Why you'll send a digital avatar to a meeting by 2020

In the future, you might not have to attend a meeting in person.
Instead, you’ll send an avatar who knows what you’d normally say, your opinions on important topics, and even finalize plans on a project. The “bot” might appear on a screen or as a robot that can look at the person speaking, walk up to the whiteboard, and make gestures.
And, here’s the good news. For anyone who has used the old joke about cloning yourself so you can become more productive, the avatar could handle multiple meetings, all at the same time. This will free you up to do the actual work that comes out of the meeting. You could dispatch an avatar to meet with a sales team in New York and in Omaha at the same time.
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This is not a far-fetched idea or something from a science-fiction movie. In fact, it’s possible you’ll send an avatar to your meetings by the year 2020 -- or even sooner.
Today, a telepresence robot can already fill in for you in a meeting. The downside is that the bot has no intelligence of its own; it’s more like a live video feed on wheels (that is, you still have to be the talking head). Some companies provide a virtual receptionist that can greet you and direct you to a meeting location. An avatar would be more like the virtual human that appears on the UK version of Match.com or a virtual resume that can share your work history.
A few companies are building the next step: an avatar that fills in for you.
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One is called Soul Machines. In a demo, an avatar can respond to questions or share opinions. The company is building the bot to use the bone structure and muscle movements of a real person. This avatar could mimic your word choices, your tacit knowledge, and even your facial expressions. It would work like an FAQ on a website initially, providing stock answers.
“I imagine this avatar will be authorized to answer questions and give positions, and defer to you if the response requires consideration,” Soul Machines CEO Mark Sagar told Fox News.
What comes next? An avatar from Soul Machines could carry on a conversation with other humans or with a group of avatars in a real (or virtual) meeting location. The goal would be exactly the same as it is now in meetings -- to reach a consensus, to elaborate on a topic, to make plans that become action points. When all of the avatars reach a resolution, the meeting would end.
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Another company called Oben is building a 3D virtual reality avatar. You’d use one to communicate for you in a virtual setting. The avatar uses Natural Language Processing (or NLU) to listen to conversations, process what everyone is saying, and respond. A bot like this could be trained to give the right response in a meeting according to a vast database of your viewpoints.
Of course, you might wonder if a meeting avatar will really work. Soul Machines’ Sagar explained that there will be a testing period and some glitches at first. If the bot gets confused, it could tap into a live feed for you to respond in real-time. Using machine learning, the bot could adapt to conversations. The bot would at least know the basics -- where you are traveling, which projects you have in your queue, what you’ve said on social media recently.
A meeting avatar could become so valuable that it could even put an end to meetings, although that will take even more work. It is far easier to share a few opinions about a project, but much harder to mimic the human brain and our ability to resolve conflict or theorize.

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Meet the 'Bat Bot': Scientists unveil robot that flies just like a bat

In what would make an excellent sidekick for Batman, scientists have built a fascinating, unconventional flying robot that moves its wings and flies just like a bat.
Covered with a thin, silicon skin, the flexible wings of this mechanical creature— called Bat Bot—  can move like bat wings do, making use of nine different artificial joints (real bats have far more joints). Anyone who’s ever seen a bat flap around at dusk knows they are incredible flyers, and Soon-Jo Chung, one of the flying robot’s creators, said that he gets “mesmerized” by bats’ impressive flight skills, with their quick turns and perching.
“Bat flight is the holy grail of aerial robotics,” Chung, an associate professor at CalTech and a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said during a conference call with reporters on Tuesday.
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The flying robotic creation is very different from a typical artificial flying device, like a quadrotor drone that uses spinning propellers. Bat Bot mimics a real species of bat from nature: Egyptian fruit bats.
“We have challenged ourselves to reverse engineer bats’ unrivaled agility with an aim to build a safe, energy-efficient soft-wing robot that can fly like a bat,” Chung said.
The bat bot can fly nearly 100 feet in a straight line, flapping its wings to create lift and propulsion. It weighs less than a quarter of a pound and has a wingspan of about a foot and a half.
Its creators say that a flying bat-like robot has advantages over traditional drones. For one, it’s safer to use in close proximity to humans, because it doesn’t have spinning props. Another possible advantage is the ability to maneuver in tight spaces. Its flexible wings are energy-efficient.

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'Security Fatigue' Complicates the Battle Against Data Breaches

With the news of a second, even bigger hack of Yahoo user data, common sense might conclude that consumers would be scurrying to batten down their Internet hatches. But a new study indicates otherwise, concluding that “security fatigue" has made many of us numb to the dangers lurking in cyberspace.

