Hello Sense: A Better Sleep

How well you perform during the day can greatly depend on what you do at night, or how you sleep. Sense by Hello is a new product that's aim is to help improve sleep. You simply place it on the stand next to your bed and it is able to monitor many things throughout the night. Watch the video below to get a quick understanding of it.

It is truly amazing how such a small object is able to capture all of this information while sitting a few feet from you. The product has 6 sensors that it uses to formulate the best nights sleep for you. These sensors are temperature, humidity, ambient light, microphone, proximity, and particulate. It also comes with a clip know as the Sleep Pill that attaches to your pillow to monitor your movement while sleeping.

Temperature is one of the biggest factors when it comes to a great nights sleep.  Many people struggle with cold or hot temperatures in their bedroom and struggle to sleep when the temperature is not where it should be. Sense matches the current temperature with the quality of sleep you are having and tells you exactly where you should set the thermostat to before you go to bed.

The Sense also knows when it should and shouldn't wake you up. Waking up during a heavy sleep from a loud ringtone or alarm may cause a person to feel tired or groggy. It tracks your sleep rhythm and wakes you up when you are in light sleep to a calming alarm. There are many more feature of the Sense that allow you to check how you slept throughout the night and what happened during certain times of the night. It gives you sleep scores and also shows you how your sleep has improved from the past few days or weeks.

It is almost hard to believe the types of products that are coming out in today's world. The Sense is just one of many items that companies have come up with to improve the quality of life. It is hard to imagine what other possible products could be made, but we will without a doubt see many more great ideas.


Posted by Austin Eller

Google Smart Car

To those that have heard the phrase "You're an awful driver," may be in luck within the next few years. Google is working on a self-driving car that would take most of the pressure off humans while driving. This car uses sensors to detect objects such as people or other vehicles from up to 200 yards away. It's GPS systems allows the car to know where it is at in the world as well so it will have a better understanding of the surroundings. Google also hopes that it will have the complete ability to predict what is going to happen, such as pedestrians or animals crossing streets.

Human error is the reason for 94% of vehicle accidents in the United States. This is what is motivating Google to make a car that would be able to drive itself both efficiently and safely. If Google can assure that these vehicles are safe, I am sure there would be a huge demand for the car, although I'm sure they wouldn't be too cheap. Google already has some vehicles driving around in Texas and California. They've driven over a total of 1 million miles!

The car isn't completely perfect though. One of Google's cars was pulled over in California for driving too slow. It was going 24 mph in a 35 mph zone. There was a passenger in the car, but no one was driving it, so the officer had to explain to the passenger what the vehicle had done wrong. In the end the officer decided not to give any tickets and let the car get off free. Google has a max limit of 25 mph on these cars currently so they don't go too fast through neighborhoods and scare people. In the future when they are more well known, Google plans on allowing them to go faster.

For complete information on this vehicle, you can go to here.

Posted by Austin Eller

Unanswered Internal Threat Questions

Recently I have been reading a decent amount of articles about intrusion detection systems, which seems to be a particularly hot topic with the all too frequent news of a database breaches.  Target, Ashley Madison, and Sony are just a few examples. Clearly, we are “losing the cyberwar.”  While external threats are common and tend to get plenty of publicity, internal threats are considered to be much more difficult to handle. I found an article about classifying internal threat levels especially interesting.  It declares that “[t]he challenges of preventing, detecting, and responding to data leakage propagated by authorized users, or insider threats, are among the most difficult facing security researchers and professionals today”. One fundamental issue is that the heuristics typically used to identify threats have yet to be fully regarded as ‘admissible’; current algorithms tend to both overestimate as well as underestimate. This is partly due to three undecided critical questions, which are unique to each information system: can a person’s intent be accurately characterized by monitoring and analyzing interactions with computing systems, is the malicious technical behavior of insiders unusual any more often than the behavior of non-malicious users, and is unusual behavior indicative of malicious intent? Being unable to determine these will likely cause an abundance of both type 1 and type 2 errors. Researchers today use various analytical or statistical methods, but they “still struggle to define the problem, much less demonstrate the operational validity of their solutions”. With further study on my part, it’ll be interesting to see how particular systems handle these inconsistencies, if at all.  

Huth, Carly L., David W. Chadwick, William R. Claycomb, and Ilsun You. "Guest Editorial: A Brief Overview of Data Leakage and Insider Threats - Springer." Information Systems Frontier, 27 Feb. 2013. Web. 16 Oct. 2015. <http://link.spriner.com/article/10.1007/s10796-013-9419-8>.