Welcome to the December 29, 2023 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
Please note: In observance of the New Year holiday, TechNews will not be published on Monday, January 1. Publication will resume on Wednesday, January 3, 2024.
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Vets Make House Calls for Killer Whales
The New York Times
Emily Anthes
December 26, 2023
Veterinarians and researchers are monitoring the health of wild orcas, or killer whales, in the Pacific Northwest with the help of drones. By steering a drone into plumes of an orca's exhaled breath, researchers can collect samples that can be analyzed for signs of illness or infection. Computational modeling by experts at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance found that by mounting a petri dish on a drone in the right place, air currents generated by the propellers would help funnel the respiratory droplets onto the dish. In September, a group successfully tested the use of a drone with multiple petri dishes to collect larger samples.
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AI-Assisted Piano Allows Disabled Musicians to Perform Beethoven
Japan Today
December 24, 2023
The "Anybody's Piano" tracks notes of music and augments players’ performances by adding whatever keystrokes are needed but not pressed. At a recent performance in Tokyo, Kiwa Usami, who has cerebral palsy, was one of three musicians with disabilities performing Symphony No. 9 with the AI-powered piano. Usami helped inspire the instrument. Her dedication to practicing with one finger prompted her teachers to work with Japanese music giant Yamaha. The result of the collaboration was a revised version of Yamaha's auto-playing piano, which was released in 2015.
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Humanoid Robots in Space: The Next Frontier
Reuters
Evan Garcia
December 27, 2023
NASA is partnering with robotics companies like Texas-based Apptronik to learn how humanoid robots developed for terrestrial purposes could benefit future humanoid robots destined for space. Apptronik is developing Apollo, a humanoid robot that originally will work in warehouses and manufacturing plants, but will ultimately be capable, according to Apptronik CEO Jeff Cardenas, of working in "unstructured spaces" with the advent of new software and development. NASA's Shaun Azimi said that the goal of such partnerships is "to see what are the key gaps, where we would need to invest in the future to bring a terrestrial system into the space environment and certified for operating in space."
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3D-Printing Reproduces Masterpieces, Stroke by Stroke
CNN
Oscar Holland
December 22, 2023
Austrian printmaking company Lito Masters has partnered with several major museums to carry out detailed scans of paintings by major artists, which it uses to create textured, stroke-for-stroke 3D-printed reproductions on canvas or paper, complete with the originals’ imperfections. As part of a new collaboration with the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris, Lito Masters spent a week scanning a collection of Claude Monet’s "Water Lilies" murals. The first offering from the partnership, launched in December, sees small portions of the artworks reprinted as 900-square-centimeter (140-square inch) collectibles.
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Spying on Beavers from Space
Wired
Ben Goldfarb
December 28, 2023
A group of scientists and Google engineers taught an algorithm to spot beaver infrastructure in satellite imagery, with the ultimate goal of helping drought-ridden areas recover. Beaver-created ponds and wetlands store water, filter out pollutants, furnish habitat for endangered species, and fight wildfires. The Earth Engine Automated Geospatial Elements Recognition, or EEAGER, convolutional neural network-based algorithm was fed with more than 13,000 landscape images with beaver dams from seven western U.S. states, along with some 56,000 dam-less locations. The model categorized the landscape accurately 98.5% of the time.
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Raspberry Pi-Based System Accurately Detects Facial Palsy
HealthDay
Elana Gotkine
December 27, 2023
Ali Saber Amsalam at the Middle Technical University in Iraq and colleagues integrated a Raspberry Pi device with a digital camera and a deep learning algorithm to create a system for detecting facial palsy (FP) in real time. The system achieved accuracy of 98% using a dataset of 20,600 images, including 19,000 normal images and 1,600 FP images. The authors wrote, "The patient's use of this system at home in the diagnostic process reduces embarrassment, effort, time, and cost."
