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Parsing untrusted data is notoriously challenging. Failure to handle maliciously crafted data correctly can (and does) lead to a wide range of vulnerabilities. The Language-theoretic security (LangSec) philosophy seeks to obviate the need for developers to apply ad hoc solutions by, instead, offering formally correct and verifiable input handling throughout the software development lifecycle. One of the key components in developing secure parsers is a broad coverage corpus that enables developers to understand the problem space for a given format and to use, potentially, as seeds for fuzzing and other automated testing. In this paper, we offer an update on work initially reported at the LangSec 2020 conference on the development of a file observatory to gather and enable analysis on a diverse collection of files at scale. The initial focus of the observatory is on Portable Document Format (PDF) files and file formats typically embedded in PDFs. In this paper, we report on the addition of a bug tracker corpus and new analytic methods.

The development and deployment of machine learning (ML) systems can be executed easily with modern tools, but the process is typically rushed and means-to-an-end. The lack of diligence can lead to technical debt, scope creep and misaligned objectives, model misuse and failures, and expensive consequences. Engineering systems, on the other hand, follow well-defined processes and testing standards to streamline development for high-quality, reliable results. The extreme is spacecraft systems, where mission critical measures and robustness are ingrained in the development process. Drawing on experience in both spacecraft engineering and ML (from research through product across domain areas), we have developed a proven systems engineering approach for machine learning development and deployment. Our Machine Learning Technology Readiness Levels (MLTRL) framework defines a principled process to ensure robust, reliable, and responsible systems while being streamlined for ML workflows, including key distinctions from traditional software engineering. Even more, MLTRL defines a lingua franca for people across teams and organizations to work collaboratively on artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies. Here we describe the framework and elucidate it with several real world use-cases of developing ML methods from basic research through productization and deployment, in areas such as medical diagnostics, consumer computer vision, satellite imagery, and particle physics.

While there are more than 7000 languages in the world, most translation research efforts have targeted a few high-resource languages. Commercial translation systems support only one hundred languages or fewer, and do not make these models available for transfer to low resource languages. In this work, we present useful tools for machine translation research: MTData, NLCodec, and RTG. We demonstrate their usefulness by creating a multilingual neural machine translation model capable of translating from 500 source languages to English. We make this multilingual model readily downloadable and usable as a service, or as a parent model for transfer-learning to even lower-resource languages., Comment: To-appear: ACL 2021 System Demonstrations

MAARS (Machine leaning-based Analytics for Automated Rover Systems) is an ongoing JPL effort to bring the latest self-driving technologies to Mars, Moon, and beyond. The ongoing AI revolution here on Earth is finally propagating to the red planet as the High Performance Spaceflight Computing (HPSC) and commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) system-on-a-chip (SoC), such as Qualcomm's Snapdragon, become available to rovers. In this three year project, we are developing, implementing, and benchmarking a wide range of autonomy algorithms that would significantly enhance the productivity and safety of planetary rover missions. This paper is to provide the latest snapshot of the project with broad and high-level description of every capability that we are developing, including scientific scene interpretation, vision-based traversability assessment, resource-aware path planning, information-theoretic path planning, on-board strategic path planning, and on-board optimal kinematic settling for accurate collision checking. All of the onboard software capabilities will be integrated into JPL's Athena test rover using ROS (Robot Operating System).

Nowcasting of precipitation is a difficult spatiotemporal task because of the non-uniform characterization of meteorological structures over time. Recently, convolutional LSTM has been shown to be successful in solving various complex spatiotemporal based problems. In this research, we propose a novel precipitation nowcasting architecture 'Convcast' to predict various short-term precipitation events using satellite data. We train Convcast with ten consecutive NASA's IMERG precipitation data sets each at intervals of 30 minutes. We use the trained neural network model to predict the eleventh precipitation data of the corresponding ten precipitation sequence. Subsequently, the predicted precipitation data are used iteratively for precipitation nowcasting of up to 150 minutes lead time. Convcast achieves an overall accuracy of 0.93 with an RMSE of 0.805 mm/h for 30 minutes lead time, and an overall accuracy of 0.87 with an RMSE of 1.389 mm/h for 150 minutes lead time. Experiments on the test dataset demonstrate that Convcast consistently outperforms other state-of-the-art optical flow based nowcasting algorithms. Results from this research can be used for nowcasting of weather events from satellite data as well as for future on-board processing of precipitation data.

Author(s): Ramapriyan, Hampapuram; Downs, Robert; Dozier, Jeff; Duerr, Ruth; Folk, Mike; Frew, James; Hoebelheinrich, Nancy; Mattmann, Chris; Peng, Ge | Abstract: Bruce R. Barkstrom, principal investigator for NASA missions involved with understanding Earth’s radiation budget, committed his life to analyzing, interpreting, and stewarding Earth science data.