Lifeboat Foundation

By Chuck Brooks

Realizing the potential of Smart Cities will require public-private cooperation and security by design.

The idea of smart cities is starting to take shape as the digital era develops. A city that has developed a public-private infrastructure to support waste management, energy, transportation, water resources, smart building technology, sustainability, security operations and citizen services is referred to as a “smart city”. Realizing the potential of Smart Cities will require public-private cooperation and security by design.

Continue reading “The Emergence Of Smart Cities In The Digital Era” »

Starlink has around 5,000 satellites in orbit, far more than any other provider.

According to Cloudflare, Starlink’s internet traffic has nearly tripled in 2023 compared to 2022. In the US, the traffic has grown by 250%, while in Brazil, where Starlink launched last year, the traffic has surged by 1700%.

Bridging the divide, one satellite at a time

Continue reading “Starlink triples its internet traffic amid geopolitical tensions” »

The company just coming out of stealth suggests its technology could be used by mining corporations and defense establishments.

Estimates suggest that 75 percent of enterprise data will be generated on the edge by 2025 and Armada is poised perfectly to address an upcoming need.

Future life magazine posted as a novelty.

One month after OpenAI unveiled a program that allows users to easily create their own customized ChatGPT programs, a research team at Northwestern University is warning of a “significant security vulnerability” that could lead to leaked data.

In November, OpenAI announced ChatGPT subscribers could create custom GPTs as easily “as starting a conversation, giving it instructions and extra knowledge, and picking what it can do, like searching the web, making images or analyzing data.” They boasted of its simplicity and emphasized that no coding skills are required.

“This democratization of AI technology has fostered a community of builders, ranging from educators to enthusiasts, who contribute to the growing repository of specialized GPTs,” said Jiahao Yu, a second-year doctoral student at Northwestern specializing in secure machine learning. But, he cautioned, “the high utility of these custom GPTs, the instruction-following nature of these models presents new challenges in security.”

In recent years, roboticists and computer scientists have introduced various new computational tools that could improve interactions between robots and humans in real-world settings. The overreaching goal of these tools is to make robots more responsive and attuned to the users they are assisting, which could in turn facilitate their widespread adoption.

Researchers at Leonardo Labs and the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Italy recently introduced a new computational framework that allows robots to recognize specific users and follow them around within a given environment. This framework, introduced in a paper published as part of the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics and Its Social Impacts (ARSO), allows robots re-identify users in their surroundings, while also performing specific actions in response to hand gestures performed by the users.

“We aimed to create a ground-breaking demonstration to attract stakeholders to our laboratories,” Federico Rollo, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Tech Xplore. “The Person-Following robot is a prevalent application found in many commercial mobile robots, especially in industrial environments or for assisting individuals. Typically, such algorithms use external Bluetooth or Wi-Fi emitters, which can interfere with other sensors and the user is required to carry.”

This weekend in Vietnam, VNExpress quotes a government diplomat who gushed that Huang is “skipping luxury dinner parties at hotels and high-end restaurants.” He explained that “Jensen chooses street food with flavors and experiences that are hard to match anywhere else.”

If you want to follow in Huang’s footsteps, the source says that the Nvidia CEO was pictured at a sidewalk restaurant on Luong Ngoc Quyen Street (Hanoi). Additionally, he stopped at a restaurant on Hang Non Street to enjoy beef pho and drink coconut water. He also went to a Goan hotpot restaurant in Hang Thiec and drank Giang coffee on Nguyen Huu Huan Street, according to the source report.

Huang didn’t just spend his time eating and drinking in Hanoi this weekend. A Redditor shared some images and information about the Nvidia boss turning up at a “small LAN party.” In the images, you can see Huang on stage at one of the Vikings eSports Arena locations in Hanoi (there seem to be five of these internet cafe-style venues in the city). He posed for photos with various LAN party attendees, and it also looks like he took part in some kind of awards ceremony.

Q-day (the day when quantum computers will successfully actually break the internet) may be some time away yet. However, that does not mean that companies — and states — shouldn’t hop on the qubit bandwagon now so as not to be left behind in the race for a technology that could potentially alter how we think about life, the Universe, and well… everything.

Spurred on by a discourse that more and more revolves around the concept of “digital sovereignty,” 11 EU member states this week signed the European Declaration on Quantum Technologies.

The signatories have agreed to align, coordinate, engage, support, monitor, and all those other international collaboration verbs, on various parts of the budding quantum technology ecosystem. They include France, Belgium, Croatia, Greece, Finland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Czech Republic, Malta, Estonia, and Spain. However, the coalition is still missing some quantum frontrunners, such as the Netherlands, Ireland, and Germany, who reportedly opted out due to the short time frame.

This week at Starbase a new sign is installed at the launch site, Booster 10 appears nearly complete, and construction continues at the build site, Massey’s Test Site, Sanchez and the launch site, while over at Cape Canaveral, SpaceX continues Starlink launch and recovery operations while getting ready for the next Falcon Heavy launch, and we review the latest batch of flyover photos courtesy of Greg Scott and Farielle Mohan.