Welcome to the January 5, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
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Computer Science Pioneer Niklaus Wirth Passes Away
iTWire
David M. Williams
January 4, 2024
ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate Niklaus Emil Wirth passed away Jan. 1 at age 89. Known for his pioneering research in programming languages and algorithms, Wirth was the recipient of the 1984 ACM A.M. Turing Award, the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award, and the Marcel Benoist Prize, among other honors. The chief designer of several programming languages, most notably Pascal, he also popularized "Wirth's law," which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.
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Humanoid Robot Acts Out Prompts Like It's Playing Charades
New Scientist
Alex Wilkins
January 4, 2024
A humanoid robot developed by researchers at Japan's University of Tokyo can be controlled using text prompts given to the large language model GPT-4. The Alter3 robot uses air pistons to control the 43 moving parts of its head, body, and arms. Two prompts were used to achieve particular movements: one asking GPT-4 to translate the movement into a series of concrete actions, the other asking that each item on the action list be transformed into the Python programming language (with details of how the code maps to the robot's body parts). The system translated both simple and complex requests into movement.
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Microsoft Adding New PC Keyboard Button
CBS News
Aliza Chasan
January 4, 2024
Microsoft is adding an AI button to its Windows keyboards, the company's first significant keyboard change in nearly three decades. The new Copilot key will launch Microsoft's AI chatbot. Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi said the software giant sees the key’s addition as "the entry point into the world of AI on the PC." Copilot is integrated with Microsoft 365 and works alongside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Teams. Users lacking the Copilot key can access it with the keyboard shortcut Windows + C.
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Machine Learning Helps Fuzzing Find Hardware Bugs
IEEE Spectrum
Tammy Xu
January 3, 2024
Texas A&M University researchers used the "fuzzing" technique, which introduces incorrect commands and prompts, to automate chip testing on the assembly line to help identify hardware bugs early in the development process. The researchers used reinforcement learning to select inputs for fuzz testing, then adapted an algorithm used to solve the multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem. The researchers found the MABFuzz algorithm significantly sped up the detection of vulnerabilities and covering the testing space.
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Making Math-Heavy Research Easier to View Online
NIST
January 3, 2024
A tool developed by a researcher at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) will make it easier for people with visual disabilities to view complex formulas in physics, math, and engineering papers online. The LaTeXML tool converts LaTeX, the common language used to render such formulas, into HTML, which is easier to read online than PDF, the format in which most research papers currently are released. The LaTeXML converter was used to create NIST's Digital Library of Mathematical Functions and has been incorporated into the arXiv article repository to generate HTML versions of scholarly papers.
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SSH Servers Vulnerable to New Terrapin Attacks
BleepingComputer
Bill Toulas
January 3, 2024
The Terrapin attack developed by researchers at Germany's Ruhr University Bochum could put nearly 11 million Internet-exposed Secure Shell Protocol (SSH) servers at risk, according to security threat monitoring platform Shadowserver. The attack compromises the integrity of the SSH channel by manipulating sequence numbers during the handshake process. Attackers can intercept and modify the handshake exchange in the adversary-in-the-middle position. The researchers have developed a scanner to assess SSH client or server vulnerability.
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Teen's Algorithm Paves Way for Greener Oil Transport
International Business Times (Singapore)
January 3, 2024
U.K. high school student Warren Zhang, founder and director of Ideal Thermal Technology Ltd., developed an algorithm that can lower oil tank heating emissions during crude oil transportation by 7%. Based on computational fluid dynamics analysis, the algorithm includes boiler, oil tank, pipeline, and integration modules, which combine to calculate energy optimization strategies for the entire cargo heating system using mathematical modeling and machine learning.
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Boy, 13, First to 'Beat' Tetris
The New York Times
Sopan Deb
January 4, 2024
Thirteen-year-old Willis Gibson appears to be the first person to beat the original Nintendo version of the puzzle game Tetris. A YouTube video uploaded by Gibson on Jan. 2 shows his screen frozen with a score of "999999." Previously, only AI had advanced that far in the game. Tetris theoretically can go on forever, though Level 29 was long thought to be the highest level that a human player could attain. Gibson reached Tetris's "kill screen," where coding limitations make the game unplayable, at Level 157.
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U.S. Awarding $162M to Expand Domestic Chip Factories
The Hill
Brett Samuels
January 4, 2024
The U.S. government on Thursday announced an agreement to provide $162 million in federal funding to Microchip Technology to expand its production of computer chips domestically, the second tranche of money granted under the CHIPS and Science Act signed into law in 2022. The funding will allow the company to “significantly increase its U.S. production of microcontroller units and other specialty semiconductors built on mature-nodes critical to America’s automotive, commercial, industrial, defense, and aerospace industries."
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Graphene Semiconductor Could Lead to Faster Computers
Deutsche Welle (Germany)
Fred Schwaller
January 4, 2024
A functional semiconductor made from graphene was created by researchers from China's Tianjin University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Their development comes at a time when silicon, the material from which nearly all modern electronics are made, is reaching its limits. Scientists have been racing to develop graphene semiconductors because of their superior speed and energy efficiency compared to silicon. The researchers figured out how to grow graphene on special silicon carbide chips, a process that took a decade to achieve.
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'Insect Eavesdropper' Helps Protect Crops
WisBusiness
Alex Moe
January 3, 2024
A machine learning algorithm developed by University of Wisconsin-Madison's Emily Bick can detect insect infestations in plants from audio signals. The algorithm interprets insect feeding sounds picked up by clip-on or stick-on contact microphones, and can distinguish between insect chewing sounds and weather-related noises by tracking vibrations in the plant rather than sound waves in the air. Said Bick, "From those sounds, we can pre-process it and train machine learning algorithms not just to detect presence and absence, but also to differentiate these species."
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Large Fishing Boats Go Untracked as 'Dark Vessels'
New Scientist
Jeremy Hsu
January 3, 2024
An AI analysis of satellite images by researchers at the nonprofit Global Fishing Watch found that the locations of 75% of industrial fishing vessels and 25% of transport and energy ships are not publicly shared. The images, taken from 2017 to 2021 in regions accounting for most large-scale fishing and other industrial activities, were analyzed using AIs trained to identify and categorize boats and offshore structures. Comparing the global map of vessels with a database of those that broadcast their location publicly revealed that a majority turned their automated identification systems off, which could indicate their participation in illegal fishing and other activities.
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