Welcome to the July 17, 2023, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
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An Easier Way to Learn Quantum Processes
EPFL News (Switzerland)
July 13, 2023
An international team of researchers led by Zoe Holmes at the Swiss Federal School of Technology, Lausanne trained a quantum computer to understand and predict quantum-system behavior. Said Holmes, "We show that with just a few simple examples called 'product states' the computer can learn how a quantum system behaves even when dealing with entangled states, which are more complicated and challenging to understand." The technique also facilitates shorter and less error-prone programs. The implication, said Holmes, is that "we might be able to learn about and understand quantum systems using smaller, simpler computers, like the near-term intermediary scale [NISQ] computers we're likely to have in the coming years, instead of needing large and complex ones, which may be decades away."
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Record Number of U.K. Students Apply for Computing Courses
DIGIT
Thom Carter
July 14, 2023
The Universities and College Admissions Service (UCAS), which operates the application processes for British universities and colleges, said the number of applications from 18-year-olds in the U.K. for computing courses jumped nearly 10% from 86,630 in 2022 to 94,870 this year. The Service said applications rose 16% for software engineering, 11% for computer science, 4% for artificial intelligence (AI), and 2% for computer games and animation. Applications from 18-year-olds from the most disadvantaged backgrounds rose by 760 to 11,870 this year. Women accounted for just 18% of all computing applications, up 1% from last year and 2% from 2021. UCAS CEO Clare Marchant said, "These new figures suggest students are becoming increasingly inspired to study computing thanks to the rise of digital and AI."
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A New Way to Look at Data Privacy
MIT News
Adam Zewe
July 14, 2023
A new metric developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers allows a small amount of noise to be added to models to protect sensitive data while maintaining the model's accuracy. An accompanying framework to the Probably Approximately Correct (PAC) Privacy metric automatically identifies the minimal amount of noise to add without having to know the model's inner workings. PAC Privacy considers the difficulty for an adversary to reconstruct sensitive data after the addition of noise, and determines the optimal amount of noise based on entropy in the original data from the adversary's viewpoint. It runs the user's machine learning training algorithm numerous times on different subsamplings of data, comparing the variance across all outputs to calculate how much noise must be added.
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3D Bioprinting Reveals an Approach for Killing Solid Cancer Tumors
Interesting Engineering
Rupendra Brahambhatt
July 12, 2023
Researchers in South Korea three-dimensionally (3D)-bioprinted micro-macro porous hydrogels containing natural killer (NK) cells that can destroy solid cancer tumors. The hydrogels' micropore side enables the NK cells to support natural processes like cytokinesis and cell death, while the macropore side allows leukocytes to absorb nutrients, oxygen, and other growth and survival factors. Most of the leukocytes attacked solid tumors in an in-vitro model. The researchers said 3D bioprinting “makes macro-scale clinical applications possible, and the automatic process shows potential for development as an off-the-shelf immunotherapy product.”
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Ground Vehicles Are New Frontier in Ukraine's Drone War
Reuters
Max Hunder
July 13, 2023
Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) developers suggest such drones could become the new frontier in the Ukraine war, with Ukrainian engineer Yevhen Hnatok saying he has provided that nation’s armed forces with several dozen remote-controlled UGVs. Hnatok's smaller UGV model can carry an anti-tank mine or a remotely operated machine gun up to 10 kilometers (6 miles) away from its operator; he also is developing a larger model to carry a 20-millimeter cannon. Hnatok said he hopes to save lives by replacing as many frontline soldiers with machines as possible.
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Simulated Molecular Bouncer Tracks Protein Movement Across Nuclear Membrane
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign News Bureau
Kyle Shelton
July 13, 2023
Physicists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) have gained insights into how proteins pass through cells' nuclear membranes by computer-modeling the nuclear pore complex (NPC) standing guard against unwanted biomolecules. The researchers used the ARBD program to produce coarse-grained molecular dynamic simulations that modeled the NPC's nucleoporin mesh. UIUC's Han-Yi Chou facilitated a void analysis to find the biophysical underpinnings for why large proteins are less likely to find a free path to cross the membrane. Explained UIUC's David Winogradoff, "We believe that what we've shown in our NPC model is going to be a generalizable property to any mesh consisting of disordered proteins."
