Hi, Cardinal readers, and welcome to the latest edition of Tech Briefs, a weekly batch of items covering the digital and life sciences landscapes. It goes live every Wednesday in Cardinal News.
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What’s inside:
Unmanned aerial threats the target for Virginia Tech student group, Secret Service
Students from Virginia Tech’s Institute for Advanced Computing wrapped up their semester with some high-level drone fighting experience.
Arlington-based graduate students spent the school year working with the U.S. Secret Service to develop an audio/video detection system, and are following up with efforts to mitigate drone activity in Washington, D.C., and its surrounding region, according to a Virginia Tech news release.
The advanced computing students’ new academic home and the Secret Service’s relatively new Advanced Research Capabilities Division gave the groups proximity to cooperate. It’s timely, given unmanned fliers’ proliferation in the Russia-Ukraine war, Israel and the United States’ war on Iran, and multiple reports of drone activity in the Eastern and Southern U.S., including military bases.
Secret Service officers are not military, though, but a federal law enforcement arm founded months after President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. Their role has been highly publicized in recent years, given three reported attempts at President Donald Trump’s life.
Officials at the Institute for Advanced Computing’s project-based learning program had several technologies they were interested in collaborating on, said Secret Service Lt. Matt Davis, who has worked with five groups of Virginia Tech students. Precision in both detection and mitigation was key, he said.
“This is really the first time where we have collaborated on a technology level with a university,” Davis said.
An experiment at the Secret Service’s test bed featured an array of cameras and microphones aimed at a drone rising during a scene of simulated chaos. The sensors transmitted information to multiple laptops running off a single generator, in a system the students designed to locate and identify possible threats in the air.
“It definitely hit me that this is genuinely needed,” said Ryan Ernest, a graduate student in computer science, who is focused on networking and integration.
The project is promising due to its scalability and the fact that it doesn’t have to rely on detecting radio frequencies, Davis said.
“We’re excited to continue this partnership,” he said. “Whether we do drone technology or vehicle cybersecurity, we have access to all the students, and that’s huge for us.”
Sands’ message to Virginia Tech community includes tech notes
The Institute for Advanced Computing is part of Academic Building One, at the Virginia Tech Innovation Campus, in Arlington. Virginia Tech President Tim Sands, who spearheaded the innovation campus, touted the institute’s launch in a recent message to the university community.
The Arlington campus hosted the Times Higher Education Innovation and Impact Summit in November, marking the first time that event was held in North America, Sands wrote.
Virginia Tech and the Southeastern Universities Research Association will team to run the Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility in Newport News, he wrote. The U.S. Department of Energy selected the management group, dubbed SURATech, which Sands wrote will soon break ground on a new high-performance data facility.
Sands’ message went live at Virginia Tech’s website on Thursday. Later that day, Sands, who has announced his intention to step down soon, visited the Hotel Roanoke, where the Roanoke Blacksburg Technology Council inducted him into its Hall of Fame.