“Users are tired of being overwhelmed by the need to be constantly on alert, tired of all the measures they are asked to adopt to keep themselves safe, and tired of trying to understand the ins and outs of online security,” a team from the U.S. National Institutes of Standards and Technology concluded in an article for IT Professional, which is published by IEEE Computer Society. “All of this leads to security fatigue, which causes a sense of resignation and a loss of control.”

The study by Brian Stanton, Mary F. Theofanos and Susanne Furman, all of NIST, along with independent consultant Sandra Spickard Prettyman have indeed reached this saturation point.

So, the announcement in December by Yahoo that it has identified another security breach, from 2013, that compromised passwords, birthdays and other personal information from more than 1 billion accounts, will likely do little to bolster Internet security – at least among average users.

In fact, with the rise of mobile, the Internet of things and the continued linking of just about everything in our personal and professional lives to global networks, the study underscores what many have long warned will be a growing number of increasingly bigger security breaches, from distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks, to hacks of retail, banking, healthcare and other sites that we freely share our personal information with on a daily basis.

The report is based on an analysis the authors did of a larger study of average computer users in the Washington, D.C., and Central Pennsylvania in 2011.

Although that original study did not specifically address security fatigue, the authors say they began to notice “many indicators in which fatigue surfaced as participants discussed their perceptions and beliefs about online privacy and security.”

 After recoding the data, they said, security fatigue surfaced in 25 of 40 interviews, and was one of the most consistent codes among the dataset.

“I think I am desensitized to it,” one respondent is quoted as saying. “I know bad things can happen. You get this warning that some virus it going to attack your computer, and you get a bunch of emails that say don’t’ open any emails, blah, blah, blah. I think I don’t pay attention to those anymore because it’s in the past. People get weary of being bombarded by ‘watch out for this or watch out for that.’”

The authors said the data shows participants often don’t feel personally at risk, or assume they are not important enough for anyone to care about stealing their information. They highlight several comments in which they say the “frustrated tone, minimization of risk and devaluating of information is evident. 

“It doesn’t appear to me that it poses such a huge security risk,” one wrote. “I don’t work for the state department, and I am not sending sensitive information in an email. So, if you want to steal the message about (how) I made blueberry muffins over the week, then go ahead and steal that.”

Another wrote: “If someone needs to hack into my emails to read stuff, they have problems. They need more important things to do.”

What many of the respondents apparently don’t realize, is that while their personal communications and information may be of little value to hackers and cyber thieves on its face, their lax security practices enable the bad guys to hijack their computers and networks and use them in broader attacks, such as DDoS attacks that can cause huge crashes across the Internet.

So what can the IT community do? The researchers said it’s time to “rethink the way we currently conceptualize the public’s relationship to cybersecurity.”

They make three specific recommendations:

(i) limit the decisions users have to make related to security,
(ii) make it easier for them to do the right thing and
(iii) provide consistency whenever possible.

For example, in the workplace, they suggest offering different ways for users to log into the system, including an option between a traditional user name and password or the use of a personal identification and verification card.

“As IT professionals, it is our responsibility to take up this challenge and work to alleviate the security fatigue users’ experience,” they write.

“…We must also continue to investigate users’ beliefs, knowledge, and use of cybersecurity advice and the factors, such as security fatigue, that inform them, so we can ultimately provide more benefit and less cost for adopting cybersecurity advice that will keep users safe online.”

In other words, improving online security is going to require a concerted effort to not only educate computer users about the need to follow security guidelines, but also provide them much easier ways to keep their data safe on an ongoing basis.

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NDSS 2017 Deadlines Approaching

NDSS 2017 is almost here! The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) symposium fosters information exchange among researchers and practitioners of network and distributed system security. The target audience includes those interested in practical aspects of network and distributed system security, with a focus on actual system design and implementation. NDSS 2017 takes place February 26 through March 1, 2017, at Catamaran Resort Hotel & Spa in San Diego, California.
Here are some upcoming deadlines you should know about:

• 18 JANUARY: DNS Privacy Workshop Call for Participation deadline (extended)
• 26 JANUARY: Call for Posters deadline
• 1 FEBRUARY: Hotel Reservation Cut-off Date
• 3 FEBRUARY: Early-bird Registration deadline

The List of Accepted Papers is online now, with a full schedule coming soon. There are also two workshops happening, one on DNS Privacy and the other on Useable Security.
NDSS brings together leaders in cybersecurity -- university researchers and educators, chief technology and privacy officers, security analysts and system administrators, and operations and security managers – to encourage and enable the Internet community to apply, deploy, and advance the state of available network and distributed system security technology. In order to have the greatest impact, peer reviewed papers are freely available and reproducible (for noncommercial purposes).
I hope you will be able to join us in San Diego next month for what promises to be an exciting and educational event!

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