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Linux Hits All-Time High of 3% of Desktop PC Share After 30 Years
Tom's Hardware
Anton Shilov
July 12, 2023
StatCounter data showed that Linux's share of the desktop PC OS market has risen to 3.08%, up from 1.64% in 2018, the highest level in its three decades on the market. Windows accounts for 68.15% of the PC OS market, followed by MacOS at 21.38% and Chrome at 4.15%. Windows' market share has fallen from about 82% in 2018, while MacOS is up from 12.33% over the same period. In contrast to its small portion of the PC OS market, Linux dominates the markets for servers, supercomputers, edge systems, Internet of Things devices, and embedded PCs.
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Europe Looks to Virtual Factories in New Industrial Revolution
Horizon: The EU Research & Innovation Magazine (Belgium)
Helen Massy-Beresford
July 13, 2023
The European Union (EU) is funding the Digital Intelligent MOdular FACtories (DIMOFAC) project to advance the concept of virtual factories or digital twins throughout Europe. The project aims to tap technologies like cloud computing, artificial intelligence, robotics, and blockchain to simulate manufacturing processes and pinpoint areas of factories for improvement. Its "Plug and Produce" system connects real machines with their digital twins by rendering reconfigured production lines more easily. Consumer electronics company Philips' electric shaver factory in the Dutch town of Drachten is one of five EU facilities that will test DIMOFAC's digital-twin system next year.
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Using AI to Save Species from Extinction Cascades
Flinders University (Australia)
Yaz Dedovic
July 12, 2023
A machine learning algorithm developed by researchers at Australia's Flinders University can predict which animals are likely to become extinct based on species interactions. Predicting which species a predator is most likely to eat could help prevent co-extinctions, in which a predator goes extinct due to the loss of prey, or extinctions in naïve native prey due to new invasive predators. Using information on which species naturally interact (or don't) and their traits, the algorithm can predict which species on a list will interact, and how. The researchers found the algorithm was accurate in predicting bird and mammal predator-prey interactions.
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App Helps Identify Autism in Children
University of Reading (U.K.)
July 14, 2023
Researchers from India, the U.K., and the U.S. tested an inexpensive application designed to identify autism and related neurodevelopmental disorders in children on 131 two- to seven-year-olds in low-resource neighborhoods in Delhi. The Screening Tools for Autism Risk using Technology (START) app quantified the children's social preferences, sensory interests, and motor skills as they engaged in simple games, questions, images, and activities on a tablet. The app found children with neurodevelopmental conditions tended to look at geometric patterns rather than social scenes, found predictable and repetitive sensory stimuli intriguing, and encountered more difficulty completing precise manual tasks. The researchers said START identified children with neurodevelopmental disorders and those with autism with 86% and 78% accuracy, respectively.
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Robot Team on Lunar Exploration Tour
ETH Zurich (Switzerland)
Fabio Bergamin
July 12, 2023
A Swiss team led by researchers at ETH Zurich has proposed sending teams of complementary robots on exploratory Moon missions instead of a single rover. The researchers tested three ANYmal robots outfitted with measuring and analysis instruments on various terrains. Two of the robots were used as specialists, with one programmed to handle terrain mapping and geological classification and the other equipped with a Raman spectrometer and a microscopy camera to identify rocks with precision. The third robot was used as a generalist. ETH's Philip Arm said, "Using multiple robots has two advantages. The individual robots can take on specialized tasks and perform them simultaneously. Moreover, thanks to its redundancy, a robot team is able to compensate for a teammate's failure."
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Record-Breaking Number of Qubits Entangled in a Quantum Computer
New Scientist
Karmela Padavic-Callaghan
July 12, 2023
Researchers in China entangled a record-breaking 51 superconducting quantum bits (qubits) in a quantum computer, entangling not just each pair but also every qubit with every other. The researchers used microwaves to manipulate the qubits' state in the Zuchongzhi quantum computing system, bombarding them with magnetic pulses to tune their interactions. They applied quantum logic gates to qubit pairs concurrently, entangling 51 qubits arrayed in a line and 30 qubits in a two-dimensional plane. The University of Science and Technology of China's Xiao-bo Zhu said, "We had to develop a new method for witnessing entanglement. This involved a clever choice of a minimal set of measurements that gathered enough information to characterize what the qubits were doing without taking too much time or computational resources."
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