Press

The world is having to feed an increasing number of mouths. Studies indicate that global population will rise to over nine billion by the year 2050. In response, Bayer AG is researching resistant cereal varieties and enhanced crop protection. A new 24-hour monitoring system from the Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics FKIE will help protect the fields where these test crops are grown and thereby safeguard this timeconsuming and cost-intensive research.

Artificial intelligence and journalistic expertise are the basis of a disinformation detection system developed and implemented in a collaboration between pressrelations, NewsGuard and the Fraunhofer FKIE. First use case: A qualitative analysis of media coverage of the 2020 US election. The analysis reveals that Donald Trump’s media dominance over his challenger Joe Biden was due primarily to the spread of fake news and disinformation, particularly with the support of untrustworthy media. One issue that stands out in particular was the accusation of election fraud, which was instrumental in paving the way for the storming of the Capitol on January 6.

The Bundeswehr plans to equip its infantry with unmanned ground vehicles for the transport of material and weapons. It has tested various off-the-shelf systems in a variety of operational scenarios as part of two troop exercises. The Fraunhofer FKIE provided technical and scientific support for the tests. The results demonstrate the high potential of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and the level of maturity they have already attained. The conclusion among soldiers and experts was unanimous: the systems are ready for procurement.

Alarming findings are published in the »Home Router Security Report 2020« by the Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics FKIE. Of the 127 home routers tested from seven major manufacturers, nearly all were found to have security flaws, some of them very severe. The problems range from missing security updates to easily decrypted, hard-coded passwords and known vulnerabilities that should have been patched long ago.

Purchasing, production, logistics, distribution and markets form a network spread over continents and nations, the details of which are difficult for companies to keep track of. However, such an overview with the focus on one's own company contributes to the company's success in many ways. The project "Fraud Information-Fusion Intelligence" by Fraunhofer FKIE adapts proven approaches, procedures and tools used by security authorities to the requirements of companies, develops them further and thus makes them usable for the detection of irregularities.

In the frame of the Future Combat Air System (FCAS), Airbus and Fraunhofer FKIE have created an independent panel of experts on the responsible use of new technologies to define and propose ethical as well as international legal »guard rails« for Europe’s largest defence project.

Fire on board! This is a grave danger for any ship, but especially so when a ship is ostensibly safely docked in harbor – where “normal” firefighters are on duty and have to cope with the special challenges on board a ship. Since 2005, 44 potentially disastrous incidents have occurred in German ports alone, including 15 fires and 13 spills of hazardous materials. EFAS, a joint project coordinated by the Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics FKIE, is aimed at significantly improving firefighters’ safety and effectiveness through optimum equipment and technological innovations.

On May 17, 1904, a public experiment was conducted on Cologne’s Hohenzollern Bridge which would go down in history as a milestone of international engineering art. On this day, the inventor Christian Hülsmeyer was the first to succeed in detecting ships travelling on the Rhine River based on the reflections of high frequency electromagnetic waves: It was the birth of radar. On October 19, a ceremony will be held to unveil a plaque commemorating this important milestone of technological history.

For his master's thesis "File system fuzzing applied to the BSD operating system family" Christopher Krah, a graduate of the department of computer science at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn and a scientist in the Applied System Analysis research group at the Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics FKIE since July, was awarded the first prize in the AFCEA Academic Award 2019, endowed with 5,000 euros.

Drones have ushered in a new dimension to airborne attacks and increasingly confront security agencies (referred to collectively in German as »BOS«) with new challenges. Drone incidents at the London Gatwick, London Heathrow and Frankfurt/Main airports have brought operations at three of the largest European airports to a temporary halt, all within a six-month period. There is also a real possibility of attacks targeting critical Infrastructure and major events in light of growing terrorist threats, which is why there is a critical need for systems that can help defend against drones. Devising such systems was the task set out for the BMBF-funded »AMBOS« project.