Welcome to the December 6, 2023 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
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Experts Warn of ‘Serious Threats’ from Election Equipment Software Breaches
Associated Press
Christina A. Cassidy
December 5, 2023
A letter sent Monday by nearly two dozen computer scientists, election security experts, and voter advocacy organizations to federal authorities called for a federal probe and a risk assessment of voting machines used throughout the U.S., saying software breaches have “urgent implications for the 2024 election and beyond.” According to the letter, the breaches involved efforts to access voting system software in several states and provide it to allies of former President Donald Trump as they sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The letter stressed that possession of voting system software could enable people to practice how to meddle in the 2024 election, allowing them to identify vulnerabilities and test potential attacks.
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Wearable Communication System Could Reduce Digital Health Divide
The University of Arizona News
Katy Smith
December 4, 2023
University of Arizona (UA) researchers developed a wearable monitoring system that can send health data up to 15 miles without major infrastructure. Most wearable devices currently use the Internet to transmit patient data to clinicians for aggregation and investigation, leaving individuals in remote or resource-constrained environments underserved. The UA system uses a low-power wide area network, or LPWAN, that can send data 2,400 times the distance that Wi-Fi can, and 533 times that of Bluetooth. The researchers also developed circuitry and an antenna that seamlessly integrates into the wearable, and said it can be three-dimensionally printed to provide a customized fit to individual users.
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AI's Future Could Be 'Open Source' or Closed. Tech Giants Are Divided
The Washington Post
Matt O'Brien
December 5, 2023
Meta and IBM have launched the AI Alliance, which is calling for an "open science" approach to the development of artificial intelligence (AI). The alliance also includes Dell, Sony, AMD, Intel, and a number of universities and AI startups. On the other side of the open vs. closed debate is Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI. There are differing definitions for open source AI, but IBM's Darío Gil said the AI Alliance is "coming together to articulate, simply put, that the future of AI is going to be built fundamentally on top of the open scientific exchange of ideas and on open innovation, including open source and open technologies." Those against open source AI argue there are safety risks to making AI systems publicly available, especially given the lack of guardrails currently in place.
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Survey Shows Efforts to Close Gender Interest Gap in STEM Must Be Stepped Up
CNN
Athena Jones
December 5, 2023
A survey by Gallup and the Walton Family Foundation found Gen Z girls, born between 1997 and 2011, significantly lag behind Gen Z boys in the level of interest they express in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) subjects. When members of Gen Z were asked about their interest in STEM occupations, 63% of female respondents said they were very or somewhat interested in at least one area, compared to 85% of males. Women remain underrepresented in fast-growing sectors like computer science, according to Gallup. The largest gender gap the survey revealed was when Gen Zers were asked if they had an interest in careers in engineering and computers/technology; males were seen to be 28% more likely than females to express an interest in each of those fields.
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Network of Robots Monitors Pipes Using Acoustic Wave Sensors
University of Bristol News (U.K.)
November 29, 2023
Researchers at the U.K.'s University of Bristol showed that guided acoustic wave sensors can enable networks of independent robots to inspect large pipe structures for defects. Each of the robots used to inspect the 3-meter-long steel pipe was equipped with omnidirectional guided acoustic wave transducers, which can send and receive guided acoustic waves. The inspection was aimed at defect detection and localization. The approach aims to reduce data transfer and overall inspection costs by minimizing communication between robots, eliminating the need for synchronization, and potentially enabling on-board processing.
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3D Printing Breakthrough Could Enable Access to Personalized Prosthetic Devices Anywhere
Loughborough University (U.K.)
November 29, 2023
A three-dimensional (3D) printing process developed by researchers at the U.K.'s Loughborough University could allow for the production of lower-limb prosthetic sockets outside hospital settings in as little as eight hours. Currently, the process takes three to six weeks and involves hospital visits and casts of the limb, with the potential for problems from an ill-fitting prosthetic. Given that the sockets wear down quickly, the process must be repeated every three to six months, and more often for children. The new process uses a 3D scan of the limb and computer-aided design software to create a personalized design profile that can be imported to a 3D printer, allowing for the socket to be produced in the user's home or other remote location. Loughborough's Simin Li said the "entire process for creating a socket is quantitative and iterative, therefore highly customizable, repeatable, and efficient."
