Welcome to the December 8, 2023 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
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Samet Honored with ACM SIGSPATIAL Lifetime Impact Award
University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies
December 6, 2023
ACM Fellow Hanan Samet at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies was honored with the inaugural Lifetime Impact Award from ACM’s Special Interest Group on Spatial Information (SIGSPATIAL) for his work in spatial databases and related fields. Samet is considered the founder of the field of spatial databases. He also developed an application called NewsStand, which lets users search for worldwide news on their computers or mobile devices with a query interface displayed on a world map. Samet was the founding editor-in-chief of ACM Transactions on Spatial Algorithms and Systems and the founding chair of ACM SIGSPATIAL. He also was awarded the 2011 ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award and was inducted into the SIGGRAPH Academy in 2019.
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McDonald's Turns to Google for AI Chatbot
Bloomberg
Daniela Sirtori-Cortina
December 6, 2023
McDonald's Corp. and Google are partnering to develop a chatbot that would provide quick answers to questions from restaurant workers, in an effort to boost productivity. The "Ask Pickles" bot will be trained on McDonald's manuals, data generated by its restaurant equipment, and more. The chatbot is part of a test of McDonald's implementation of Google Cloud's data and generative artificial intelligence tools. With Google Cloud's edge computing technology, kiosks can be operated via small servers connected to an individual location instead of a centralized cloud, which Google Cloud's Thomas Kurian said is more reliable, speeds processing, and facilitates data collection. McDonald's Brian Rice said eventually dashboards could alert franchisees or managers about equipment issues, and the company could use the data to gain a broader view of equipment performance across restaurants.
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Machine Learning Monitors Driver ‘Workload’ to Improve Road Safety
University of Cambridge (U.K.)
December 7, 2023
University of Cambridge researchers, in partnership with Jaguar Land Rover, developed an adaptable algorithm that could improve road safety by predicting when drivers can interact safely with in-vehicle systems or receive messages. The researchers used a combination of on-road experiments and machine learning, as well as Bayesian filtering techniques, to continuously measure driver "workload." The resulting algorithm is adaptable and can respond in near-real time to changes in the driver’s behavior and status, road conditions, road type, or driver characteristics. This information can then be incorporated into in-vehicle systems. Said Cambridge's Bashar Ahmad, “We’ve been able to adapt the models on the go using simple Bayesian filtering techniques. It can easily adapt to different road types and conditions, or different drivers using the same car."
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Drone-Mounted Radar Helps to Locate Polar Bear Dens
Scientific American
Andrew Chapman
December 5, 2023
Researchers at the Norwegian Research Center (NORCE) and Polar Bears International (PBI), a research and conservation group, are collaborating on the use of technology to identify and protect hidden polar bear dens amid a rise in oil and gas exploration in the Arctic. NORCE's Rolf-Ole Rydeng Jenssen developed a drone-mounted radar system able to penetrate multiple snow layers, which could serve as a more accurate method of detecting polar bear dens than the forward-looking infrared (FLIR) systems currently in use. Tests in which the drone was flown over dens with GPS-collared bears inside revealed that the radar can identify anomalies in the snow associated with the presence of the dens.
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Quantum Computer Sets Record on Path Towards Error-Free Calculations
New Scientist
Karmela Padavic-Callaghan
December 6, 2023
Dolev Bluvstein at Harvard University and colleagues built a quantum computer with the largest number of logical quantum bits (qubits) ever. The researchers placed several thousand rubidium atoms in an airless container, then used lasers and magnets to cool them to near absolute zero, allowing them to control the atoms’ quantum states precisely with lasers. They created 280 qubits from those atoms, then used another laser pulse to entangle groups of those to make a logical qubit. The computer makes its qubits interact and exchange information by moving them with optical “tweezers” made of laser beams. The researchers implemented several computer operations, codes, and algorithms on the new computer to test the logical qubits’ performance and found fewer errors than typically seen in quantum computers that use physical qubits.
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The World Depends on 60-Year-Old Code No One Knows
PC Magazine
JD Sartain
December 1, 2023
The 64-year-old programming language COBOL is one of the top mainframe programming languages in use, particularly in the banking, automotive, insurance, government, healthcare, and finance sectors. However, most schools and universities have not taught COBOL in decades, which poses a challenge as those well-versed in COBOL retire, with few options to replace them. IBM hopes to use artificial intelligence (AI) to remedy the situation by creating a generative AI-powered code assistant dubbed watsonx to convert COBOL code to a more modern programming language. Said IBM's Skyla Loomis, "It's AI assisted, but it still requires the developer" to edit the code provided by the AI. He added, "It's a productivity enhancement — not a developer replacement type of activity."