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Research on Mobile Device Motion Detection Earns SenSys Test of Time Award
India Education Diary
December 28, 2023
The Accelerometer-Based Transportation Mode Detection on Smartphones study, published in 2013, won the SenSys Test of Time Award, announced at the 21 st ACM Conference on Embedded Networked Sensor Systems in Istanbul in November. The study looked at how data from smartphone accelerometers can be used to identify what mode of transportation a person is using. The paper was recognized as a "pioneer work on smartphone sensing which foresees years of innovative work of integrated sensing and learning from wireless portable devices."
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iPhone Triangulation Attack Abused Undocumented Hardware Feature
BleepingComputer
Bill Toulas
December 27, 2023
The Operation Triangulation spyware attacks targeting iPhone devices since 2019 leveraged undocumented features in Apple chips to bypass hardware-based security protections. The attacks, which exploit four zero-day vulnerabilities, start with a malicious iMessage attachment sent to the target, and the entire chain is zero-click. Kaspersky discovered the attack within its own network in June 2023. It then reverse engineered the attack chain, concluding that the attackers "are able to write data to a certain physical address while bypassing the hardware-based memory protection by writing the data, destination address, and data hash to unknown hardware registers of the chip unused by the firmware."
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Content Credentials Will Fight Deepfakes in the 2024 Elections
IEEE Spectrum
Eliza Strickland
December 27, 2023
With nearly 80 countries holding major elections in 2024, the deployment of content credentialing to fight deepfakes and other AI-generated disinformation is expected to gain ground. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA), an organization that’s developing technical methods to document the origin and history of real and fake digital-media files, in 2021 released initial standards for attaching cryptographically secure metadata to image and video files. It has been further developing the open-source specifications and implementing them with leading media companies. Microsoft, meanwhile, recently launched an initiative to help political campaigns use content credentials.
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The Times Sues OpenAI and Microsoft over AI Use of Copyrighted Work
The New York Times
Michael M. Grynbaum; Ryan Mac
December 27, 2023
The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft over copyright issues associated with its written works. The lawsuit contends that millions of articles published by the newspaper were used to train automated chatbots that now compete with the news outlet as a source of reliable information. The complaint cites several examples when a chatbot provided users with near-verbatim excerpts from Times articles that would otherwise require a paid subscription to view. It also highlights the potential damage to The Times’ brand through so-called AI “hallucinations,” a phenomenon in which chatbots insert false information that is then wrongly attributed to a source.
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Scientists ‘Teleport’ Images
Independent (U.K.)
Anthony Cuthbertson
December 20, 2023
An international team from the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and the Institute of Photonic Sciences (ICFO) in Spain "teleported" images across a network, using laser light patterns and an optical detector that harnessed quantum processes. The principles of quantum physics allowed the information of the image to appear on the receiver’s end without having to physically travel from the sender. Likening the feat to 'Star Trek' teleportation, ICFO's Adam Vallés warned that the current "configuration could not prevent a cheating sender from keeping better copies of the information to be teleported, which means we could end up with many Mr. Spock clones if that is what Scotty wanted."
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Social Media Makes Billions Off Teens, Children
UPI
Mike Heuer
December 27, 2023
The leading social media platforms generated a total of almost $11 billion in combined ad revenues from U.S. users younger than 18 in 2022, researchers at Harvard University's T.H. Chan School of Public Health found. Social media platforms don't publish data on user ages or ad revenue generated by age groups. The researchers used market research data and public surveys conducted in 2021 and 2022 to estimate the relationship between young users and ad revenue for popular social media platforms and apps and created a simulation model to determine the likely revenues and ages of non-adult users.
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Artificial Pain Sensors Could Help Robots Avoid Damaging Themselves
New Scientist
Alex Wilkins
December 27, 2023
Artificial "pain-sensing" skin developed by Jie Tan at Hunan University in China and colleagues uses a zinc and gallium crystal to identify potential hazards. When a strong force is applied to the crystal, electrons are released, creating an electrical signal. The force also produces flashes of light in the crystal, which can be monitored by a camera to indicate where the pain is. The team developed an algorithm that can interpret when a stimulus should be avoided. A robotic hand equipped with the skin and algorithm successfully differentiated between safe and harmful objects 97.5% of the time.
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