Articles - QESP
By George Washington University
- Sunday, February 24th, 2019
A team of researchers including Neil Johnson, a professor of physics at the George Washington University, has discovered that decentralized systems work better when the individual parts are less capable.Dr. Johnson was interested in understanding how systems with many moving parts can reach a desired target or goal without centralized control. This explores a common theory that decentralized systems, those without a central brain, would be more resilient against damage or errors.
By Stephen Easton
- Sunday, February 24th, 2019
A new partnership between the federal government’s peak cyber security team and a professional association promises to improve cross-sector collaboration, and might also lead to more consideration of independent expertise in the development of public policy.The most visible outcome of the deal between the Australian Cyber Security Centre and the Australian Information Security Association is a plan to merge their respective annual conferences into one big get-together in October.AISA chair Damien Manuel says the new Australian Cyber Conference will be the largest on the sector’s events calendar, a “cornerstone piece for the region” that helps position Australia as a centre for cyber security research, industry innovation and professional collaboration.
By Ted Smillie
- Saturday, February 23rd, 2019
From food safety to cybersecurity, Blockchain is being hailed as the biggest thing since the internet. A January 2, 2019 MIT Technology Review, In 2019, blockchains will start to become boring, suggests that “In 2017, blockchain technology was a revolution that was supposed to disrupt the global financial system. In 2018, it was a disappointment. […]
By Tom Sear , PhD Candidate, UNSW Canberra Cyber, Australian Defence Force Academy, UNSW
- Saturday, February 23rd, 2019
The Australian political digital infrastructure is a target in an ongoing nation state cyber competition which falls just below the threshold of open conflict.Today Prime Minister Scott Morrison made a statement to parliament, saying:The Australian Cyber Security Centre recently identified a malicious intrusion into the Australian Parliament House computer network.During the course of this work, we also became aware that the networks of some political parties – Liberal, Labor and the Nationals – have also been affected.
By Paul Salmon, Professor of Human Factors, University of the Sunshine Coast , Peter Hancock Professor of Psychology, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Industrial Engineering and Management Systems, University of Central Florida, Tony Carden , Researcher, University of the Sunshine Coast
- Tuesday, January 29th, 2019
Artificial intelligence can play chess, drive a car and diagnose medical issues. Examples include Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo, Tesla’s self-driving vehicles, and IBM’s Watson.
This type of artificial intelligence is referred to as Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) – non-human systems that can perform a specific task. We encounter this type on a daily basis, and its use is growing rapidly.
But while many impressive capabilities have been demonstrated, we’re also beginning to see problems. The worst case involved a self-driving test car that hit a pedestrian in March. The pedestrian died and the incident is still under investigation.
By Stephen Easton
- Tuesday, January 29th, 2019
A teachable moment doesn’t have to arise naturally; even a simulated one helped make British police officers 21% less likely to be hooked by a phishing email, in one of a series of behavioural nudges tested in 2018.
Nudges often only influence a small fraction of the target group because they preserve choice by definition, as opposed to incentives or penalties, but are still good value as they can be scaled up at very low cost.
Several trialled over the past year have produced much larger effects, however, according to the latest yearly research report from the Behavioural Insights Team, a company jointly owned by its staff, the British government and the innovation quango Nesta.
By Ted Smillie
- Tuesday, January 29th, 2019
“Democratizing data science is the notion that anyone, with little to no expertise, can do data science if provided ample data and user-friendly analytics tools. Supporting that idea, the new tool ingests datasets and generates sophisticated statistical models typically used by experts to analyze, interpret, and predict underlying patterns in data.” So says a 15 January […]
By Australian National Audit Office
- Monday, January 28th, 2019
On 1 July 2016, the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) was created through the merger of the CrimTrac agency (CrimTrac), the Australian Crime Commission (ACC) and the Australian Institute of Criminology (AIC).1 Prior to the merger, CrimTrac had commenced planning and initial administration of the Biometric Identification Services project (the BIS project or BIS).
By Springer
- Friday, December 28th, 2018
Once upon a time, people thought that electrons and ions always stuck together, living happily ever after. However, under low density of matter or high temperatures, the components of matter are no longer bound together. Instead, they form plasma, a state of matter naturally occurring in our universe, which has since been harnessed for everyday applications such as TV screens, chip etching and torches, but also propulsion and even sustained energy production via controlled fusion.
By Mikhail Dyakonov
- Friday, December 28th, 2018
In quantum computing, the classical two-state circuit element (the transistor) is replaced by a quantum element called a quantum bit, or qubit. Like the conventional bit, it also has two basic states. Although a variety of physical objects could reasonably serve as quantum bits, the simplest thing to use is the electron’s internal angular momentum, or spin, which has the peculiar quantum property of having only two possible projections on any coordinate axis: +1/2 or –1/2 (in units of the Planck constant). For whatever the chosen axis, you can denote the two basic quantum states of the electron’s spin as ? and ?.
