Welcome to the October 6, 2023, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
Please note: In observance of Indigenous Peoples’ Day/Columbus Day, ACM TechNews will not be published on Monday, Oct. 9. Publication will resume Wednesday, Oct. 11.
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Keshav Pingali to Receive ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award
ACM
October 4, 2023
ACM and IEEE Computer Society have named the University of Texas at Austin's Keshav Pingali to receive the 2023 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award for contributions to high-performance parallel computing involving irregular algorithms. Pingali also has contributed to programming languages, compilers, and runtime systems for multicore, manycore, and distributed computers. The award acknowledges Pingali's "operator formulation of algorithms," a simple programming and execution model that can capture parallelism patterns in regular and irregular algorithms. This model is deployed by the Galois system, and its applications range from real-time intrusion detection in computer networks to parallel tools for asynchronous circuit design to drug discovery-focused machine learning on graphs. The award also recognizes Pingali's mentoring of computer science leaders and students.
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3D Printing Method Shows Promise for Repairing Brain Injuries
University of Oxford (U.K.)
October 4, 2023
Scientists at the U.K.'s University of Oxford three-dimensionally (3D)-printed human neural cells to emulate the cerebral cortex's architecture. The researchers differentiated human induced pluripotent stem cells into neural progenitor cells to form two distinct layers, then suspended them in solution to produce "bioinks" for printing into two-layered brain tissue. The 3D-printed tissues exhibited strong integration when implanted into mouse brain slices; their signaling activity corresponded with that of the host cells. Said Oxford's Linna Zhou, "Our droplet printing technique provides a means to engineer living 3D tissues with desired architectures, which brings us closer to the creation of personalized implantation treatments for brain injury."
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Atomic-Resolution Microscope Used to Make a Quantum Computer
Nature
Davide Castelvecchi
October 5, 2023
Physicists at South Korea's Institute for Basic Science and IBM Research used individual titanium atoms sitting on a surface to conduct quantum calculations. The researchers scattered the atoms on a magnesium oxide surface, then charted their positions with an atomic-resolution scanning tunnelling microscope (STM). They configured three atoms into a triangle by controlling the spins of single electrons via microwaves beamed from the STM's tip. The researchers also tuned the microwaves' frequencies to induce interaction between the atomic spins, arranging and reading out the results of a two-quantum-bit operation that lasted nanoseconds. Andreas Heinrich at the Institute for Basic Science said it will be fairly straightforward to extend the technique to perhaps 100 qubits, although It might be difficult to push much beyond that.
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An Exabyte of Disk Storage at CERN
CERN (Switzerland)
Tim Smith
September 29, 2023
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland has exceeded the 1-exabyte threshold, amassing 1 million terabytes (TB) of disk space. A total 111,000 devices, mostly hard drives and a growing number of flash drives, provide this data capacity. CERN's Andreas Peters said, "We reached this new all-time record for CERN's storage infrastructure after capacity extensions for the upcoming LHC [Large Hadron Collider] heavy-ion run," with the combined data store's reading rate passing the 1 TB/second mark. This achievement "sets new standards for high-performance storage systems in scientific research for future LHC runs," added CERN's Joachim Mnich.
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Men Took Over Job Fair Intended for Women, Nonbinary Tech Workers
NPR
Emily Olson
October 5, 2023
Men crowded this year's Grace Hopper Celebration technology job fair for female and nonbinary tech professionals. Organizers said space at the career expo in Orlando, FL, was even more limited by an increase in participation by self-identifying males. Cullen White with expo organizing-nonprofit AnitaB.org said some men made false assertions about their gender identity on their conference registrations. AnitaB.org president Bo Young Lee said shifting demographics from industry layoffs and the persistent gender imbalance among science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) occupations has undermined the conference's supportive atmosphere. Women were disproportionately affected by recent job cuts, making up 69.2% of all tech layoffs this year according to The Women Tech Network; they hold just 26% of jobs across all STEM occupations and just 24% in computer fields, according to the latest available data from the U.S. Department of Labor.
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Finger-Shaped Sensor Enables More Dexterous Robots
MIT News
Adam Zewe
October 4, 2023
A finger-shaped camera-based touch sensor developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers extends high-resolution tactile sensing beyond a robot's fingertips. The GelSight Svelte sensor features two mirrors that give the camera in the base of the sensor a view of the entire length of the finger by reflecting and refracting light. A three-fingered robotic hand built with the sensors can use the entire sensing area of its fingers to grasp a heavy object and can perform lateral pinching grasps and a power grasp using the entire sensing area. The sensor's flexible backbone can measure the force being placed on it, and a three-dimensional depth image of the object can be generated using color saturation data from red and green LED arrays on the backbone that measure deformation during grasping.
