Infrastructure Policy Watch: new resilience guidelines from Australia and UK hydrogen strategy

Engineering Tech

Article | July 13, 2022

5G is the next quantum leap in mobile and wireless communication, providing unprecedented speed, capacity, and capabilities. In the 5G world, networks will serve trillions of connected things, and each person will be supported by hundreds of connected devices. In addition to these opportunities, the combination of new capabilities and virtualisation in 5G introduces new threats. 5G has significantly more network end-points that cyber criminals can exploit, and 5G virtualisation means that the entire connection is based on software, which is inherently hackable. Transforming society by reconceptualising the “network” Understanding where the vulnerabilities exist is a critical first step toward protecting 5G networks from cyber threats. This entails implementing a process that involves identifying, profiling, and assessing the health of each component before allowing it to connect to the network, and, if necessary, restricting access to the 5G service based on this assessment. It's known as a zero-trust approach, and it will assist organizations throughout the 5G ecosystem in striking the right balance between business risk and 5G security. 5G Expands Cyber Risks The network is transitioning away from centralized, hardware-based switching and toward distributed, software-defined digital routing. However, in the 5G software defined network, that activity is pushed outward to a web of digital routers spread throughout the network, removing the possibility of chokepoint inspection and control. 5G adds to its cyber vulnerability by virtualizing higher-level network functions previously performed by physical appliances in software. These activities are based on the Internet Protocol common language and well-known operating systems. Even if it were possible to secure the network's software vulnerabilities, the network is also managed by software—often early generation artificial intelligence—that is vulnerable. The dramatic increase in bandwidth that enables 5G opens up new attack vectors. Low-cost, short-range small-cell antennas deployed throughout urban areas become new physical hard targets. Finally, there is the vulnerability created by connecting tens of billions of hackable smart devices (actually, small computers) to the Internet of Things network. Plans are in the works for a diverse and seemingly endless list of IoT-enabled activities, ranging from public safety to battlefield to medical to transportation—all of which are both wonderful and uniquely vulnerable. In this paper, we argue that a zero-trust approach, combined with company leaders focusing on three key pillars—trust, resilience, and enablement—will form the foundation of a sound cyber strategy, allowing companies to roll out 5G quickly and safely.

Engineering Tech

Article | August 17, 2021

Construction engineers are driven to look for ways to improve everything from construction methods, the materials used, to the systems used to develop new building designs with lower cost margins and thin financing costs. Under those circumstances, there is a lot of pressure on contractors and designers to find more effective ways to reduce construction costs. BIM is being used by a growing number of engineers, architects, and contractors to make the design and development of structures faster, better, and more cost-efficient. BIM has been proven to help reduce costs and increase efficiency throughout the project lifecycle ranging from design and construction to facility management.

Engineering Tech

Article | July 14, 2022

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in its latest Fiscal Risks Report has forecast the cost to the UK public finances from climate change (physical risks) and the transition to net-zero (transition risks) across a range of different scenarios. Describing the challenge, the OBR states: There are many other policy challenges to overcome, so the path to net zero can be expected to involve many policy levers on top of carbon taxes and emissions trading schemes, including bans and other regulations, and public subsidies and investment. These will all have economic and fiscal implications of one sort or another – either directly (via taxes and spending) or indirectly (via wider economic outcomes). Taking early action to achieve net zero would add 21% of GDP to public sector net debt by 2050, a smaller amount than that added by the Covid-19 pandemic. This amount comes from increased spending on net-zero investment, the loss of tax revenues (such as fuel duty), revenues from tax on carbon and other costs such as increased debt interest payments.

Article | April 24, 2020

Feature engineering is the process of extracting new variables by transforming raw data to improve the predictability of a machine learning model. But feature engineering is not just this kind of simple translation of categories like names or colors into numbers. The following section includes a collection of different kinds of engineering approaches that go beyond a translation of categories into numbers and address needs such as transforming numbers into categories or filtering data points due to missing or false data.