On Thursday, October 13th, the Strauss Center is hosting Dr. Nicholas Weaver, founder of Skerry Technologies, as he discusses a significant new weapon on the battlefield: the small autonomous drone. Small drones have already changed the landscape of war across armed conflicts in the past decade, from Syria, to Mexico, to Ukraine. The future of drone usage on the battlefield is constantly evolving. The cost of drones has dropped and problems have emerged between what the human controllers want the drone to do, and what the drone is actually programmed to do. Rather than banning drones entirely, Dr. Weaver offers suggestions for how to prepare for drone-led conflicts in the future.
This event is free and open to the public. No RSVP required. Lunch will be served. For more information on this event, contact Susan Crane at scrane@austin.utexas.edu.
Biography
Nicholas Weaver received a B.A. in Astrophysics and Computer Science in 1995, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science in 2003 from the University of California at Berkeley, with a particular focus on computer architecture.
In 2003, he joined the International Computer Science Institute, first as a postdoc and then as a staff researcher, with a primary focus on Computer Security. His research focuses include network security, worms, botnets, network measurement, and online criminality (including cryptocurrencies). Other areas have included both hardware acceleration and software parallelization of network intrusion detection, defenses for DNS resolvers, and tools for detecting ISP-introduced manipulations of a user’s network connection.
He also has taught at UC Berkeley in the Computer Science department for several years as a lecturer, but has now left that position to focus on his own startup, Skerry Technologies, focused on developing hardware and software for low cost, human safe, fully autonomous small drones.