Welcome to the October 23, 2023, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
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Biden Administration Picks 31 Regional Tech Hubs to Spur U.S. Innovation
Reuters
David Shepardson
October 23, 2023
The U.S. Commerce Department has named 31 regional technology hubs eligible to receive $500 million in federal funding to spark innovation across various industries. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said diversification is the goal, adding that current tech ecosystems like Silicon Valley "don't corner the market on great ideas." The Biden administration this month announced seven "hydrogen hubs" in 16 states will split $7 billion to turbocharge the sector by focusing on areas like artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Raimondo said the White House intends to allocate five to 10 of the 31 tech hubs up to $75 million each next year.
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Using Machine Learning to Discover the Structure of Glycoproteins
University of Waterloo Cheriton School of Computer Science (Canada)
October 19, 2023
Qianqiu Zhang and colleagues at Canada's University of Waterloo, Waterloo-based software and service provider Bioinformatics Solutions, and China's Baizhen Biotechnology developed a database search and sequencing software tool to determine the structure of glycoproteins that enable proteins to execute various functions. GlycanFinder uses mass spectrometry data to recognize and discover new glycopeptides by charting the distribution of molecules in a sample according to molecular weight, inferring the order of the peptide's amino acids and the glycan's sugar molecules. The tool discovers new glycopeptides using "a deep learning model that's trained on all the known glycan structures and on the mass spectrum of a sample to learn and then predict the glycan's structure by recurrently building a tree of glycans from the root which is attached to the peptide, to the branches and leaves," according to Zhang.
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Martin Goetz, Who Received the First Software Patent, Dies at 93
The New York Times
Richard Sandomir
October 21, 2023
Martin Goetz, recipient of the first U.S. software patent, has died at age 93. He received the patent for data-sorting software for mainframes in 1968, nearly 10 years after founding the company Applied Data Research with several partners. Goetz's daughter Karen Jacobs said he had patented his own software to prevent IBM from copying and bundling it into its mainframes. This "sorting system," as Goetz called it, is thought to have been the first software product to be sold commercially, and its patenting inspired him to become a fierce advocate for patenting software. Said the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco's Robin Feldman, "The world we live in now, with app stores and software invented in someone's garage, is a credit to Goetz's vision, his scientific innovation, and dogged persistence."
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Robotic Prosthetic Ankles Improve 'Natural' Movement, Stability
NC State University News
Matt Shipman
October 18, 2023
Researchers at North Carolina State University (NC State) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill demonstrated that nerve impulse-driven robotic prosthetic ankles enable more natural and stable movement by amputees. The researchers fitted five subjects who each had one leg amputated below the knee with a prototype robotic ankle prosthesis that responds to electromyographic signals picked up by sensors on the leg. NC State's Aaron Fleming said, "When a study participant thinks about moving the amputated limb, this sends electrical signals through the residual muscle in the lower limb. The sensors pick these signals up through the skin and translate those signals into commands for the prosthetic device."
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Low-Power Hardware Accelerator Offers Outsize Security
IEEE Spectrum
Michelle Hampson
October 20, 2023
A multi-institutional U.S. research team created RISE, which the University of Rochester's Zahra Azad described as an area- and energy-efficient hardware accelerator for performing homomorphic encryption (HE) on edge devices. The researchers integrated RISE onto a RISC-V (reduced instruction set computer) processor with the goals of sharing both encryption and decryption hardware, optimizing memory access patterns, and enhancing the chip's error-sampling capability. Azad said RISE outperformed state-of-the-art HE designs/solutions for edge devices, encrypting messages going to and from the cloud with up to 6,000 times the energy efficiency of a standard RISC-V chip.
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Unveiling the Future of High-Resolution VR Displays
SPIE
October 17, 2023
Scientists are working to improve virtual reality (VR) display technology to overcome the "screen door effect," in which low resolution causes users to see a grid-like pattern on screens. The typical 500- to 600-pixels-per-inch (PPI) resolutions of VR displays in 2017 have evolved to approximately 1,200 PPI, while the 2,117-PPI 4K VR liquid crystal display proposed by researchers at Taiwan's Innolux Technology Development Center promises to further improve image quality. Innolux's Yung-Hsun Wu said, "We are focused on enhancing pixel aperture ratios, liquid crystal efficiency, and transmittance while also proposing methods to reduce power consumption and enhance backlight efficiency."
