Welcome to the June 30, 2023, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
Please Note: In observance of the U.S. Independence holiday, TechNews will not be published on Monday, July 3. Publication will resume Wednesday, July 5.
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Silent Robot Fish Helps Advance Ocean Science
CBS News
Li Cohen
June 28, 2023
Researchers at Switzerland's ETH Zürich engineered a silent robot fish that can film and gather samples underwater while leaving the environment undisturbed. ETH Zürich's Leon Guggenheim said the waterproof "head" of the approximately three-foot-long Belle robot contains electronics and a camera, while its "belly" stores a battery, motors, filter, and pumps. The filter captures fine particles like larvae and algae from which scientists can extract DNA to characterize environmental biodiversity. Belle's silicone fin incorporates two cavities that internal pumps fill and empty with water to help propel the robot. Once the robot fish has finished gathering data, it swims to the surface and broadcasts a global positioning system signal so researchers can retrieve it.
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Scientists Edge Toward Scalable Quantum Simulations on Photonic Chip
University of Rochester News Center
June 29, 2023
University of Rochester (UOR) researchers ran chip-scale quantum simulations in a synthetic environment with physical-world mimicry shaped by the frequency or color of quantum-entangled photons over time. UOS' Qiang Lin said, "For the first time, we have been able to produce a quantum-correlated synthetic crystal. Our approach significantly extends the dimensions of the synthetic space, enabling us to perform simulations of several quantum-scale phenomena, such as random walks of quantum entangled photons."
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Microsoft Unveils Analog Optical Computer to Solve Optimization Problems
Interesting Engineering
Ameya Paleja
June 28, 2023
Microsoft Research Lab has unveiled what it’s calling the first-ever analog optical computer programmed to speedily solve optimization problems. Microsoft researchers said the Analog Interactive Machine (AIM) system combines binary and continuous variables to facilitate a more expressive abstraction than heuristic algorithms can achieve. They induce photons to execute simple math operations like addition and multiplication by exploiting their ability to interact with the material through which they travel. The team established a physical system that uses optics and electronics to perform vector-matrix multiplications and miniaturized its components to fit on centimeter-scale processors.
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UChicago Team Wins NIH Long COVID Computational Challenge
University of Chicago Department of Computer Science
June 28, 2023
The U.S. National Institutes of Health awarded a research team from the University of Chicago and the Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory the $200,000 grand prize in the Long COVID Computational Challenge for their real-time monitoring system. The Convalesco team produced a lightweight monitoring system that updates patients' likelihood of developing long COVID in real time using machine learning models. They designed the system to factor in the irregularity of medical data and to ensure the model's generalizability. The visualization dashboard compiled a timeline of cumulative risk using 100 symptoms and 31 demographic attributes within the data.
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Barred from Grocery Stores by Facial Recognition
The New York Times
Adam Satariano; Kashmir Hill
June 28, 2023
The use of facial recognition by private businesses is on the rise, with close to 400 retailers in Britain using Facewatch to alert them to return visits by shoplifters, problem customers, and legal adversaries. For a monthly cost starting at £250 pounds (US$320), the system allows retailers to upload images of alleged offenders from security footage, adding them to a watchlist shared among nearby stores. Facewatch, which licenses Real Networks and Amazon's facial recognition software, checks people's biometric information as they walk into the store against a database of flagged individuals and sends smartphone alerts to retailers if there is a match. Big Brother Watch's Madeleine Stone said Facewatch is "normalizing airport-style security checks for everyday activities like buying a pint of milk."
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Flexible, Supportive Company Culture Makes for Better Remote Work
Georgia Tech Research
June 26, 2023
Munmun De Choudhury and Mohit Chandra at the Georgia Institute of Technology gauged the factors underpinning the success of remote work by analyzing data from employee review website Glassdoor. The researchers assessed more than 140,000 reviews from workers at 52 Fortune 500 companies that permitted remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic. They formulated an algorithmic prediction task to identify which cultural elements present before the pandemic would support remote-work environments, forecasting a firm's favorable remote work environment with 76% accuracy. De Choudhury and Chandra separated corporate culture into 41 dimensions categorized as interests, work values, work activities, social skills, job structural traits, work styles, and interpersonal relationships. They determined companies with strong remote workplaces accommodated employees' interests and provided independence, a collaborative atmosphere, and flexible policies.
