Here’s a great video produced by the DHS Center of Excellence, ALERT, or Awareness and Localization of Explosives-Related Threats (what is it about engineers and acronyms?!). ALERT 101 is a new series featuring the center’s unique technologies and research areas. This one explains millimeter wave and back scatter airport screening systems. For more info on ...
Earlier this month the Affective Science Institute hosted another great event called Reading the Face: Translating Science to Security. Three emotion scientists, including Northeastern’s Lisa Feldman Barrett, discussed their unique research approaches to studying the human ability to detect a person’s emotion by looking at his or her face. In the wake of 9/11, large-scale ...
Earlier this month, more than 1000 teams across the globe tried to hack their way to a spot at the biggest cybersecurity education conference around. Fifteen teams were finalists, earning travel grants to Cybersecurity Awareness Week (CSAW) and the chance to participate in the event’s Capture the Flag Competition in November. With the guidance of ...
Talk about making complex topics accessible to the general public — this video from PhD candidate Margery Hines does such a good job explaining ground penetrating radar (GPR) for landmine detection, it won the Judges’ Choice Award at the 2012 NSF IGERT Online Video & Poster competition. Cover photo via Flickr.
Academic Minute is a radio podcast that features researchers from colleges and universities around the world, keeping listeners abreast of what’s new and exciting in the academy. In June, electrical and computer engineering professor Carey Rappaport spoke about his work developing a new generation of body scanners that provide an increase in security and privacy ...
Yesterday I was the victim of a cyber attack, which sucked. But it also meant I got to watch science happening in real time. First of all, cyber-security is a big topic of discussion here at Northeastern. I blogged about it last week after speaking with Professors Engin Kirda and William Roberston about their DARPA ...
Most of us have a cell phone these days. Most of them are “smart” But as they get even smarter, turning into not just our datebooks and GPS devices but also our wallets and who knows what else, are we compromising our own security for the sake of convenience? I think smart phones should be ...
The death toll in Jos, Nigeria after the most recent suicide bomb has climbed to 19. In our jaded world, that doesn’t seem so high. But nearly 13,000 individuals died from suicide attacks between 2003 and 2010, and clearly that number continues to rise. Professors Carey Rappaport and Jose Martinez are using their skills in ...
Here’s a cool new FB app from computer sciences professor, Alan Mislove. It’s called Friendlist Manager and it makes using lists on the social-network (a.k.a. time sink) a whole lot easier (as if you needed anything on FB to be easier, since you don’t already spend enough time there). Mislove uses network information to build ...
The library has an awesome new exhibit up called “Places & Spaces: Mapping Science.” They’ve got dozens of maps describing a variety of scientific concepts and trends, like one spider web of connections between scientific disciplines and a crazy topographical visualization of patent patterns across the globe. This is a particularly interesting concept to me ...