Welcome to the November 27, 2023 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
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Wireless in the Blood
EPFL News
Tanya Petersen
November 22, 2023
The Molecular Multiple Access (MoMA) protocol, developed by a global team of researchers, enables a molecular network with multiple transmitters, with potential implications for biological computing machines, such as micro- and nano-implants that can collect data inside the human body. MoMA includes packet detection, channel estimation, and encoding/decoding schemes that leverage the unique properties of molecular networks to address existing challenges. The researchers evaluated the protocol on emulated blood vessels with tubes and pumps, demonstrating that it can scale up to four transmitters while significantly outperforming state-of-the-art technology. "It’s an incredible idea that we can send data by encoding it into molecules, which then go through the bloodstream and we can communicate with them, guiding them on where to go and when to release their treatments, just like hormones,” said Haitham Al Hassanieh, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.
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U.K. Plans Big Boost to AI and Quantum Research Spending
Financial Times
Clive Cookson
November 22, 2023
Artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum research were at the core of science and technology announcements in U.K. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s Autumn Statement. The government will boost spending on computing power to develop AI by £500 million over two years, bringing the total planned investment to more than £1.5 billion. The government also revealed five “moonshot missions” for its £2.5 billion national quantum strategy, including the development of U.K.-based quantum computers capable of running 1 trillion operations without making any errors. It also aims to deploy “the world’s most advanced quantum network at scale, pioneering the future quantum Internet."
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Researchers Break New MacBook Pro Weeks after Release
Georgia Tech Research
November 20, 2023
Georgia Institute of Technology Ph.D. student Jason Kim successfully evaded security measures on Apple’s latest MacBook Pro to capture his fictional target’s Facebook password and second-factor authentication text. The demonstration, coming only weeks after the new MacBook's release, showed how the recently discovered iLeakage side-channel exploit is still a threat to Apple devices. First co-discovered by Kim, the vulnerability affects products made by Apple since 2020. It allows attackers to see what’s happening on their target’s Safari browser. “A remote attacker can deploy iLeakage by hosting a malicious webpage they control, and a target just needs to visit that webpage,”explained Kim. “Because Safari does not properly isolate webpages from different origins, the attacker's webpage is able to coerce Safari to put the target webpage in the same address space. The attacker can use speculative execution to subsequently read arbitrary secrets from the target page.” The team disclosed its findings to Apple, which has since issued a fix.
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Computer Model of the Ear May Help Improve Cochlear Implants
IOCB Prague
November 22, 2023
A complete computer model of the ear will allow experts to learn more about the detailed mechanisms of various forms of hearing impairment and may open ways to improving hearing aids and cochlear implants. Developed by Pavel Jungwirth and colleagues from the Institute of Organic Chemistry and Biochemistry of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Austria-based cochlear implant company MED-EL the computer model makes it possible to obtain data that is difficult to acquire experimentally. It maps in detail how sound is being converted into mechanical vibrations in the middle and inner ear. It also simulates how these vibrations trigger electrical signals in outer and inner hair cells in the cochlea and how these signals get transformed through the action of neurotransmitters into electrical impulses in the cochlear nerve.
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Construction Robot Builds Stone Walls on Its Own
New Scientist
Jeremy Hsu
November 22, 2023
An autonomous robot with a large gripper developed by researchers at ETH Zürich in Switzerland autonomously built a 6m (H) x 65m (L) stone wall in a public park. The robot is equipped with LiDAR, enabling it to create its own three-dimensional map of a construction site. AI models were developed to help the robot figure out the best way to grasp and place individual stones. Once the robot knows the location of each large stone based on the digital map, it grasps the rock, digitally scans it, and determines its weight to compute how it may fit into the eventual wall. The robot can place one stone building block every 12 minutes, still 10% slower than experienced human machine operators, but manual construction requires additional workers to put down visual markers such as paint and string to guide for operators.
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Fluorescent Artificial Seed Monitors Soil Temperature by Using Drones
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia
November 22, 2023
The Acer I-Seed is an environmentally friendly, soft robotic seed that can be spread over large areas via drone and to monitor soil temperatures. Developed by researchers at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) and Germany's Leibniz Institute for New Materials the Acer I-Seed is three-dimensionally printed using biocompatible and compostable material and contains non-toxic, temperature-sensitive fluorescent lanthanide particles. It mimics the aerodynamic behavior of the luminescent, winged Acer campestre seed, which rotates like a helicopter blade as it is dispersed by the wind. I-Seeds hold potential for deployment by drones equipped with fluorescence LiDAR, enabling remote and distributed monitoring of soil temperature and other parameters. Researchers already tested drone release of the I-Seed, demonstrating its feasibility.