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Amazon Used Secret 'Project Nessie' Algorithm to Raise Prices
The Wall Street Journal
Dana Mattioli
October 3, 2023
Redacted portions of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's monopoly lawsuit against Amazon indicate the e-commerce giant used a secret algorithm called "Project Nessie" to raise prices. Sources said Nessie helped Amazon profit more on items across shopping categories, using its influence so competitors would also hike their prices. Nessie automatically reinstated an item's normal price point in cases where rivals did not elevate prices to Amazon's level. One source said the algorithm helped Amazon produce more than $1 billion in revenue. An Amazon spokesman said the company initiated Project Nessie "to try to stop our price matching from resulting in unusual outcomes where prices became so low that they were unsustainable," and scrapped the algorithm several years ago because it "didn't work as intended."
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ML Used to Probe Building Blocks of Shapes
Imperial College London (U.K.)
Hayley Dunning
October 4, 2023
Researchers suggest using machine learning (ML) to explore "atomic shapes" could potentially transform mathematical discovery. Mathematicians from the U.K.'s Imperial College London and University of Nottingham applied ML to uncover unexpected patterns in the building blocks of shapes known as Fano varieties. They trained an ML model on example data to produce a model that could forecast the dimensions of Fano varieties from quantum periods with 99% accuracy. The researchers then applied the model using more traditional mathematical techniques to demonstrate that the quantum period defines the dimension. They also think the mathematical datasets could help polish ML models.
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Quantum Image Generator No Match for Those on Ordinary Computers
New Scientist
Alex Wilkins
October 3, 2023
The MosaiQ quantum generative adversarial network (GAN) created by researchers at Northeastern and Rice universities can reliably produce identifiable images with inherent scalability. MosaiQ integrates a quantum image generator with a classical discriminator, and can outperform classical GANs, said Northeastern's Devesh Tiwari. Rice's Tirthak Patel said, "All the pixels are related to each other, in terms of their positioning and what color they have, or in this case what sort of amplitude or intensity they have. These pixel relationships can be better emulated using these higher-dimensional quantum networks." The researchers ran MosaiQ on IBM's seven-quantum-bit Jakarta quantum computer for two distinct datasets of black and white images; MosaiQ-produced images were not easily differentiated from the original dataset.
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Drones Help Farmers Optimize Vegetable Yields
University of Tokyo (Japan)
October 4, 2023
Researchers at the University of Tokyo (UTokyo) and Chiba University in Japan have demonstrated that artificial intelligence (AI)-powered drones can help farmers maximize crop yields. The researchers used low-cost drones with specialized software to scan a field of broccoli and accurately predict the plants' anticipated growth traits. Training the system required the researchers to label various characteristics of plant images the drones might encounter. UTokyo's Wei Guo said, "With our system, drones identify and catalog every plant in the field, and their imaging data feeds a model that uses deep learning to produce easy-to-understand visual data for farmers."
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Morphing Robots Can Grip, Climb, Crawl Like Insects
Colorado State University
Josh Rhoten
October 2, 2023
Three robotic systems developed by Colorado State University (CSU) researchers can adapt their shapes to better navigate tough terrain. The robots include a gripper that can adjust its shape to improve its grasp, a quadruped that can flatten itself to enter small openings and grip ledges, and an untethered robot that can transition between walking and swimming. The robots respond to temperature changes by becoming softer or more rigid. The robots can change shape on demand and reverse the process as necessary. Said CSU's Jianguo Zhao, "This approach offers a promising path towards developing robots that can navigate and work in difficult environments."
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Avatars to Help Tailor Glioblastoma Therapies
Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine (Germany)
October 4, 2023
A screening platform developed by researchers at Germany's Max Delbrück Center and Belgium's Vlaams Instituut voor Biotechnologie (VIB) and KU Leuven could help formulate glioblastoma therapies using zebrafish avatars. VIB's Lise Finotto created xenograft models by injecting glioblastoma stem cells from patients into zebrafish embryos, monitoring how the tumors suppressed the immune response "to learn how to revert the macrophages to a tumor-attacking state." The researchers learned tumors in the zebrafish avatars became less invasive when the LGALS1 gene was removed, and Max Delbrück's Holger Gerhardt said the avatars could be refined to determine effective drug treatments.
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Birders, AI Push Bird Conservation to the Next Level
Cornell University Lab of Ornithology
October 4, 2023
A computational tool developed by Cornell University researchers leverages big data, artificial intelligence, and advancements in graphics processing units to model the full annual life cycles and migration patterns of entire ecological communities at continental scales. The researchers combined data on 500 North American bird species from more than 9 million sightings reported to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's eBird program with data on 72 environmental variables like topography and land cover. This allowed them to estimate the distribution of species, the environments where they typically can be found, and interactions among them. Cornell Lab's Courtney Davis said, "This information vastly improves our understanding of natural and human factors that can contribute to species declines."
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