Welcome to the May 5, 2023, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
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Transformative Innovations Recognized by World's Largest Computing Society
ACM
May 3, 2023
ACM announced the recipients of four technical awards, with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Mohammad Alizadeh to receive the 2022 ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award for advancing efficient datacenter network communication. ACM bestowed the ACM Software System Award on a 14-member international research team for developing the seL4 microkernel, the first-ever industrial-strength, general-purpose operating system with formally proved implementation correctness. The ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award went to Google's Michael Burrows and Paolo Ferragina, and Giovanni Manzini at Italy's University of Pisa, for creating the BW-transform and the FM-index that unlocked and shaped the field of compressed data structures, and fundamentally impacted data compression and computational biology. Finally, Bernhard Schölkopf at Switzerland's ETH Zurich and the University of California at Berkeley's Stuart J. Russell were named to share the ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award for their respective contributions to machine learning and artificial intelligence.
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White House Pushes Tech CEOs to Limit Risks of AI
The New York Times
David McCabe
May 4, 2023
Vice President Kamala Harris and other White House officials urged technology CEOs to limit the risks of artificial intelligence (AI) at the Biden administration's first meeting with major AI executives since the release of tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot. Harris said the private sector is ethically, morally, and legally obligated to ensure their products are safe and secure, and "must comply with existing laws to protect the American people." The AI boom has raised anxiety about the technology's economic and geopolitical ramifications, as well as its potential to strengthen criminal activity. Critics have cited the opaqueness of AI systems, with fears of discrimination, job displacement, misinformation, and even lawbreaking by AIs. The companies behind these AIs counter that elected officials must take action to set industry regulations for the technology.
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Predicting What Mice See by Decoding Brain Signals
EPFL (Switzerland)
May 3, 2023
Scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL) developed the CEBRA machine learning algorithm, which they say is capable of predicting information like what mice see when they watch a movie by exposing the hidden structure in neural code. CEBRA can anticipate unseen movie frames directly from neural signals after an initial training session mapping brain signals and movie characteristics. The algorithm functions well with less than 1% of neurons in the visual cortex, given that region in mice encompasses 0.5 million neurons. EPFL's Mackenzie Mathis said, "This work is just one step towards the theoretically-backed algorithms that are needed in neurotechnology to enable high-performance BMIs [brain-machine interfaces]."
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English Major? History Student? USC Wants to Teach You About Computer Science, Too
Los Angeles Times
Debbie Truong
May 4, 2023
University of Southern California (USC) officials said the forthcoming School of Advanced Computing will extend computer science (CS) instruction to all students, as well as conferring more degrees in technology-related disciplines. The school is the central pillar of the $1-billion USC Frontiers of Computing initiative to expand computing university-wide, which will incorporate data science and information technology (IT) instruction into non-CS majors' education. Officials said the facility, to open next year, will host CS, data science, IT, and advanced computing programs, with the goals of producing graduates for jobs in technology and other high-demand fields, and giving students in all disciplines digital literacy. In addition, said USC's Ishwar Puri, "We want to develop a digital backbone across USC that touches every student and every graduate, so when they go out into the world, they understand what computing is."
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Robo-Gripper Reflexively Organizes Cluttered Spaces
MIT News
Jennifer Chu
April 27, 2023
Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed a robotic gripper that can adapt in the momen, without engaging a higher-level planner, to gain a better hold by grabbing, pinching, or dragging an object. The system is comprised of a high-speed arm, two lightweight multi-jointed fingers, a camera mounted on the arm's base, and custom high-bandwidth sensors on the fingertips. The sensors record the force and location of any contact and the finger's proximity to surrounding objects over 200 times per second. Instead of having the gripper restart when it fails to grasp an object, the system's algorithm instructs the robot to make any of three grasp maneuvers. The reflexes are organized at a lower decision-making level, eliminating the need for the robot to reevaluate a situation to plan an optimal fix.
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Deere Seeks Satellite Network to Connect Far-Flung Farms
The Wall Street Journal
Bob Tita
May 1, 2023
Farm-equipment company Deere aims to network farms in remote regions of Brazil and the U.S. via satellites as it deploys sophisticated machinery and software for more rapid sowing and harvesting of crops. Company executives said Deere requires widespread connectivity to maintain driverless tractors and to update intelligent crop sprayers. Deere said its satellite network will transmit signals to Brazilian farms and remote U.S. areas where Wi-Fi is unavailable. It expects to choose a satellite operator later this year and to start marketing the satellite service to growers by the end of next year. The company aims to add 1 million farm and construction machines to its cloud-based operations center by 2026; Deere's Jonny Spendlove said up to 100,000 of those machines would be linked through satellites.
