Determined to improve public safety, SkyFire Consulting works with police and fire departments to implement the use of drones in varying aspects of their efforts. SkyFire’s work is mainly done behind the scenes as it aids Federal Aviation Administration training and certification for public safety departments.
“We help [public safety organizations] identify their use cases, their missions, and identify what equipment will help them best,” SkyFire CEO Ben Kroll told Digital Trends at the Drone Rodeo at the 2018 CES expo. “We will assist with the FAA certification process and whatever route they want to go that way. We also do [public safety] training, we have several customizable training programs that we offer departments.”
Besides for training and certification, SkyFire also focuses on pairing the proper drones for the appropriate public safety department. For example, with fire departments, SkyFire teaches firefighters how drones can be location scouts with thermal imaging to see where they should focus on extinguishing a blaze.
SkyFire, however, does not build or provide custom drones. Instead, SkyFire helps public safety departments understand drone technology and know which drones they should purchase to best fit their needs.
Despite the beneficial use of drones for public safety, not everyone is on board just yet. Due to concerns about privacy, policies for drone usage aren’t yet that nuanced and some local governments may have even placed strict restrictions on the use of drones. These challenges are nothing new for SkyFire, as it works with municipalities and local governments to make the use of drones by public safety departments more acceptable and an actual reality.
“Politically, there is a lot of misinformation about what drones can and can’t do,” Kroll said. “We try to advocate to municipalities [that] if they are going to have sort of drone restriction or drone ban, make an exemption for public safety. Public safety can really use this as a tool.
“We’ve seen lives saved ultimately from the adoption of the technology.”
San Francisco startup Dimensional advertised for people to walk robot dogs through city streets. The New York Times reported that the job could include carrying a roughly 33-pound robot back to the office if it overheated. A lift home is an awkward requirement for a labor-saving machine.
Keeping the hardware running is only one challenge. Anthropic's robotics tests found that language models mostly failed when controlling joints directly, but did better when directing trained controllers. Giving an AI agent a body doesn't teach it to handle ordinary household objects.
Soon, a mattress protector may be more than a bed cover. Australian medtech company Sleeptite and researchers at RMIT University have received a US patent for FlexiSense, a smart bedding technology that tracks body position and posture to help caregivers identify when older residents may be at risk of falling.
The technology is being developed for Sleeptite’s in-bed monitoring system, REMi, and was recently on display at The MedTech Conference in Boston. A peer-reviewed study in Flexible and Printed Electronics says the sensors can also be made at scale without sacrificing performance or durability.
AI companies spend enormous amounts of time convincing us their technology is safe and secure. But what happens when those same companies become targets of increasingly sophisticated AI-powered attacks? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, is now facing that question. According to a Washington Post report, cybersecurity startup Cathedral discovered vulnerabilities that let its researchers access sensitive information in Anthropic's internal systems.
The researchers used AI agents to identify potential entry points in less than 12 hours. Interestingly, they didn't need to crack Claude itself. Instead, they exploited weaknesses in third-party business applications that Anthropic uses for everyday operations. Anthropic's security testing program disclosed the findings, which allows outside researchers to identify and report vulnerabilities.