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Brain-Wave Cap Saves Lives by Identifying Strokes
Interesting Engineering
Sejal Sharma
October 17, 2023
The StrokePointer brain-wave cap designed by researchers in the Netherlands can diagnose large vessel occlusion (LVO) stroke while patients are in an ambulance. Amsterdam University Medical Centers (UMC) researchers said the cap enables an electroencephalogram to check for an ischemic stroke, as well as measuring the extent of cerebral blood vessel blockage to determine the appropriate treatment. The researchers used StrokePointer in 12 Dutch ambulances between 2018 and 2022, with data collected from nearly 400 patients bolstering their confidence that the cap can "recognize patients with a large ischemic stroke with great accuracy." Amsterdam UMC spin-off TrainecT aims to commercialize StrokePointer, with the company website saying the cap's algorithm was trained on the world's largest pre-hospital EEG database to diagnose LVO stroke among suspected acute stroke patients, achieving more than 80% diagnostic accuracy.
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'Subway Map' of Lyme Disease Pathways Identifies Potential Treatment Targets
Tufts University
Julie Rafferty
October 19, 2023
Tufts University scientists have assembled a computational "subway map," or genome-scale metabolic model, of Lyme disease-causing bacterium Borrelia burgdorferi's molecular mechanisms, and identified two compounds that selectively target the disease's infection pathways. Although the compounds' side effects rule out Lyme treatment, laboratory testing showed they both exclusively killed Lyme bacteria in culture. Tufts' Peter Gwynne said, "We can now use this model to screen for similar compounds that don't have the same toxicity of the anticancer and asthma medications, but could potentially stop the same or another part of the Lyme disease process."
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Scientists Listen to Find Out How Wildlife Is Doing
Yahoo! News
Sara Hussein
October 17, 2023
Scientists in Germany, Ecuador, and the U.S. used bioacoustics to investigate the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for monitoring animal life in recovering habitats. The researchers used audio recorded at various sites in Ecuador's Choco region, with experts initially listening to identify birds, mammals, and amphibians. They performed an acoustic index analysis to measure biodiversity based on soundscape metrics such as noise volume and frequency, then processed 14 days of recordings through an AI-assisted computer program trained to distinguish 75 bird calls. The researchers found the algorithm could consistently detect those calls, as well as correctly quantifying biodiversity levels at each site. "Our results show that soundscape analysis is a powerful tool to monitor the recovery of faunal communities in hyperdiverse tropical forest," they said.
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Doubling Down on Known Protein Families
Berkeley Lab News Center
Allison Joy
October 11, 2023
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute (JGI) assembled the Novel Metagenome Protein Families Catalog to better understand protein functional diversity and help categorize microbial dark matter. The catalog is based on more than 26,000 microbiome datasets in the Integrated Microbial Genomes & Microbiomes (IMG/M) database. Beginning with 8 billion metagenome genes from IMG, the researchers eliminated genes with any similarity to previously known genes, then took the remaining novel genes and clustered them into families, concentrating on those with at least 100 members. They found protein family diversity in the metagenomic space was at least double that of the reference genomes. Said Georgios Pavlopoulos, now at Greece's Biomedical Sciences Research Center Alexander Fleming, “This was a massive analysis of 1.3 billion proteins with massively parallel computations."
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The Race to Save Secrets from Future Computers
The New York Times
Zach Montague
October 22, 2023
China, Russia, and the U.S. are racing to find ways to prevent future quantum computers from cracking long-supported encryption protocols and endangering national security, the financial system, and critical infrastructure. Whereas the most powerful quantum device currently uses 433 quantum bits (qubits), tens of thousands or even millions of qubits would likely be necessary to break modern encryption systems. U.S. scientists are working to develop encryption systems that not even a powerful quantum computer can decipher, with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) expected to finalize its guidance for transitioning to the new systems next year. NIST said the federal government aims to migrate as much as possible to quantum-resistant algorithms developed through international academic collaboration by 2035. Many submitted algorithms—four of which NIST recommended for wider use—are lattice-based, which promise to complicate decryption exponentially as more dimensions are added.
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Hardware Processes in Higher Dimensions
University of Oxford Department of Materials (U.K.)
October 19, 2023
A team of researchers in the U.K., Singapore, and Germany processed three-dimensional (3D) data by developing integrated photonic-electronic hardware. The researchers achieved this by enhancing their photonic matrix-vector multiplier chips with an additional parallel dimension through exploitation of multiple radio frequencies to encode the data. They used the hardware to evaluate the risk of sudden death from electrocardiograms among heart disease patients, and analyzed 100 electrocardiogram signals concurrently to identify the risk with 93.5% accuracy. The team also estimated that this method can overtake state-of-the-art electronic processors even with 6- x 6-input scaling, potentially increasing energy efficiency and compute density 100-fold.
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