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Hackers Can Target Smart Meters to Destabilize Electricity Grid
Oregon State University News
May 3, 2023
Oregon State University (OSU) researchers demonstrated that hackers can destabilize a power transmission grid by manipulating smart meters to produce an oscillation in electricity demand. The researchers used a time-domain grid protection simulator to demonstrate a load oscillation attack caused by a hack of advanced metering infrastructure. Said OSU's Eduardo Cotilla-Sanchez, "We juxtaposed our work with related recent grid studies and found that a well-crafted attack can cause grid instability while involving less than 2% of the system's load." The researchers said a grid's vulnerabilities must be understood so grid operators can enact countermeasures, which could include intentionally ‘islanding’ the affected area or altering the generation portfolio to minimize the impact of such an attack.
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DOD Wearable Identifies Infections
Interesting Engineering
Loukia Papadopoulos
April 30, 2023
The U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) said it has co-developed a wearable algorithm with technology company Philips that can identify infections quickly as part of the Rapid Assessment of Threat Exposure (RATE) program. DOD's Jeff Schneider said, "With RATE, the DOD can use commercial wearables to noninvasively monitor a service member's health and provide early alerts to potential infection before it spreads." The RATE algorithm is trained on hospital-acquired data from COVID-19 cases, tapping biometric data from off-the-shelf wearables. The algorithm is able to detect infectious disease symptoms up to 48 hours before they appear, and to forecast infections up to six days ahead. DOD will use additional funding it has received to distribute the technology to 4,500 more users across various departments, including the Air Combat Command's 360 first sergeants.
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AI in the ICU
Carnegie Mellon University School of Computer Science
Kayla Papakie
April 25, 2023
Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center tested an artificial intelligence (AI)-based tool's viability for helping intensive care unit (ICU) doctors make critical decisions. The AI Clinician Explorer interactive clinical decision support interface offers recommendations for treating sepsis. The researchers trained the model on a dataset of more than 18,000 patients who satisfied standard diagnostic criteria for sepsis while in the ICU. Clinicians can use the system to screen and look for patients in the dataset, visualize their disease pathways, and compare model predictions to actual bedside treatment decisions. The researchers gave 24 ICU physicians access to the tool and found that most used it to inform some of their sepsis treatment decisions for four simulated patients.
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Energy-Efficient Bitcoin Mining Through Light
Optica
Edwin Cartlidge
May 3, 2023
Researchers in the U.S. and Italy used integrated photonic circuits to deploy a modified proof-of-work blockchain to reduce the energy consumption of bitcoin mining while preserving network security. The framework substitutes bitcoin's SHA-256 hash function with LightHash, a function optimized for analog photonic chips built from Mach-Zehnder interferometers. The interferometers' arrangement helps to process hash functions by providing answers to specific matrix multiplications when laser light passes through the circuit and is measured at the device's output. LightHash averages the trade-off between circuit size and accuracy by comparing outputs from multiple circuit copies. Experiments using an interferometer network that could process matrices with up to four rows and columns raised error susceptibility but could reduce the error rate in hashing by up to four orders of magnitude.
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The Future of Data Storage Lies in DNA Microcapsules
Eindhoven University of Technology (Netherlands)
May 4, 2023
An international team of researchers has added scalability to synthetic DNA data storage via a new polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique. Tom de Greef at the Netherlands' Eindhoven University of Technology led the team's development of protein-polymer microcapsules that self-seal above 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit), enabling PCR to occur separately in each capsule. This "thermo-confined PCR" method read 25 DNA data files simultaneously without major errors. Reducing the temperature again causes the copies to detach from the capsule while keeping the anchored original file, preserving the original's quality. Assigning a fluorescent label to each file and a unique color to each capsule also eases data-library searches, which could enable a future system in which a robotic arm selects and reads specific files from a pool of capsules.
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Inmates Use VR to Learn Real-World Skills
MIT Technology Review
Daliah Singer
April 26, 2023
Virtual reality (VR) technology is being used by some state corrections departments to help inmates who have been incarcerated since their teens learn basic work skills to improve their chances of getting and keeping a job when they are released. Proponents say VR can help inmates develop digital literacy in a secure environment. The technology also can help them navigate the sights and sounds of modern life. Virtual Training Partners' Ethan Moeller noted, "When you're role-playing, when you're learning a new skill, the closer you can bring them to doing what they're actually going to have to do out in the real world, the better. VR does that better than any other training medium."
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