Welcome to the August 23, 2023, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
ACM TechNews mobile apps are available for Android phones and tablets (click here) and for iPhones (click here) and iPads (click here).
To view "Headlines At A Glance," hit the link labeled "Click here to view this online" found at the top of the page in the html version.
The online version now has a button at the top labeled "Show Headlines."
|
|
|
Advances in Quantum Emitters Mark Progress Toward Quantum Internet
Berkeley Lab News Center
Alison Hatt
August 22, 2023
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), the University of California, Berkeley, and Spain's Universidad de Sevilla deepened knowledge about quantum emitter production by generating emitters using pulsed ion beams. The researchers harnessed the pulsed beams to produce a specific type of color center in silicon in greater numbers than they could with continuous beams. They learned the beam's intensity altered the optical properties of the emitted photons. Berkeley Lab's Thomas Schenkel explained, "The color centers we're making are candidates for becoming the backbone of a quantum Internet and a key resource for scalable quantum information processing. They could support linking quantum-computing nodes for scalable quantum computing."
|
Tool Models Wildfires in the Pacific Northwest, Beyond
University of Washington News
James Urton
August 21, 2023
A modeling tool developed by University of Washington (UW) researchers in collaboration with colleagues at the U.S. Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station and a consulting fire ecologist can simulate forest landscapes and wildfire dynamics over decades or even centuries using various wildfire management strategies. REBURN could help forest managers and policymakers assess the impact of putting out wildfires of all sizes or allowing certain blazes to return to uninhabited areas. In simulations of north-central Washington, REBURN showed that patches of recently burned areas will serve as "fences" for the next five to 15 years or more, with areas where these fences covered 35% to 50% of the forest landscape seeing fewer big, damaging wildfires.
|
Engineers Create Battery Alternative Using Cement, Carbon Black
dezeen.com
Amy Frearson
August 4, 2023
Engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University's Wyss Institute have produced a supercapacitor from cement and carbon black, a development that could potentially expedite the shift to renewable energy. The researchers said the technology could be manufactured inexpensively using "two of humanity's most ubiquitous materials." The device's energy storage capacity stems from its high internal surface area because of the chemical composition generated when adding carbon black to a concrete mixture and curing. The researchers fabricated button-sized supercapacitors to power a light-emitting diode, and are designing a 45-cubic-meter (1,589-cubic-foot) version to demonstrate the technology’s scalability.
|
VR Brings New Vision to Workplace Training
BBC News
Andrea Murad
August 20, 2023
Companies increasingly are using virtual reality (VR) technology for workplace training. Jenson8, a U.K. firm that provides VR-based training platforms, developed Apollo, a team-building exercise that allows participants to collaborate with co-workers on a Mars mission. Bank of America's Mike Wynn observed VR-based training is attractive to younger employees, who have spent years playing immersive computer games. A PricewaterhouseCoopers study found that staffers learn four times faster via VR than from in-person classroom sessions, and are 50% more focused in a VR environment. Further, VR training can be less expensive and safer than training in high-risk environments, and computers often are better able to provide honest feedback than humans.
|
Nature-Inspired Pressure Sensing Technology Aims to Transform Healthcare, Surgical Robots
National University of Singapore
August 18, 2023
An aero-elastic pressure sensor created by researchers at the National University of Singapore (NUS), that nation’s Agency for Science, Technology, and Research, and Pennsylvania State University promises greater precision and reliability across medical applications. The researchers designed the eAir sensor to mimic the lotus leaf effect, the natural phenomenon in which water-repelling structures cause water droplets to roll off a leaf's surface. The sensor contains an air layer that forms an air-liquid interface upon contact with the sensor's liquid, which compresses as outside pressure mounts. Surface treatment causes frictionless movement of the interface within the sensor, altering electrical signals to mirror added pressure accurately. Said NUS’ Benjamin Tee, “The introduction of soft and readily integrable eAir sensors … could be a game-changer” for use in surgeries.
|
Research Hack Reveals Call Security Risk in Smartphones
Texas A&M Engineering News
Nancy Luedke
August 17, 2023
A multi-institutional team of researchers developed malware to extract caller information by screening vibration data from ear speakers recorded by a smartphone's accelerometers. The researchers used two newer Android phones whose motion-sensor data is retrievable without users' consent. The models' larger speakers also provided more caller information than older models, allowing a machine learning algorithm to infer 45% to 90% of the word regions from their accelerometer data. The researchers learned their EarSpy malware could identify repeat callers with 91.6% accuracy, determine the speaker's gender with 98.6% accuracy, and identify spoken numbers from zero to nine with 56% accuracy. Texas A&M University's Ahmed Tanvir Mahdad said attackers would have to conceal EarSpy within a downloadable application to pull off the exploit.
