Welcome to the January 12, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

Please note: In observance of the U.S. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day holiday, TechNews will not be published on Monday, Jan. 15. Publication will resume on Wednesday, Jan. 17.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• Security of Georgia's Dominion Voting Machines on Trial
• Biorobotic Heart Helps Scientists Study Cardiac Function
• Robots Key to New Ways of Farming as Labor Shortage Looms
• Software Engineers Say the Job Market Is Getting Much Worse
• Mobileye Unveils Customizable Operating System for Self-Driving Cars
• Chinese Social Network Fails to Curb Abuse by Showing Users' Locations
• Waterloo Researchers’ Tool to Be Part of ESA's Climate Change Initiative
• Technology Helps Decode Animal Pain, Behavior
• AI Helps U.S. Intelligence Track Hackers Targeting Critical Infrastructure
• E-Nose Sniffs Out Coffee Varieties Nearly Perfectly
• The Next Front in the U.S.-China Battle Over Chips
• Scientists Discover Unknown Bacteria Species in Hospital Patients
• Material Found by AI Could Reduce Lithium Use in Batteries

Security of Georgia's Dominion Voting Machines on Trial

A federal trial has begun to determine whether Dominion Voting Systems' touch-screen voting machines used in the U.S. state of Georgia can be hacked or manipulated. In Georgia, once voters make their choices, their ballots are printed with their votes and a QR code; the QR code is ultimately what is read and cast as the voter’s ballot. Several voters and the Coalition for Good Governance, who launched the suit, want the state to revert to paper ballots which, they say, will assure voters their ballots are being counted properly.
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Biorobotic Heart Helps Scientists Study Cardiac Function

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed a biorobotic replica of the human heart that can model both healthy and diseased organs to help scientists better understand cardiac function. The biorobotic heart is comprised of pig heart tissue and soft robotic muscles, pumps a clear fluid instead of blood, and accurately replicates blood flow through the organ. Users can customize its heart rate, blood pressure, and other parameters and view real-time changes in functioning via an internal camera.
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Robots Key to New Ways of Farming as Labor Shortage Looms

Robots increasingly are being deployed on farms in Japan amid an impending labor shortage. The startup Agrist operates a farm in Shintomi that uses robots instead of humans to harvest bell peppers. The robots each are equipped with two cameras and AI trained to identify ripe peppers, which are cut from stems using extendable arms, which then places the peppers in a cart. Meanwhile, Asai Nursery in Mie Prefecture has teamed up with auto parts manufacturer Denso Corp. on AgriD, a joint venture in which robots are used to harvest and transport tomatoes.
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Software Engineers Say the Job Market Is Getting Much Worse

A December survey of software engineers conducted on behalf of Motherboard by Blind, an online anonymous platform for verified employees, found that close to 90% of the 9,338 respondents said it is harder now than before the pandemic to get a software job. Almost 80% of those polled said U.S. job market competitiveness has increased in the last year, while just 6% said they were "extremely confident" they could find a similar job with the same compensation they receive today. Nearly three-quarters (72%) of respondents said they were "not really" or "not at all concerned" that AI would make their roles redundant.
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Mobileye Unveils Customizable Operating System for Self-Driving Cars

The DXP operating system rolled out by Mobileye Global Inc. at CES is aimed at reducing the amount of time it takes automakers to develop customized self-driving vehicle systems. DXP includes the universal components for self-driving systems, with thousands of adjustable parameters that allow for customization. Mobileye CEO Amnon Shashua called DXP "a driving experience platform" that “allows us to scale.”
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Chinese Social Network Fails to Curb Abuse by Showing Users' Locations

In April 2022, Chinese social network Weibo began to display the province or municipality where someone is based according to their IP address, in a bid to deter abuse. Tian Yang at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and colleagues compiled a list of 96 uncivil or abusive words in Chinese and checked how frequently these words appeared in posts replying to 66 notable media profiles on Weibo for 12.5 days before and after the policy change. The likelihood of abuse referring to users’ locations increased by 33.5% after the policy change.
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Waterloo Researchers’ Tool to Be Part of ESA's Climate Change Initiative

An algorithm for processing satellite radar altimetry data developed by researchers at Canada's University of Waterloo will be implemented as part of the European Space Agency's (ESA) Climate Change Initiative to assess lake ice trends over time. The algorithm distinguishes between open water, thin ice, growing ice, or melting ice with 94% accuracy.
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Technology Helps Decode Animal Pain, Behavior

Researchers increasingly are leveraging video game tech, AI, and computer vision in an effort to decode animal behavior as a proxy for human health conditions. A number of computer vision tools have been developed to quantify animal behavior, including Harvard Medical School's MoSeq, the University of Michigan's LabGym, Carnegie Mellon University's B-SOiD, and DeepLab Cut from Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. In the long term, researchers hope these tools can improve both animal and human health.
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AI Helps U.S. Intelligence Track Hackers Targeting Critical Infrastructure

At a Jan. 9 conference hosted by Fordham University, cybersecurity leaders said U.S. intelligence authorities are leveraging AI to detect hackers that increasingly are using the same technology to conceal their activities. National Security Agency's Rob Joyce explained that hackers are "using flaws in the architecture, implementation problems, and other things to get a foothold into accounts or create accounts that then appear like they should be part of the network." The FBI's Maggie Dugan noted that hackers are using open source models and their own datasets to develop and train their own generative AI tools, then sell them on the dark web.
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E-Nose Sniffs Out Coffee Varieties Nearly Perfectly

Researchers at Taiwan's National Kaohsiung University of Science and Technology developed an e-nose device that can identify coffee varieties based on their aroma. The device, which assesses gases to identify the nature of the substance at hand features eight metal semiconductor oxide sensors, each of which detects specific gases and transmits the resulting data to an AI algorithm. In tests of several algorithms on 16 coffee bean varieties, accuracy rates ranged from 81% to 98%, with a convolutional neural network algorithm achieving the greatest accuracy.
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The Next Front in the U.S.-China Battle Over Chips

The next front in the U.S.-China semiconductor trade war could involve RISC-V, an open-source architecture increasingly being used by Chinese government agencies and companies to compete with the U.S. in semiconductor design. The U.S. House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party is among those concerned about China's use of RISC-V and is calling for an interagency government committee to study RISC-V's potential risks. However, some tech executives say it makes little sense to restrict RISC-V, given that it is merely a basic set of computing instructions that determine the calculations that can be performed by a chip.
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Scientists Discover Unknown Bacteria Species in Hospital Patients

Researchers at Switzerland's University of Basel and University Hospital Basel developed an algorithm to identify bacteria in patient blood and tissue samples in which known bacteria was not detected using conventional testing methods. They performed genetic sequencing of the samples, with 35 previously undiscovered bacteria species identified among the 61 bacteria species found in the samples. The researchers continue to collect samples and identify new bacteria using the NOVA (Novel Organism Verification and Analysis) algorithm.
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Material Found by AI Could Reduce Lithium Use in Batteries

AI and supercomputing were leveraged by researchers at Microsoft and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to identify a new material with the potential to reduce the use of lithium in batteries by up to 70%. It took the researchers less than a week using these technologies to narrow down 32 million potential inorganic materials to 18 promising candidates, a task that would have taken over 20 years using standard methods. It took less than nine months from the discovery of N2116, a solid-state electrolyte, to develop a working battery prototype.
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