using local and cloud-based services. Operating systems will enable the middleware to notify the user of untrustworthy sites independent of the application in use.

A Chinese military ship seized a U.S. underwater, unmanned research vessel, prompting the U.S. Defense Department to launch “appropriate government-to-government channels” with the Chinese government to immediately return the vessel. On Thursday, China unlawfully seized the unclassified ocean glider while sailing in the South China Sea, according to a Defense Department news release. 

The USNS Bowditch and the unmanned underwater vessel (UUV) are used to gather military oceanographic data such as salinity, water temperature and sound speed, the release states. 

Federal employees are frustrated by slow and unreliable applications, a quandary they say impedes them from getting their work done and diminishes confidence in information technology modernization efforts, according to survey results released today by Riverbed Technology, an application performance company.

Of the 335 federal employees surveyed, nearly a third said it takes more than 24 hours for agency IT managers to address application failures, despite clear processes in place to report problems.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, or IARPA, has selected its winners from its crowd-sourced Multi-View Stereo 3-D Mapping Challenge—a contest to see who could best convert satellite photos into 3-D models to create more accurate maps.

The top challenge solvers demonstrated their solutions during an all-day workshop Wednesday in Washington, D.C. The open source solutions were released during the event and will be made available to the public on an IARPA website.

The Kill Chain Integration Branch at Hanscom Air Force Base has begun an experimentation campaign, known as Data-to-Decisions, to look at ways to provide warfighters data in the fastest and most efficient way possible. The campaign is in its early stages but, according to officials, already showing the potential for favorable results.

Lockheed Martin Rotary and Mission Systems out of Manassas, Virginia, received a $125,185,446 cost-plus-incentive-fee and cost reimbursement modification to a previously awarded contract for Acoustic-Rapid commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) Insertion (A-RCI) systems engineering and technical support. The company will perform engineering services to continue the development and production of COTS Insertion A-RCI sonar systems that integrate and improve towed array, hull array, sphere array and other ship sensor processing, through rapid insertion of hardware and software.

The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Agency (IARPA) announced the public release of the Accurate Events from Natural Text (ACCENT) technology. ACCENT is a state-of-the-art automated event coder capable of identifying nearly 300 types of sociopolitical events in text. IARPA hopes the software release will spur increased activity in the research community.

Over the next five years, Sandia National Laboratories will oversee the brain replication work of three university-led teams who aim to close the computer-human gap in object recognition. An advanced computer may beat experts in chess, but a computer algorithm trained only on pictures of red apples cannot recognize that a green apple is still an apple.