Welcome to the June 6, 2025 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Recognizes Young Researchers
• U.S. Removes ‘Safety’ from AI Safety Institute
• Nvidia's Blackwell Conquers Largest LLM Training Benchmark
• China Offers Cash Rewards for Hackers
• System Enables Robots to Solve Manipulation Problems in Seconds
• Brain-Mimicking Vision Sensor Enhances Autonomous Driving Accuracy
• Quantum Computers on the Edge of Revealing New Particle Physics
• Hackers Abuse Modified Salesforce App to Steal Data
• Meta Pauses Mobile Port Tracking After Researchers Disclose Practice
• FBI Helps Takes Down AVCheck Site Used to Test Malware
• Belgian Lab Shapes Modern Soccer's Data Revolution
• Google, Chile Partner to Deploy a Trans-Pacific Submarine Cable
• Canada's Xanadu Achieves Error-Resistant Quantum Chip

ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award Recognizes Young Researchers

Ashish Sharma at the Microsoft Office of Applied Research was named to receive the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award for his dissertation “Human-AI Collaboration to Support Mental Health and Well Being.” Sharma developed advances in natural language processing to positively impact the mental health of people. Honorable Mentions for the Award went to Alexander (Zander) Kelley at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign for his dissertation “Explicit Pseudorandom Distributions for Restricted Models of Computation,” and Sewon Min at the University of Washington for her dissertation “Rethinking Data Use in Large Language Models."
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U.S. Removes ‘Safety’ from AI Safety Institute

The U.S. Department of Commerce has renamed its AI Safety Institute, created in 2023 under the previous administration, as the Center for AI Standards and Innovation (CAISI). The name change reflects a change in focus from overall safety to combating national security risks and preventing “burdensome and unnecessary regulation” abroad. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick called the agency’s overhaul a way to “evaluate and enhance U.S. innovation” and “ensure U.S. dominance of international AI standards.”
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Nvidia's Blackwell Conquers Largest LLM Training Benchmark

Nvidia's Blackwell GPUs ranked first in all six benchmarks of the MLCommons consortium's MLPerf machine learning competition. The large language model (LLM) pretraining task, in particular, was more resource-intensive than in the past, with the GPT3 model replaced by Meta's Llama 3.1 403B. In the LLM fine-tuning benchmark, AMD's Instinct MI325X GPU was on par with Nvidia's H200s and marked a 30% improvement over the Instinct MI300X.
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China Offers Cash Rewards for Hackers

The public security bureau in Guangzhou, China, is offering rewards of 10,000 yuan ($1,392) for information leading to the arrests of 20 people it claims are hackers belonging to the Taiwanese military's Information, Communications, and Electronic Force Command. Chinese news agency Xinhua said the hackers organized, planned, and carried out premeditated attacks on military, aerospace, government, energy and transportation, maritime affairs, science, and technology research firms in China, Hong Kong, and Macau.
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System Enables Robots to Solve Manipulation Problems in Seconds

A task and motion planning (TAMP) algorithm developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NVIDIA Research leverages the power of GPUs to enable robots to solve multistep manipulation problems in seconds. The CUDA parallel computing platform helps speed up the algorithm, which combines sampling and optimization to simulate thousands of potential solutions and narrows options based on the robot's constraints, the environment, and any user-defined objectives.
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Brain-Mimicking Vision Sensor Enhances Autonomous Driving Accuracy

A vision sensor developed by researchers at South Korea's Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, and Seoul National University could help autonomous vehicles, drones, and robots recognize objects in their surrounding environment faster and with greater accuracy. The synapse-mimicking robotic vision sensor features an optical transistor that changes its current response based on gate voltage, enabling it to detect outline information even in low-light environments.
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Quantum Computers on the Edge of Revealing New Particle Physics

Researchers at Austria's University of Innsbruck and Google ran separate simulations on different quantum computers to visualize how excited particles behave in quantum fields, both based on a simplification of the standard model of particle physics. The Innsbruck researchers employed a quantum computer from QuERA made from extremely cold atoms controlled by lasers and electromagnetic pulses, while the Google researchers used Google's Sycamore quantum computer with small superconducting circuits.
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Hackers Abuse Modified Salesforce App to Steal Data

Hackers are tricking employees at companies in Europe and the Americas into installing a modified version of a Salesforce-related app that allows them to steal data, access other corporate cloud services, and extort those companies. The hackers convince employees via voice calls to install a modified version of Salesforce’s Data Loader, a proprietary tool used to bulk-import data into Salesforce. Some 20 organizations have been affected by the campaign.
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Meta Pauses Mobile Port Tracking After Researchers Disclose Practice

Computer scientists at Spain's IMDEA Networks, Netherlands' Radboud University, and Belgium's KU Leuven discovered that native Android apps were used by social media giant Meta and Russian search engine Yandex to listen in on localhost ports. This enabled the companies to connect Web browsing data to user identities, skirting Google Play's privacy protections. Following the disclosure, the researchers observed that Meta's Pixel script stopped sending data to localhost and that the tracking code was largely removed.
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FBI Helps Takes Down AVCheck Site Used to Test Malware

The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), in conjunction with law enforcement in the Netherlands and Finland, have seized and taken offline AVCheck.net, a website operating as a counter antivirus service. Marketed as a "high-speed antivirus scantime checker," the agencies said AVCheck enabled cybercriminals to test their malware against multiple antivirus engines prior to deployment, scanning files, domains, and IP addresses without alerting antivirus vendors.
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Belgian Lab Shapes Modern Soccer's Data Revolution

Computer science professor Jesse Davis of the Sports Analytics Lab at Belgium's Catholic University of Leuven heads a team that, for more than a decade, has leveraged machine learning, data mining, and AI to advance the science behind soccer and change how it's played. However, it has been challenging for clubs to implement the lab's research, even though most big clubs now have an extensive data department.
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Google, Chile Partner to Deploy a Trans-Pacific Submarine Cable

Under an agreement with the Chilean government, Google will install an undersea fiber optic cable that will connect the coastal city of Valparaíso with Sydney, Australia, via French Polynesia. The 9,200-mile (14,800-kilometer) Humboldt Cable, slated for deployment in 2027, aims to transform Chile into a major digital hub.
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Canada's Xanadu Achieves Error-Resistant Quantum Chip

Researchers at Canadian startup Xanadu Quantum Technologies Inc. have developed an error-resistant quantum chip, which corrals photons into a quantum state that enables the creation of a GKP qubit. Three of the chip's outputs are linked to detectors that indicate whether the state of the fourth output is suitable for a quantum calculation. The chips would serve as an initial error-detection layer in a working quantum computer.
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