Welcome to the October 16, 2023, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
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Wearables Track Parkinson’s Better Than Human Observation
The New York Times
Matt Richtel
October 15, 2023
A team led by the University of Oxford's Chrystalina Antoniades demonstrated that digital wearable devices can track the progression of Parkinson’s disease (PD) in an individual more effectively “than the conventionally used clinical rating scales.” By tracking 122 physiological metrics picked up by the devices, researchers were able to discern subtle changes in the movements of subjects with PD. Each subject wore a sensor on their chest, one at the base of their spine, and one on each wrist and foot. The sensors employed technologies such as accelerometers and gyroscopes to capture the wearers' movements. Antoniades said she was optimistic about the possibility of using such sensors to track a “plethora of diseases that bring together bioengineering, clinical science, and movement science."
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AI Just Got 100-Fold More Energy Efficient
Northwestern Now
Amanda Morris
October 12, 2023
Northwestern University engineers developed a device that can perform accurate machine-learning classification tasks using 1 percent of the energy required by current technologies. They constructed miniaturized transistors from two-dimensional molybdenum disulfide and one-dimensional carbon nanotubes, rather than silicon, making them dynamic enough to switch among various steps and eliminating the need for a single silicon transistor for each step of data processing. When tested on large amounts of data from electrocardiogram datasets, the device efficiently and correctly identified irregular heartbeats and determined the arrhythmia subtype from among six different categories with nearly 95% accuracy. Said Northwestern’s Mark C. Hersam, “Our device is so energy efficient that it can be deployed directly in wearable electronics for real-time detection and data processing, enabling more rapid intervention for health emergencies."
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Internet Companies Report Biggest-Ever Denial of Service Operation
Reuters
Raphael Satter
October 11, 2023
Technology companies last week reported the Internet's largest known denial of service (DoS) attack and are sounding the alarm over a new technique they say could easily cause widespread disruption. Google said in a blog post published Oct. 10 that its cloud services warded off rogue traffic more than seven times the size of the previous record-breaking attack thwarted last year. Internet protection company Cloudflare said the attack was "three times larger than any previous attack we've observed." Amazon's web services division confirmed being hit by "a new type of distributed DoS event." All three said the attack began in late August; Google said it was ongoing. The attacks are capable of generating hundreds of millions of requests per second. All three companies said the attacks were enabled by a weakness in the HTTP/2 network protocol that makes servers particularly vulnerable to rogue requests.
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Bringing High-Speed mmWave Networks to Any IoT Device
UCLA Samueli School of Engineering
October 12, 2023
Omid Abari, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of California, Los Angeles, and collaborators have created a simple, energy-efficient plug-and-play module to address the challenges associated with exploiting millimeter wave (mmWave) networks for Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Powering 5G and 6G networks, mmWave can address the networking demand of billions of IoT devices, but the hardware required to use mmWave is complex, expensive, and power-hungry. The mmPlug module created by Abari and his team can easily connect to the antenna port of any IoT device, enabling it to operate in the mmWave band. It is compatible with different wireless technologies and does not require any modification to the circuit, firmware, or communication protocols of the existing IoT devices.
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Robot Could Be Key to Helping People with Disabilities
IEEE Spectrum
Evan Ackerman
October 8, 2023
The Georgia Institute of Technology's Charlie Kemp and fellow roboticist Aaron Edsinger partnered to develop a simple, safe, affordable assistive robot for disabled people. The collaborators designed the Stretch robot under the aegis of their Hello Robot startup, equipping it with an arm that moves up and down and extends and retracts, with a bending wrist joint. Stretch's wheeled base avoids obstacles via sensors and a depth camera on a pan-and-tilt head at its top. Jane Evans, whose quadriplegic husband Henry developed a precursor to Stretch with Kemp and robotics firm Willow Garage, said Stretch can alleviate caregivers' burden by enabling patients to perform "mundane, repetitive tasks."