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Study Shows 130 Countries Exploring Central Bank Digital Currencies
Reuters
Marc Jones
June 28, 2023
A study by the U.S.-based Atlantic Council think tank found 130 nations are investigating digital currencies, with advanced development, tests, or launches underway in nearly half. The study indicated all G20 countries but one—Argentina—are in an advanced central bank digital currency (CBDC) development phase. Eleven countries, including Nigeria and several in the Caribbean, already have rolled out CBDCs, while Chinese tests involve 260 million people and encompass 200 types of transactions. The Atlantic Council said only a wholesale version of the U.S. dollar is "moving forward" in America, while progress on a retail version has "stalled."
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Turning Old Maps into 3D Digital Models of Lost Neighborhoods
Ohio State News
Jeff Grabmeier
June 28, 2023
Researchers at Ohio State University (OSU), the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission, and Chicago-based marketing solutions provider Epsilon have converted old Sanborn Fire Insurance maps into three-dimensional digital models of historic neighborhoods with a new machine learning (ML) technique. OSU's Yue Lin created ML tools that derive details about individual buildings—including location, construction materials, and primary use—from the maps. The team used the method to digitally reconstruct two mostly demolished neighborhoods on the near east side of Columbus, OH, based on 13 Sanborn maps drafted in 1961. Analysis validated the ML model's replication accuracy, with the digital version's building footprints and construction materials matching those in the maps by roughly 90%.
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Unveiling the Origins of Merging Black Holes in Galaxies Like Our Own
University of Geneva (Switzerland)
June 29, 2023
An international team of scientists exploring the origins of merging black holes used binary population synthesis-enabled models to simulate the evolution of tens of millions of binary star systems. The researchers developed the open source POSYDON software to forecast this evolution using a repository of single- and binary-star simulations. The University of Florida's Jeffrey Andrews said, "By pre-computing a library of simulations that cover the entire parameter space of initial conditions, POSYDON can utilize this extensive dataset along with machine learning methods to predict the complete evolution of binary systems in less than a second." Northwestern University's Vicky Kalogera said POSYDON has overtaken prior models in demonstrating that massive merging black holes might exist in galaxies like the Milky Way.
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Automatic Detection of Natural Disasters Using Images from Social Media
Universitat Oberta de Catalunya News (Spain)
Xavier Aguilar
June 28, 2023
A deep learning system created by an international research team can use images posted on social media to detect natural disasters. The researchers compiled a taxonomy of incidents and the Incidents1M database for training deep learning models, composing a list with 43 incident categories. This list allowed the researchers to label training images in conjunction with 49 place categories. Incidents1M contained more than 1.7 million images labeled class-positive and class-negative, with the class-negative labels helping to train the system to remove false positives. The researchers tested the system's incident-detection abilities on a massive volume of images from social media, which "did correspond to specific, recorded incidents, such as the 2015 earthquakes in Nepal and Chile," according to Àgata Lapedriza at Spain's Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.
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BBCube 3D: A Breakthrough in Semiconductor Integration, Data Transmission
Tokyo Tech News (Japan)
June 29, 2023
The Bumpless Build Cube 3D (BBCube3D) technology designed by scientists at Japan's Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) and tech developer Hitachi could potentially improve the three-dimensional integration of processing units (PUs) and memory chips. The researchers facilitated 3D connectivity between PUs and dynamic random access memory (DRAM) by stacking PU dies atop multiple DRAM layers interconnected by through-silicon vias (TSVs). BBCube 3D owes its improved electrical performance to low parasitic capacitance and resistance to the TSVs, overall compactness, and the absence of solder microbumps. Tokyo Tech's Takayuki Ohba said the technology "has the potential to achieve a bandwidth of 1.6 terabytes per second, which is 30 times higher than DDR5 [Double Data Rate 5 Synchronous DRAM] and four times higher than HBM2E [High Bandwidth Memory 2E]."
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Computer Model Predicts Crop Yields
NC State University News
Matt Shipman
June 28, 2023
Scientists at North Carolina State University (NC State) and China's Zhejiang University built a computer model that predicts cotton, corn, sorghum, and soybean yields in the southeastern U.S. to complement climate change-era decisions by farmers and government water resource managers. The regional hydroeconomic optimization modeling framework (RHEO) taps data including rainfall forecasts, county-level soil properties and irrigation costs, and U.S. Department of Agriculture-supplied crop prices. NC State's Hemant Kumar said when fed 31 years' worth of historical data from 21 counties in southwestern Georgia, "RHEO was able to predict variability in each of our four target crops, as well as identify irrigation strategies that would reduce related costs," according to Kumar.
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