Welcome to the January 22, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• NTP Inventor Dies at Age 85
• Blood Protein Analysis Identifies Long-COVID Signatures
• Microsoft Says Russian Government Hackers Stole Its Emails
• Undersea Robot Digitally Captures the Sea's Most Delicate Life
• Digital Twins Mirror the Present, Map the Future of Cities
• Contact Lens Detects Signs of Glaucoma
• NASA's Robotic, Self-Assembling Structures
• 'Shocking' Amount of the Web Is Already AI-Translated Trash
• Crop Health Sensor Runs on Solar, Microbe Power
• Wireless Tracking System Could Help Improve XR Experience
• Entry-Level AI Roles Command Higher Salaries
• Virtual Reality Helps Doctors Spot Signs of Sepsis

NTP Inventor Dies at Age 85

ACM Fellow David L. Mills, the inventor of Network Time Protocol (NTP), died at age 85 on January 17. Mills also invented the first "Fuzzball router" for NSFNET (one of the first modern routers, based on the DEC PDP-11 computer), created one of the first implementations of FTP, inspired the creation of "ping," and played a key role in Internet architecture as the first chair of the Internet Architecture Task Force. Google Chief Internet Evangelist and former ACM president Vint Cerf said Mills was "an iconic element of the early Internet."
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Blood Protein Analysis Identifies Long-COVID Signatures

A computational model developed by an international research team can predict the likelihood an individual will develop long-COVID based on blood protein levels, among other factors. The model is based on an analysis of more than 6,596 proteins in 268 blood samples. The researchers detected significant differences in blood proteins among those with long-COVID, those who recovered completely from COVID-19, and those who were never infected.
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Microsoft Says Russian Government Hackers Stole Its Emails

Microsoft said hackers working for the Russian government breached its corporate networks recently and stole email from executives and some employees to find out what the company knew about them. The tech company said the breach was not due to any flaw in its software, but rather began with a “password spraying.” The technique worked on what Microsoft said was an old test account, and the hackers then used the account’s privileges to get access to multiple streams of email.
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Undersea Robot Digitally Captures the Sea's Most Delicate Life

Two camera systems developed by researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute were affixed to a remote underwater vehicle to capture information about soft-bodied ocean creatures at depths of 200 to 1,000 meters. One camera uses lasers to detect the movements of organisms while the other allows for 3D visualization. During a 30-day Pacific Ocean tour, the researchers filmed 61 animals and obtained 32 specimens.
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Digital Twins Mirror the Present, Map the Future of Cities

Barcelona, Cambridge, and Helsinki are among the European cities incorporating digital twins into their urban planning. Digital twins give city planners a detailed view of the present and the ability to imagine future projects. Cities that develop digital twins and continually update them to capture growth can use the dynamic live data to identify ways to reduce traffic, plan housing developments and infrastructure improvements, and determine action steps to address climate change, among other things.
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Contact Lens Detects Signs of Glaucoma

Contact lenses developed by researchers at the U.K.'s Northumbria University and Turkey's Bogaziçi University can detect glaucoma with embedded micro-sensors that track changes in intra-ocular pressure (IOP). The GlakoLens contacts can collect data over a 24-hour period and send it wirelessly to the wearer's ophthalmologist. Tracking IOP for longer periods could improve diagnostic accuracy.
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NASA's Robotic, Self-Assembling Structures

Researchers at the NASA Ames Research Center have developed "self-reprogrammable mechanical metamaterials," a self-assembling robotic structure comprised of cuboctahedral frames (voxels) and two types of assembly robots. The ARMADAS (Automated Reconfigurable Mission Adaptive Digital Assembly Systems) could be used to build communication towers and shelters on the lunar surface, or booms, antennas, and other in-orbit structures.
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'Shocking' Amount of the Web Is Already AI-Translated Trash

Amazon Web Services researchers expressed concerns about the training of large language models after they determined that more than 50% of sentences on the Internet have been translated into two or more languages, with the quality worsening due to poor machine translation (MT). The researchers analyzed a corpus of 6.38 billion sentences scraped from the Internet, finding that 57.1% of the sentences showed patterns of multi-way parallelism in at least three languages. They found MT generally skews toward Western and Global North languages, while African and other low-resource languages did not have enough training data to generate accurate translations.
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Crop Health Sensor Runs on Solar, Microbe Power

A low-cost wearable sensor developed by researchers at Italy's Polytechnic University of Turin can be used to monitor plants' water levels. The sensor, which connects to the stem using 0.4 millimeter-long stainless steel needles that serve as electrodes, is powered by solar energy and a plant microbial fuel cell that draws electrical energy from microbes in the soil. The device measures the electrical impedance of the stem to indirectly determine moisture levels. In tests of tobacco plants, the sensor was 85% accurate in gauging the plant's water potential based on electrical impedance.
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Wireless Tracking System Could Help Improve XR Experience

Researchers at the University of California, San Diego and Japan's Osaka University have developed a wireless asset localization system that could improve the extended reality (XR) experience. The system performs real-time tracking of physical objects with centimeter-level accuracy using wireless signals in the sub-6 GHz regime to produce a virtual representation of the objects. The wireless signals enable the system to detect battery-operated ultrawide-band tags attached to the objects.
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Entry-Level AI Roles Command Higher Salaries

A new Bizreport analysis found that AI helped boost tech salaries last year, with the pay gap between tech and non-tech jobs expanding 36%. The report said salaries for AI-related roles were 78% higher than those of other jobs. At the entry level, AI-related salaries exceeded those of non-AI jobs by 128%, compared with 58% for mid-level roles and 49% for senior roles. Additionally, the report showed computer science salaries in the U.S. jumped 46% last year from 2022, mainly due to demand for AI talent.
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Virtual Reality Helps Doctors Spot Signs of Sepsis

Staff and students at the Great Western Hospitals NHS (National Health Service) Foundation Trust in the U.K. are being trained on how to use virtual reality (VR) to spot symptoms of sepsis, which develops when the immune system overreacts to an infection. The effort draws on research from the U.K.'s University of Bath, whose Richard Joiner said, "This new VR simulation addresses this challenge by enabling doctors to train experientially in a safe and realistic environment, without endangering patients."
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