Welcome to the January 3, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
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Wanted: ‘New Collar’ Workers
The New York Times
Lora Kelley
December 31, 2023
Amid fear that millions of workers will lose jobs to technology in the coming years, some optimists say there also are real opportunities ahead for skilled workers who know how to handle machines, but who may not have a college degree. “New collar” jobs require advanced skills but not necessarily advanced degrees, especially in emerging high-tech fields like AI, cybersecurity, and robotics. Hiring managers increasingly use skills-based filters on LinkedIn to identify appropriate candidates, a LinkedIn spokesperson said, adding that 155 million of the platform’s more than 930 million users lack four-year degrees.
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AI Glasses Unlock Independence for Some Blind, Low-Vision People
The Globe and Mail (Canada)
Joe Castaldo
December 27, 2023
AI, combined with language processing and computer vision, has led to advanced applications for people who are blind or visually impaired. That includes Internet-connected glasses, such as those from Netherlands-based Envision, which uses an AI model to respond to voice commands like “describe scene” by capturing an image of the person’s surroundings, and composing a description that it reads aloud through a tiny speaker behind the user's ear. The Be My AI app, provided by U.S.-based Be My Eyes, provides descriptions of photos taken by a smartphone.
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Princeton, UW Produce Highest Earning Computer Engineers
ITPro Today
Nathan Eddy
December 30, 2023
A new report by website hosting provider Hostinger found Princeton University, the University of Washington, and Santa Clara University produce the highest-earning computer engineering graduates. Based on data on the average incomes of alumni who obtained computer engineering degrees at universities across the U.S., the report assesses the earning power of these graduates and calculated the median earnings of those with bachelor's degrees in computer engineering fields four years post-graduation.
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Java Applications Have Major Security Flaws
Tech Times
Jace Dela Cruz
December 28, 2023
Widely-used Java applications examined by researchers led by Alexandre Bartel at Umeå University in Sweden were found to have major security vulnerabilities in their deserialization process, in which packaged information is restored to its previous state. The study found the flow of bytes allows attackers to modify information during deserialization to gain control over the receiving system. Said Bartel, "The problem is that the programmers seem to repeat the same mistakes over and over again and therefore reintroduce the vulnerabilities."
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A New Olympics Event: Algorithmic Video Surveillance
IEEE Spectrum
Lucas Laursen
December 27, 2023
The upcoming Paris Summer Olympic Games will serve as a testbed for AI-powered video surveillance, and people's tolerance of its use. Surveillance will not only cover the events, but also the entire Olympic village and the connecting roads and rails. It will proceed under a temporary law allowing automated surveillance systems to detect “predetermined events” of the sort that might lead to terrorist attacks. While some critics have raised concerns about misuse of the technology, others seem unconcerned.
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Drone Study Reveals How Water Shapes Mountains
Earth.com
Andrei Ionescu
December 25, 2023
Penn State researchers leveraged drone technology to identify a connection between river boulder size and river steepness, to show how mountainous terrain is shaped by water over time. The drones gathered data on river channel morphology and boulder measurements in the challenging terrain of Taiwan's central mountain range. Based on that data, the researchers determined that river boulder size is the primary indicator of rock strength in the mountains, and that erosion models need to take rock strength into account.
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Headset Could Reduce Delirium in ICU Patients
The Times of Israel
Renee Ghert-Zand
January 1, 2024
Researchers at Israeli medical tech company EyeControl are testing a device aimed at reducing delirium in hospital intensive care unit (ICU) patients, including those wounded during the current Israel-Hamas war. The lightweight plastic headset features an infrared camera that tracks eye movement; a bone-conduction earphone that plays recordings of the voices of family and friends, the patient's favorite music, messages with the date and time, and reminders that they are in the hospital; and a cloud-based platform that allows for remote control of the headset.
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Brain Stimulation Could Help Doctors Learn to Use Surgery Robots
Futurity.org
January 2, 2024
Johns Hopkins University (JHU) researchers found stimulating people's brains with gentle electric currents could boost learning in virtual environments. Study participants drove a surgical needle through three small holes, first in a virtual simulation and then in a real scenario using the da Vinci Research Kit, an open-source research robot. Participants who received steady electrical currents showed a notable boost in dexterity, compared to those who received such stimulation only at the beginning of the process.
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Japnit Ahuja Receives WomenTech Network Global Award
Ontario Tech University (Canada)
January 2, 2024
Japnit Ahuja, a fourth-year computer science student at Canada's Ontario Tech University, was named recipient of the 2023 Ada Lovelace Special Recognition Award for Women in ICT from the WomenTech Network, an international community that promotes gender diversity in information and communication technology (ICT). Ahuja founded the non-profit Go Girl Organization, whose volunteers have held more than 500 free coding workshops, teaching programming to more than 2,000 youngsters in Indian regional languages. Her honors thesis project focuses on developing a mobile application to assist less-privileged students learn Web development and programming.
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Your Car Is Tracking You. Abusive Partners May Be, Too
The New York Times
Kashmir Hill
December 31, 2023
Internet-connected vehicles gather large amounts of data using a variety of methods, and privacy advocates have raised concerns about how this data is being used and shared by auto manufacturers. Although drivers benefit from the convenience of smartphone apps that pinpoint a car's location and allow remote locking and unlocking, among other things, these same convenience features can be used by abusive domestic partners to track their victims. Vehicle manufacturers generally are unwilling to end an abusive partner's access to these apps, especially if the vehicle’s loan and title are in their name.
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Enhancing Nerve Implant Performance
India Education Diary
December 27, 2023
Researchers at Australia's University of Adelaide found electrical fields can improve the performance of nerve-stimulating implants used to treat sciatica and other debilitating conditions. The researchers focused on minimally invasive, wireless graft-antenna implants around which nerves can rebuild. They used several computational techniques incorporated in a mouse model to hypothetically examine the effect of the circuitry implanted via patches inserted near affected nerves.
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A Magic Tool to Understanding AI: Harry Potter
Bloomberg
Saritha Rai
December 26, 2023
J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books are being used by researchers experimenting with generative AI, due to the series' long-lasting pop culture influence. In a recent paper, Microsoft researchers used the Harry Potter books to show that AI models can be edited to eliminate any knowledge of the series, without affecting their overall decision-making and analytical abilities. Microsoft's Mark Russinovich said the universal familiarity of the Harry Potter books would make it "easier for people in the research community to evaluate the model resulting from our technique and confirm for themselves that the content has indeed been 'unlearned.'"
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