Spotlight

AP: After Alps crash, some experts ponder flights without pilots, April 2015

“NEW YORK (AP) — To improve airline safety, maybe we need to remove the pilots.

“That radical idea is decades away, if it ever becomes a reality. But following the intentional crashing of Germanwings Flight 9525 by the co-pilot, a long-running debate over autonomous jets is resurfacing. At the very least, some have suggested allowing authorities on the ground to take control of a plane if there is a rogue pilot in the cockpit.

Continue reading the AP article, which features an interview with Dr. Humphreys.

Todd Humphreys Receives NSF CAREER Award, March 2015

Dr. Humphreys has been selected to receive the NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award to study “Secure Perception for Autonomous Systems.”  

The award was announced in a press release from the Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics Department at UT-Austin.   View the NSF’s summary of all the 2015 recipients of the CAREER award.  

Dr. Humphreys Testifies on Drone Security Issues at Hearing before House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight and Management Efficiency, March 2015

Dr. Humphreys testified at a hearing of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight and Management Efficiency, titled “Unmanned Aerial System Threats: Exploring Security Implications and Mitigation Technologies,” on March 18, 2015.  View the oral and written testimony at the website of the Committee.  The full video is accessed from the upper right hand corner of the page.

The hearing was discussed in a CNN article and an Inside Unmanned Aerial Systems article.  Dr. Humphreys authored an op-ed in the Star-Telegram on the same subject. 

NBC: Secret Service Testing Drones, How to Disrupt Their Flying, March 2015

“Mysterious, middle-of-the-night drone flights by the U.S. Secret Service during the next several weeks over parts of Washington — usually off-limits as a strict no-fly zone — are part of secret government testing intended to find ways to interfere with rogue drones or knock them out of the sky, The Associated Press has learned. A U.S. official briefed on the plans said the Secret Service was testing drones for law enforcement or protection efforts and to look for ways, such as signal jamming, to thwart threats from civilian drones. The drones were being flown between 1 a.m. and 4 a.m.

Access the NBC news article and video, which includes an interview with Dr. Humphreys

IEEE Computer: Noirware, February 2015

“No system or software designer, innovator, or inventor has a perfect record. As with baseball sluggers, a 33 percent success rate with significant projects—delivered on time without errors—probably qualifies you as a superstar. So the act of coming up with a bad idea, or a failed implementation thereof, doesn’t disqualify you from getting kudos.  But there are consumer-level bad ideas and industrial strength bad ideas. The latter are the more worrisome, especially if they recur with any frequency. As such, I’ll deal with them here.

Continue reading the IEEE Computer article, which discusses Dr. Humphrey’s research.

GPS World: Accuracy in the palm of your hand, February 2015

Austin, TX — Ken Pesyna, Robert Heath, and Todd Humphreys authored the cover story of GPS World on centimeter-accurate positioning using smartphone GNSS antennas in the February 2015 edition.

“The smartphone antenna’s poor multipath suppression and irregular gain pattern result in large time-correlated phase errors that significantly increase the time to integer ambiguity resolution as compared to even a low-quality stand-alone patch antenna. The time to integer resolution — and to a centimeter-accurate fix — is significantly reduced when more GNSS signals are tracked or when the smartphone experiences gentle wavelength-scale random motion.

Continue reading the GPS World article, or download a PDF copy.

Todd Humphreys Receives ION’s Thomas L. Thurlow Award, January 2015

“The Institute of Navigation (ION) has selected Todd Humphreys, assistant professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the Cockrell School of Engineering, to receive the Colonel Thomas L. Thurlow Award. Humphreys was selected ‘for contributions that enhance radionavigation security and robustness in the face of intentional spoofing and natural interference.’ ION presented Humphreys with the award at the ION Technical Meeting (ITM) in Dana Point, California, January 26-28.

Continue reading the announcement from the UT Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics department.

Wall Street Journal: White House Drone Crash Said to Be ‘Recreational,’ January 2015

“The Secret Service said it believes a hobbyist accidentally crashed a drone onto the White House grounds early Monday, an incident that prompted a lockdown and delivered a wake-up call over the potential terrorism threat of unmanned aircraft.

“The person flying the 2-foot helicopter that crashed called the Secret Service after the incident was widely reported and has been cooperating with agents, the agency said. Authorities didn’t identify the person.

“The Secret Service said the crash appears to have ‘occurred as a result of recreational use of the device,’ but officials said the agency is still following up on other leads.

Continue reading the WSJ article, and a follow-up WSJ article entitled “Criminals, Terrorists Find Uses for Drones, Raising Concerns,” both of which feature interviews with Dr. Humphreys.

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