Welcome to the November 10, 2023, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
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Holocaust Survivor Recalls 'Night of Broken Glass' in Interactive VR Project
Associated Press
Kirsten Grieshaber
November 9, 2023
November 9 marked the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), when the Nazis burned more than 1,400 synagogues, vandalized 7,500 Jewish businesses, and killed at least 91 people across Germany and Austria. Charlotte Knobloch, president of the Jewish Community of Munich and Upper Bavaria in Germany, partnered with the New York-based Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany (Claims Conference) on an interactive virtual reality (VR) experience to ensure those atrocities are not forgotten. Said Claims Conference President Gideon Taylor, "This important collaboration provides a new lens to Holocaust education by providing an immersive experience that will help users, including future generations, understand the Holocaust from inside the historical moments in a way that has never been possible."
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Finding Answers (About the Best Way to Find Answers)
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Julia Cohen
November 6, 2023
Computer scientists at the University of Southern California (USC) considered which knowledge graph (KG) representations are best for different applications. The researchers focused on the performance of four types of KG representations across three use-cases: exploring knowledge, writing queries, and building machine learning models. Said USC's Jay Pujara, "Basically, there was not a clear winner. This is not a situation where you can say a certain type of representation is always best for a certain type of task." However, they found that one type of representation, Qualifiers, works well in all scenarios. This method assigns information to the edges connecting the entities to present additional facts. Pujara noted, "There's still a case where each of these proposed representations might have some benefit."
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Algorithms Are Deciding Who Gets Organ Transplants. Are Their Decisions Fair?
Financial Times
Madhumita Murgia
November 9, 2023
The National Liver Offering Scheme was rolled out in the U.K. in 2018 to match livers with patients waiting for transplants based on their Transplant Benefit Score. However, concerns have been raised by some transplant patients and medical professionals due to a lack of understanding of how the algorithm works and the absence of an appeals process. Although the goal is to make transplant decisions fairer, an analysis by the Liver Advisory Group to the U.K. National Health Service found that patients aged 26 to 39 were waiting longer than they had before the algorithm, and longer than patients over 60. University of Cambridge's David Spiegelhalter said, "A range of subtle statistical issues appear to have unintentionally biased the algorithm against certain classes of patients."
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Cutting-Edge Approach to Tackling Pollution
University of Houston News
Rashda Khan
November 6, 2023
University of Houston (UH) researchers developed a computational approach to identifying pollution sources in Houston with greater accuracy. The researchers used multi-year volatile organic compound measurements data from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality’s environmental monitoring stations. They integrated the Positive Matrix Factorization model with the SHAP machine learning (ML) algorithm, which helps explain why ML models make certain decisions while also making the data more understandable. Their analysis revealed that in industrial areas, Houston’s oil and gas industry had the highest impact on emissions, while shortwave radiation and relative humidity were the two most important influencing factors for overall ozone concentration.
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Singapore’s Coding Community Fastest Growing in Asia-Pacific
The Straits Times (Singapore)
Krist Boo
November 9, 2023
About one in six of Singapore's 5.9 million inhabitants plays a part in computer coding, an analysis of unique GitHub users logging in from Singapore shows, the highest ratio in the world and a 400% increase from 2019. The island-nation's coding community is the fastest growing in Asia-Pacific, increasing by 39% in the 12 months to September and outpacing even India, which is expected to overtake the U.S. as the country with the largest community of software creators by 2027. There are an estimated 200,000 software developers in Singapore, but GitHub’s data includes members who may not write code but rather add to the analytics, design, or deployment of coding. Said GitHub’s Sharryn Napier, “In my experience, Singapore has always punched above its weight, particularly in the technology sector."
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Smartphone Application Increases Safety in Liver Surgery
Medical University of Vienna (Austria)
November 2, 2023
An international team of researchers led by Patrick Starlinger at Austria's Medical University of Vienna developed a smartphone application that provides a personalized risk score for patients undergoing liver surgery. The researchers based the multivariable model on basic patient traits and the aspartate aminotransferase-to-platelet ratio index + albumin-bilirubin grade preoperative score. The less-invasive model can predict liver failure at a level equivalent or superior to established liver function tests much faster and at a fraction of the cost. Starlinger said the free smartphone app "allows us to calculate our score and thus individualize the risk assessment of patients before liver resection. This sets a new standard in preoperative risk assessment and will significantly increase the safety of liver surgery for our patients."
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High-Speed Logistics Robots Steal Humanoids' Thunder
New Atlas
Loz Blain
October 30, 2023
Germany's Fraunhofer Institute has developed logistics robots that may outperform humanoid machines. The self-balancing two-wheeled evoBOT can walk up to 60 kilometers/hour (37 mph) and lift up to 65 kilograms (143 lbs.), faster than humanoid robots and demonstrating greater strength/lifting capacity. The evoBOT also can carry up to 100 kilograms (220 lbs.) when loaded by someone else and can position objects with precision and operate for up to eight hours on a single battery charge. The institute's O3dyn robot is an automated pallet jack that uses light detection and ranging (LiDAR), global positioning systems (GPS), and three-dimensional camera systems for navigation, complemented by omnidirectional wheels and 1,300-kilogram (2,866-lb.) maximum load capacity.