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Quantum Computer Unveils Atomic Dynamics of Light-Sensitive Molecules
National Science Foundation
October 5, 2023
U.S. National Science Foundation-funded research has yielded a new technique for observing the interaction of light-sensitive molecules with incoming photons. Duke University scientists designed the conical intersection method to constrain the molecules' phase-shifting trajectories using a quantum simulator. They used a five-ion quantum computer that manipulates vacuum-trapped charged atoms via lasers; the ions' 1-billion-times-slower quantum dynamics enabled direct measurement of the geometric phase in operation. Duke's Kenneth Brown said, "The beauty of trapped ions is that they get rid of the complicated environment and make the system clean enough to make these measurements."
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Few Open Source Projects Actively Maintained
InfoWorld
Paul Krill
October 12, 2023
The 9th Annual State of the Software Supply Chain report by supply chain management company Sonatype analyzing nearly 1.2 million open source software projects found that only about 11% were actively maintained. The figure represents an 18% decline from last year. The four primary ecosystems analyzed were JavaScript, via NPM; Java, via the Maven project management tool; Python, via the PyPI package index; and .NET, through the NuGet gallery. Some Go projects also were included. Sonatype also found that open source projects that are consistently maintained outperform counterparts on critical best practices for software security.
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Medical Imaging Fails Dark Skin. Researchers Fixed It
Johns Hopkins University Hub
Roberto Molar Candanosa
October 10, 2023
A team led by researchers at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) developed a way to produce clear images of anyone's internal anatomy, no matter their skin tone. "When you're imaging through skin with light, it's kind of like the elephant in the room that there are important biases and challenges for people with darker skin compared to those with lighter skin tones," said JHU's Muyinatu "Bisi" Bell. "Our work demonstrates that equitable imaging technology is possible." The team created an algorithm to process information from photoacoustic imaging, a method that combines ultrasound (US) and light waves to render medical images. In people with darker skin tones, melanin absorbs more of this light, which yields noisy signals for US machines. The team was able to filter the unwanted signals from images of darker skin to provide more accurate details.
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Google's Green Light Project Retimes Traffic Lights for 30% Fewer Stops
New Atlas
Loz Blain
October 11, 2023
Google's Project Green Light has partnered with 12 cities worldwide to provide artificial intelligence-based traffic signal timing recommendations on 70 different intersections that could reduce stop/starts by 30% and intersection emissions by 10%. The tool models and analyzes thousands of intersections simultaneously to develop a city-wide picture of traffic flow that can be experimented on virtually. The goal is to give as many drivers as possible a "green wave" that will reduce travel time, boost fuel efficiency, and cut emissions. Said David Atkin at Transport for Greater Manchester in the U.K., one of the 12 cities using the system, "Green Light identified opportunities where we previously had no visibility, and directed engineers to where there were potential benefits in changing signal timings."
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Dancing Delicacies: Combining Food, Tech for Interactive Dining
Monash University (Australia)
October 6, 2023
An international team of researchers induced food to "dance" across platters as part of an interactive dining project. Jialin Deng at Australia's Monash University engineered a programmable plate equipped with electrodes to manipulate food items like sauces and condiments. Deng said, "We can put solid items and watery items together, we can merge two different flavors, we can transport various things towards the plate, we can play with chemical or physical reactions like in molecular gastronomy." Monash's Florian Mueller said this technology will transform the hospitality sector through more interactive culinary applications, as well as enabling computer science students to learn through food consumption.
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Wireless, Battery-Free Electronic 'Stickers' Gauge Forces Between Touching Objects
UC San Diego Today
Liezel Labios
October 10, 2023
Electronic "stickers" developed by University of California (UC) San Diego engineers can measure the amount of force exerted by one object on another. The wireless, battery-free stickers feature a thin capacitor comprised of a polymer sheet between two conductive copper strips and a radio frequency identification (RFID) sticker. An external force applied to the sticker compresses the polymer and increases the capacitor's electric charge. The resulting changes in the signal transmitted by the RFID sticker are measured by a remote RFID reader and translated into a magnitude of applied force. The researchers tested the stickers by measuring smaller forces in a model knee joint using softer polymer and larger forces on the underside of a box using stiffer polymer. Said UC San Diego's Dinesh Bharadia, "These force stickers could make technology more intelligent, interactive, and intuitive."
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