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Grantmaker Betting a TV Show for Teen Girls Can Help Narrow the STEM Gender Gap
Associated Press
Eden Stiffman
December 6, 2023
Lyda Hill Philanthropies, founded by Dallas philanthropist Lyda Hill, aims to promote science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers to teen girls by financing and developing the CBS TV series "Mission Unstoppable." The show, viewed by a million broadcast viewers on average during its first two seasons and earning multiple Emmy nominations, highlights scientists in a variety of fields, including coding, as relatable role models. A white paper by the Raben Group found a 17% jump in interest in STEM and a 16% rise in interest in high school or university STEM courses among "Mission Unstoppable" viewers. Said Lyda Hill Philanthropies' Nicole Small, "We're looking to create a culture shift in how girls see themselves in the world."
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3D Printing Gets a Boost
Queen Mary University of London (U.K.)
December 4, 2023
Researchers at the U.K.'s Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and University of Leicester and China's Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Centre of Excellence for Advanced Materials developed a computational model to reveal how solute trapping occurs during the rapid solidification process in additive manufacturing (AM, also known as three-dimensional printing). Solute trapping occurs when solute elements are concentrated in certain regions of a solidification front, which can lead to the formation of non-equilibrium microstructures that can be detrimental to the properties of AM components. Said QMUL's Chinnapat Panwisawas, "By understanding how solute trapping works, we can develop new materials and processes that can lead to stronger, more reliable, and more complex three-dimensionally printed components."
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Bitcoin Mining Used More Water Than New York City Last Year
The Wall Street Journal
Eric Niiler
December 6, 2023
A study by Alex de Vries of the Netherlands' Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam found that water use by bitcoin miners hit 591 billion gallons so far this year, up from 415 billion gallons in 2021. de Vries found that bitcoin mining in the U.S. consumes the same amount of water used by 300,000 households per year, raising environmental concerns, particularly in areas plagued by drought or the lack of fresh water. Digital Power Network's Perianne Boring maintains most of the water used by bitcoin miners is recycled or returned to the environment. The Rocky Mountain Institute's Paolo Natali said changes to bitcoin software to reduce the number of calculations needed for mining would cut electricity and water requirements, but such changes would "require some consensus among all the holders of bitcoin, or for them to start trading different currencies."
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AI Makes Gripping More Intuitive
Technical University of Munich (Germany)
December 4, 2023
An artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm developed by researchers at Germany's Technical University of Munich (TUM) uses the synergy principle and a network of sensors to help patients more intuitively control advanced hand prostheses. The synergy principle is used to describe, for instance, how the fingers move in a synchronized way to grasp an object and adapt to its shape once contact is made. The researchers have developed machine learning algorithms based on this principle. Said TUM's Patricia Capsi Morales, "With the help of machine learning, we can understand the variations among subjects and improve the control adaptability over time and the learning process."
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Millions of Patient Scans, Health Records Spilling Online Due to Decades-Old Protocol Bug
Tech Crunch
Carly Page
December 6, 2023
Researchers at Germany's Aplite, a cybersecurity consultancy focused on digital healthcare, found security vulnerabilities in the decades-old Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard that expose the private data and medical histories of around 16 million patients and more than 43 million health records online. DICOM is the internationally recognized file format for computed tomography (CT) scans and X-ray images. The researchers determined more than 3,800 servers in more than 110 countries have exposed data including patient names, addresses, phone numbers, and even Social Security numbers. Aplite's Sina Yazdanmehr said Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and other cloud giants host more than 70% of the exposed DICOM servers, with the remainder in medical offices connected to the Internet.
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Neural Net Could Help Find Orphaned Wells
IEEE Spectrum
Rina Diane Caballar
December 5, 2023
A neural network developed by Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) researchers could help locate orphaned oil and gas wells that continue to emit methane into the atmosphere. The Senseiver neural network transforms the limited data gathered through airplane and drone surveys into a concise and usable form. Expanding on Google's Perceiver IO architecture, Senseiver assigns weights to inputs (the field observations from sensors and the sensors' locations) in order to predict the next measurement. Said LANL's Javier E. Santos, "If we have a couple hundred buoys or boats recording sea temperature, we can send those measurements into this machine learning model and ask for the sea temperature in spots where it has not been observed. It's going to reconstruct those spots based on the information from the sensors that are available."
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