Lifeboat Foundation

Giving children the nasal flu vaccine may help protect them against strep A, according to analysis by the UK Health Security Agency.

UKHSA pilot scheme shows strep A infections lower in areas where nasal vaccine offered to all young children.

Alexandra Topping

Continue reading “Nasal flu vaccine may help protect children against strep A, study shows” »

Face recognition tools are computational models that can identify specific people in images, as well as CCTV or video footage. These tools are already being used in a wide range of real-world settings, for instance aiding law enforcement and border control agents in their criminal investigations and surveillance efforts, and for authentication and biometric applications. While most existing models perform remarkably well, there may still be much room for improvement.

Researchers at Queen Mary University of London have recently created a new and promising architecture for face recognition. This architecture, presented in a paper pre-published on arXiv, is based on a strategy to extract facial features from images that differs from most of those proposed so far.

“Holistic methods using convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and margin-based losses have dominated research on face recognition,” Zhonglin Sun and Georgios Tzimiropoulos, the two researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore.

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.

Simulation can help engineers overcome these challenges. Rather than tweaking the AI model’s architecture and parameters, it has been shown that time spent improving the training data can often yield more extensive improvements in accuracy.

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.

The adoption of a password-free future is hyped by some of the biggest tech companies, with Apple, Google, and Microsoft committing to support the FIDO standard this past May. Along with the Digital ID Bill reintroduced to Congress this past July, we’re poised to take a giant leap away from the password to a seemingly more secure digital future. But as we approach a post-password world, we still have a long way to go in ensuring the security of our digital lives.

As companies continue developing solutions to bridge us to a passwordless world, many have prioritized convenience over security. Methods of two-factor authentication (2FA) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) such as SMS or email verification — or even the use of biometrics — have emerged as leading alternatives to the traditional username/password. But here’s the catch: Most of these companies are validating devices alone and aren’t properly leveraging this technology, leaving the door open for bad actors.

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.

With the arrival of AI-generated art and the proliferation of tools like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion and DALL-E, questions have been rife in circles across the creative industry.

Is this a temporary trend? Or a would-be essential tool in creative communication?

Check out all the on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.

On September 15, 2022, the Ethereum network migrated from a proof-of-work to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism called the Merge. Apart from reducing energy consumption by 99%, the Merge laid the foundations for building a highly secure and scalable blockchain. However, despite the benefits of the Merge, it also marks a regression in privacy, which is a significant concern for Ethereum users.

Privacy generally takes a backseat to other core blockchain topics such as decentralization and scalability. In fact, blockchain networks’ zeal for data transparency often comes at the cost of compromising individual and enterprise privacy. But without a privacy-focused approach — even one that gives users optional privacy — Ethereum decentralized applications (dapps) will repeat the same mistakes of Web2 applications.

Leading Canada’s Bio-Safety & Security R&D — Dr. Loren Matheson PhD, Defence Research and Development Canada, Department of National Defence.

Dr. Loren Matheson, Ph.D. is a Portfolio Manager at the Center For Security Science, at Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC — https://www.canada.ca/en/defence-research-development.html), which is a special operating agency of the Department of National Defence, whose purpose is to provide the Canadian Armed Forces, other government departments, and public safety and national security communities with knowledge and technology.

Continue reading “Dr Loren Matheson, PhD — Centre for Security Science, DRDC — Leading Canada’s Safety & Security R&D” »

The US government may have made a major scientific breakthrough in fusion energy, paving the way for creating a limitless supply of energy with zero carbon emissions or radioactive waste, The Financial Times reported, citing people with knowledge of a recent experiment’s results.

The fusion process is a landmark step of progress in the quest to achieve a limitless supply of environmentally-friendly energy.

According to The Financial Times, the US Energy Department will have US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and Undersecretary for Nuclear Security Jill Hruby announce a “major scientific breakthrough” sometime on Tuesday.

InvisDefense uses an unusual pattern and irregular heat signals to confuse AI cameras.