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Processor Made for AI Speeds Genome Assembly
Cornell Chronicle
Patricia Waldron
November 1, 2023
Cornell University researchers demonstrated that a hardware accelerator developed for artificial intelligence operations can increase the speed of genome assembly. The researchers used existing DNA and protein sequence data to test an intelligence processing unit's (IPU) ability to align protein and DNA molecules. In assembling sequences from the model organisms E. coli and C. elegans, the IPU was 10 times faster than a graphics processing unit (GPU) and 4.65 times faster than a supercomputer's central processing unit (CPU). To reduce the amount of data transferred from the CPU and eliminate bottlenecks, the researchers reduced the memory footprint of the X-Drop sequence alignment algorithm by 55 times. Cornell's Giulia Guidi said, "You can exploit the IPU high memory bandwidth, which allows you to make the whole processing faster," adding that "the IPU may become the next GPU."
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Russian Spies Behind Cyber Attack on Ukraine Power Grid in 2022, Say Researchers
Reuters
James Pearson
November 9, 2023
Russian cyber spies were behind a hack that disrupted part of Ukraine's power grid in late 2022, U.S. cybersecurity firm Mandiant, part of Google, said in a report, a rare instance of a successful hack against industrial control systems. A hacking group known as “Sandworm,” previously identified as a cyberwarfare unit of Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency, was able to cause a power cut in an unidentified area of Ukraine by tripping circuit breakers at an electrical substation. The group then deployed data-wiping malware in a bid to cover its tracks, the report stated. Sandworm gained attention in 2015 after a separate cyberattack against Ukraine’s power grid. “There have only been a handful of incidents similar to this, with the majority carried out by Sandworm,” Mandiant analyst Nathan Brubaker said.
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Low-Cost Error Compensation for Fabrication of High-Precision Microstructures
SPIE
November 6, 2023
At Germany's Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg (H-BRS) University of Applied Sciences, researchers have developed a simplified, low-cost method for addressing tilt and curvature errors in two-photon polymerization printing of optical microstructures. After printing an optical microstructure without accounting for errors, the researchers illuminated it with a laser to identify the impact of imperfections on the resulting image, then reconstructed the errors using an algorithm that would compensate for them in future printings. The researchers found their method reduced noise in tests on microstructures with deliberate errors when images of the uncompensated and compensated prints were compared.
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Big Data on Plants Can Predict Their Impact on Climate Change
The Jerusalem Post (Israel)
Judy Siegel-Itzkovich
November 8, 2023
An international database created by researchers at Israel's Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University was used to study the lifecycles of perennial and annual plants on a global scale and to assess the impact of human disturbance on annuals. The database contains data on the lifecycles of around 235,000, or 67%, of known species from the last eight decades from a variety of global sources. Using empirical tools and big data, the researchers observed that annuals are more common in areas with high temperature/low rainfall summers. Further, they found annuals accounted for just 6% of global vegetation, compared with the scientific community's accepted estimate of 12%. Among other things, they predicted annuals will benefit more from climate change, rising in around 70% of regions worldwide. However, the researchers added, annuals are not as efficient in lowering carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere as perennials.
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ML Gives Users 'Superhuman' Ability to Open, Control Tools in VR
University of Cambridge (U.K.)
November 8, 2023
A virtual reality (VR) application developed by researchers at the U.K.'s University of Cambridge can open and control three-dimensional (3D) modeling tools with the user's hand movements. The machine learning (ML)-based application, HotGestures, eliminates the need for users to interact with a menu while building VR figures and shapes. The researchers developed a neural network that can recognize 10 gestures for building 3D models: pen, cube, cylinder, sphere, palette, spray, cut, scale, duplicate, and delete. Users can open the scissor tool by making a cutting motion, for instance, and there is no need to pause their work when switching between tools. Said Cambridge's Per Ola Kristensson, "We all communicate using our hands in the real world, so it made sense to extend this form of communication to the virtual world."
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Robot Mimics a 450-Million-Year-Old Extinct Marine Organism
Interesting Engineering
Amal Jos Chacko
November 7, 2023
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers have developed a new approach to robotics that uses insights from extinct organisms to create soft robots. In collaboration with paleontologists from Spain and Poland, the researchers have introduced the field of Paleobionics with a robot that mimics the marine organism pleurocystitid, which lived around 450 million years ago. The robot mimics the pleurocystitid's flexible columnar structure using computational simulations, soft robotics, and three-dimensionally printed elements. Said CMU's Carmel Majidi, "A lot of fundamental principles of biology and nature can only fully be explained if we look back at the evolutionary timeline of how animals evolved. We are building robot analogues to study how locomotion has changed."
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