|
Europe's Fastest Supercomputer Trains Large Language Models in Finland
Computer Weekly
Pat Brans
August 18, 2023
Finland's University of Turku is among 10 European university research labs that joined forces to develop new large language models (LLMs) in several European languages. Researchers are training GPT-like language models on LUMI (Large Unified Modern Infrastructure), Europe's fastest supercomputer, which is hosted at the CSC Data Center in Kajaani, Finland. The effort is important because LLMs need a substantial amount of text in a given language, and sufficient computing power to train the LLM with that data. CSC's Aleksi Kallio said, "Once [LLMs] are deployed, they are black boxes, virtually impossible to figure out. That's why it's important to have as much visibility as possible while the models are being built. And for that reason, Finland needs its own [LLM] trained in Finland."
|
Hailsondes Launch into Thunderstorms to Sound Them Out
IEEE Spectrum
Charles Q. Choi
August 17, 2023
Scientists at Sweden-based mobile sensor developer Sparv Embedded and the Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) developed and dispatched hailstone-shaped sensors into thunderstorms. Each spherical, 6.5-centimeter-wide "hailsonde" sensor is deployed by balloon to fly freely within storms, "collecting information on how hail grows, gets moved by winds, and falls," according to BOM's Joshua Soderholm. The hailsondes' polystyrene shells contain three-dimensionally (3D)-printed components, electronics, and a battery. Soderholm said the researchers developed the technology by 3D-scanning hailstones to learn about their evolution within storms and their radar signatures, analyzing cross-sections via computer vision to determine growth patterns, and examining hailstone shapes in the air with drones.
|
Creating Forest Inventories with Drones, AI
Leibniz Centre for Tropical Marine Research (Germany)
August 16, 2023
An international team of researchers led by Germany's Leibniz Center for Tropical Marine Research used drone imagery and artificial intelligence (AI) to identify individual trees in mangrove forests, which can help produce biological inventories of forests and estimate their carbon reserves. The researchers photographed the canopy of Colombia's Utría National Park with drones, then used photogrammetry to generate large-scale mosaics of the forest that an AI workflow classified into distinct habitat categories. They outlined individual trees of each native species and calculated the height and diameter of each one’s crown, allowing estimation of its above-ground biomass.
|
To Improve EV Batteries, Study Them on the Road
Stanford University
Mark Shwartz
August 18, 2023
A study by Stanford University researchers looked at the gap between controlled laboratory testing of electric vehicle battery management systems (BMS) and actual road experience. The researchers said BMS algorithms trained under ideal laboratory conditions do not reflect real-world conditions, such as driving and charging styles. The researchers obtained a year of BMS field data from the Volkswagen Innovation and Engineering Center, which included 3,750 hours of driving by an all-electric Audi e-tron SUV. They used the data to calculate electrical resistance in the battery pack, measure its energy and power levels, and account for seasonal weather impacts, and found that battery health improves with rising temperatures.
|
Invisible Tagging System Enhances 3D Object Tracking
MIT News
Alex Shipps
August 15, 2023
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Spain's University Carlos III engineered fluorescent tags that can be embedded in three-dimensionally (3D)-printed objects to augment tracking. The researchers believe the invisible BrightMarkers can enhance motion tracking, virtual reality (VR), and object detection. BrightMarkers' fluorescent materials allow each tag to emit light at a specific wavelength visually detectable only with infrared cameras. The researchers created BrightMarker-detecting attachments for smartphones and augmented reality (AR)/VR headsets. Said MIT's Mustafa Doga Dogan, "BrightMarkers serve as gateways to 'ubiquitous metadata' in the physical realm. This term refers to the concept of embedding metadata—descriptive information about the object's identity, origin, function, and more—directly into physical items, akin to an invisible digital signature accompanying each product."
|
Driverless Cars May Struggle to Spot Children, Dark-Skinned People
New Scientist
Matthew Sparkes
August 17, 2023
Scientists in the U.K. and China evaluated eight artificial intelligence (AI)-based pedestrian detectors used in driverless car research, and found they may have difficulty detecting children and dark-skinned people. The researchers learned the detectors' accuracy identifying adults was nearly 20% higher than it was for children, and 7.5% higher for light-skinned pedestrians versus those with dark skin. Jie Zhang at the U.K.'s King's College London said while automakers' software details are confidential, they are usually based on existing open source models, which "must also have similar issues." Carissa Véliz at the U.K.'s University of Oxford said these problems must be corrected before deploying AI systems in cars on real roads, although engineers must ensure their remedies do not intentionally harm overall safety.
|
|