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Color-Changing Fabric Could Reduce Clothing Waste
Reuters
Joyce Zhou
December 6, 2023
A color-changing textile embedded with a tiny camera and making use of artificial intelligence (AI) could enable wearers to change the color of their clothes with a simple gesture. The recyclable fabric developed by the Hong Kong-based Laboratory for Artificial Intelligence in Design is knitted with polymeric optical fibers and textile-based yarns, and can be illuminated in a range of different hues. A thumbs-up gesture in front of the fabric’s camera triggers the fabric to turn deep blue, while a heart sign will turn it pink, and an 'OK' gesture will turn it green. Colors can also be customized using a smartphone app, and AI algorithms help the camera distinguish the gestures of individual users.
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Measuring Long-Term Heart Stress Dynamics with Smartwatch Data
Duke Pratt School of Engineering
November 27, 2023
A “digital twins” computational framework developed by biomedical engineers at Duke University and computational scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory captures personalized arterial forces using data from wearable devices such as smartwatches to better predict risks of heart problems. The Longitudinal Hemodynamic Mapping Framework digitally duplicates a patient’s blood flow for an entire week’s worth of heartbeats to assess its three-dimensional (3D) characteristics. “Modeling a patient’s 3D blood flow for even a single day would take a century’s worth of compute time on today’s best supercomputers,” said Duke's Cyrus Tanade. “If we want to capture blood flow dynamics over long periods of time, we need a paradigm-shifting solution in how we approach 3D personalized simulations."
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IBM Releases 1,000-Qubit Quantum Chip
Nature
Davide Castelvecchi
December 4, 2023
IBM has unveiled the Condor quantum chip, which features 1,121 qubits laid out in a honeycomb pattern. The company said it will focus less on developing bigger quantum computers, and more on creating error-resistant machines. To that end, IBM also introduced the Heron chip, which boasts 133 qubits and an error rate one-third that of than its previous quantum processor. IBM plans to concentrate on developing chips that contain a few quantum low-density parity check (qLDPC) qubits in around 400 physical qubits. The qLDPC alternative error-correction approach aims to reduce by a factor of 10 or more the more than 1,000 physical qubits per logical qubit needed to perform useful quantum computations.
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A Drone with Ears
Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft (Germany)
December 1, 2023
Researchers at Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing, and Ergonomics (FKIE) developed a microphone array that can be added to drones, along with cameras, to help locate disaster victims. The array of MEMS microphones, called LUCY (Listening system Using a Crow's nest arraY), uses acoustic sensors to detect cries for help and other noises that can identify survivors and help determine their precise location. LUCY currently is equipped with 48 microphones, can detect frequencies that cannot be heard by the human ear, and uses artificial intelligence (AI) to filter out noise from rescue equipment, wind, birds, and the drone's rotors. The AI, combined with signal processing techniques, enables the system to detect and classify sounds and calculate their angle of incidence with precision. The signals are processed quickly thanks to a compact processing unit, and the location data is transmitted to rescue teams.
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Personal Information Can Be Accessed Through ChatGPT Queries
Silicon Angle
James Farrell
November 29, 2023
Google researchers demonstrated that OpenAI's ChatGPT could be used to obtain personal information, like names, email addresses, and phone numbers, provided it is given the right prompts. Although the large language models that power such chatbots are trained to weed through online data to respond to queries without replicating that information, the researchers found they could force ChatGPT to provide answers that included text from its original language modeling by repeatedly using keywords. The researchers said, "Using only $200 USD worth of queries to ChatGPT, we are able to extract over 10,000 unique verbatim memorized training examples. Our extrapolation to larger budgets suggests that dedicated adversaries could extract far more data."
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Boosting Faith in the Authenticity of Open Source Software
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Steve Nadis
November 30, 2023
A system developed by computer scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Purdue University, and Chainguard Labs aims to ensure the security and legitimacy of open source software. The Speranza system expands on the OpenID Connect-based Sigstore system, which automates and streamlines the digital signing process, by altering its basic infrastructure to provide privacy guarantees. The process involves converting a software developer's email address into a "commitment" comprised of a large pseudo-random number and generating a "co-commitment" associated with a software package created or modified by the developer. The authorized developer would publish a zero-knowledge proof that establishes a link between the commitment representing their identity and the commitment associated with the software product. MIT's Karen Sollins said Speranza "simultaneously allows [software] users to have confidence that the maintainers are, in fact, legitimate maintainers and, furthermore, that the code being downloaded is, in fact, the correct code of that maintainer."
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