Month: January 2017

Worms, birds and insects inspire the robots of the future

A post by Dr Silvia Ardila-Jiménez, Post-doctoral Research Associate, Imperial College London

The development of autonomous systems is one of the technology trends driving the fourth industrial revolution. Autonomous systems in transportation are perhaps the most widely talked about, but beyond this we’re already seeing systems deployed in sectors like environmental monitoring and agriculture.

The range of potential applications is huge: search and rescue, border surveillance, construction, energy, health, sports and recreation, agriculture, and food and water security to name a few. And whilst advances in this area are vast – fueled by machine learning, data science, robotics etc. – no man-made system can perform at the level of living organisms.

The interaction between safety and security

A post by Professor Chris Hankin, Director ISST

Increasing digitization has led to convergence between IT (Information Technology) used in offices and mobile devices, and OT (Operational Technology) that controls devices used in critical infrastructure and industrial control systems. The IoT (Internet of Things) is also rapidly growing, with around 10 billion devices today.

These trends raise concerns about the interaction between safety and security. The reality of the threat has been highlighted in national news coverage, from cyber security vulnerabilities being exploited to compromise vehicle safety, to denial of service attacks launched from consumer devices.

Discussions are sometimes hampered by the lack of clear definitions of the concepts.