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Researchers Develop Automatic Text Recognition for Ancient Cuneiform Tablets
Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg
November 20, 2023
Software that can decipher difficult-to-read texts on cuneiform tablets has been developed by a team of researchers at Germany's Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU), Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, and Mainz University of Applied Sciences. Researchers used three-dimensional models of nearly 2,000 cuneiform tablets to develop an AI system that works along the same lines as optical character recognition (OCR) software, converting images of writing and text into machine-readable text. "OCR usually works with photographs or scans. This is no problem for ink on paper or parchment. In the case of cuneiform tablets, however, things are more difficult because the light and the viewing angle greatly influence how well certain characters can be identified," explained MLU's Ernst Stötzner.
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As AI-Controlled Killer Drones Become Reality, Nations Debate Limits
The New York Times
Eric Lipton
November 21, 2023
The U.S. and China are among the nations making swift progress in developing and deploying drones equipped with AI that can hunt and kill targets without human input. Although concerns about AI-controlled autonomous weapons have prompted proposals at the U.N. to govern their use, observers do not expect any legally binding mandates to be issued in the near future. Rapid advances in AI and the intense use of drones in wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have combined to make the issue more urgent. The jamming of radio communications and GPS in war zones is accelerating the shift, as autonomous drones can operate even when communications are cut off.
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Search Algorithm Reveals Nearly 200 New Kinds of CRISPR Systems
MIT News
Allessandra DiCorato
November 23, 2023
A search algorithm has identified 188 kinds of new rare clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) systems in bacterial genomes. The algorithm was developed by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard University, and the National Institutes of Health. CRISPR is a bacterial defense system engineered into tools for genome editing and diagnostics. The team used their Fast Locality-Sensitive Hashing-based clustering (FLSHclust) algorithm to mine three major public databases that contain data from a wide range of unusual bacteria. The algorithm uses big-data clustering approaches to rapidly search huge amounts of genomic data. “This new algorithm allows us to parse through data in a time frame that’s short enough that we can actually recover results and make biological hypotheses," said Harvard's Soumya Kannan.
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Protecting Critical Infrastructure from Cyber Attacks
RMIT University
November 22, 2023
A mathematical breakthrough by researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology and tech startup Tide Foundation in Australia allows system access authority to be spread invisibly and securely across a network. Dubbed "ineffable cryptograph," the technology has been incorporated into a prototype access-control system specifically for critical infrastructure management, known as KeyleSSH, and successfully tested with multiple companies. It works by generating and operating keys across a decentralized network of servers, each operated by independent organizations. Each server in the network can only hold part of a key—no one can see the full keys, all the processes they are partially actioning, or the assets they are unlocking.
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Mapping Soundscapes Everywhere
The Source
Shawn Ballard
November 21, 2023
Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis (WUSTL) developed a framework for soundscape mapping that can be applied anywhere in the world. The Geography-Aware Contrastive Language Audio Pre-training (GeoCLAP) framework incorporates geotagged audio, textual description, and overhead images, allowing users to create probable soundscapes from either textual or audio queries for any geographic location. “Our approach overcomes the limitations of previous soundscape mapping methods that were rule-based, often missing important sound sources, or relied on direct human observations, which are difficult to obtain in sufficient quantities away from popular tourist destinations," said WUSTL's Nathan Jacobs.
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A Stronger Core for Better Plant Breeding
The University of Adelaide
Johnny von Einem
November 21, 2023
A software tool with enhanced genome-sequencing powers was developed by researchers at the University of Adelaide (UofA) in Adelaide, Australia. The CoreDetector tool was created to efficiently handle more computationally challenging genome-sequencing tasks, such as aligning large and evolutionary diverse genomes of plants. The software is Java-based and easily transportable between operating systems. “There are few tools which have the functionality to handle large and evolutionary diverse genomes, but CoreDetector harnesses the power of computational parallelization to undertake the cumbersome task of pairwise sequence alignment between population member genomes,” said UofA's Julian Taylor. CoreDetector’s underlying research is freely available on GitHub.
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