Welcome to the January 24, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• Deepfake Audio of Biden Alarms Experts
• Liquid RAM Flexes
• Self-Powered Sensor Harvests Energy from the Air
• Swimming Robot Detects Sars-CoV-2, Other Viruses
• Is Google Search Getting Worse?
• Tech Workers Ditching Big Cities for Boise
• A Simple Method to Speed Cache Sifting
• Japan Turns to Innovation to Tackle Labor Crisis
• Digital Twins of Brain Tumors
• PixieFail UEFI Flaws Expose Millions of Computers
• Scientists Crack Ancient Chromosomal Complications
• 'Growing' Robot 3D-Prints Its Own Body
• Few Companies Follow New York City's AI Hiring Law

Deepfake Audio of Biden Alarms Experts

A telephone message containing deepfake audio of U.S. President Joe Biden called on New Hampshire voters to avoid yesterday’s Democratic primary and save their votes for the November election. This comes amid rising concerns about the use of political deepfakes to influence elections around the world this year. Audio deepfakes are especially concerning, given that they are easy and inexpensive to create and hard to trace.
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Liquid RAM Flexes

Researchers at China's Tsinghua University developed a flexible resistive random access memory (RAM) device that uses a gallium-based liquid metal (GLM) to create a reversible switching process that allows for data storage and erasure. With FlexRAM, GLM droplets experience oxidation when a low voltage is applied, corresponding to the high-resistance state of "1"; reversing the voltage polarity returns the metal to the low-resistance state of "0." The prototype array of eight FlexRAM units can store one byte of information.
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Self-Powered Sensor Harvests Energy from the Air

A self-powered temperature sensor developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers takes energy from its surroundings. The design framework was used to create an energy management circuit for an off-the-shelf temperature sensor, allowing it to continuously sample temperature data by harvesting magnetic field energy. A microcontroller automatically adjusts the amount of harvested energy to prevent the device from storing too much energy and potentially exploding.
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Swimming Robot Detects Sars-CoV-2, Other Viruses

City University of Hong Kong researchers developed a swimming robot that can identify chemical and viral molecules in hard-to-access places. The leaf-shaped robot is soft, wireless, and battery-free, and features electrode sensors. Inspired by a dolphin's tail, the robot uses an electromagnetic actuation system to oscillate and swim. In tests in simulated pipes, the robot was able to identify and quantify ammonium, chloride, and Sars-CoV-2 virus particles.
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Is Google Search Getting Worse?

A study by German researchers found that Google's search results are deteriorating in quality. The researchers googled 7,392 search terms weekly for a year, comparing Google's search performance to that of Bing and DuckDuckGo. While Google outperformed the other search engines, the researchers said low-quality SEO spam is making its way to the top of its search results. The researchers said higher-ranked pages are "more optimized [and] more monetized with affiliate marketing" on average and "show signs of lower text quality."
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Tech Workers Ditching Big Cities for Boise

Career site Handshake reported applications for tech jobs in Boise, ID, surged 116% in 2023 on a year-over-year basis, despite the city being one of the most isolated in the U.S. The increase is second only to that seen in Columbia, MD. The report indicated that more recent tech graduates are moving inland as they seek a blend of nature, city life, and work-life balance, alongside stability and opportunity.
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A Simple Method to Speed Cache Sifting

Computer scientists from Emory University, Carnegie Mellon University, and the Pelikan Foundation developed an open source algorithm that could revolutionize Web traffic management with an easy, fast, effective method for determining which items to remove from a Web cache to free up space. The SIEVE algorithm makes simple adjustments to the classic FIFO (first-in, first-out) cache-eviction algorithm to allow for quick demotion of objects in the cache and enable "lazy promotion" to maintain popular objects in the cache with minimal computational effort.
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Japan Turns to Innovation to Tackle Labor Crisis

Japan, the world's fastest-aging economy, is turning to technologies like AI, avatars, and robots to address labor shortages. Industrial robots have been deployed to automate the assembly of reinforcement bars (rebar), one of the most labor-intensive processes in the construction industry. The trucking industry is turning to self-driving trucks for deliveries, and robots for moving cargo. Farmers are deploying robots and drones to sow, nurture, and harvest crops. In the retail sector, some chains are using avatars to greet customers, provide information, and even to staff night shifts and rural stores.
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Digital Twins of Brain Tumors

Aerospace and biomedical engineers at the University of Texas at Austin demonstrated how the techniques used to create digital twins in the aerospace industry can be used to customize treatment plans for individual patients suffering from a brain tumor. The digital twin is created using population-level clinical data and is tailored to the patient using Bayesian model calibration, with ongoing updates as the patient's MRI data becomes available. The digital twin can be used to predict the patient's response to differing dosages and lengths of radiotherapy.
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PixieFail UEFI Flaws Expose Millions of Computers

Researchers at French R&D firm Quarkslab identified nine security flaws in the TianoCore EFI Development Kit II (EDK II) affecting Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) firmware from AMI, Intel, Insyde, and Phoenix Technologies. The PixieFail vulnerabilities put millions of computers at risk of remote code execution, denial-of-service, DNS cache poisoning, and sensitive information leaks. The issues were found in EDK II's NetworkPkg TCP/IP network protocol stack.
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Scientists Crack Ancient Chromosomal Complications

A computational method of counting chromosomes in ancient genomes developed by researchers at the U.K.’s universities of Oxford and York allowed the researchers to identify the first prehistoric case of Turner's syndrome and a case of Jacob's syndrome from the early Medieval period. The researchers used the new method to identify aneuploidies (too many or too few chromosomes) in a large dataset as part of the Thousand Ancient British Genomes project.
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'Growing' Robot 3D-Prints Its Own Body

Researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology developed a self-growing robot that can overcome gaps and other obstacles while exploring unstructured environments. The FiloBot has a stem-like body with a conical head and a power source/base station. It continuously pulls a 3D-printing thermoplastic filament from a spool in the base station through a heated extruder in its head, with the coiled layers of plastic bonding as they cool. FiloBot can control the direction in which its body grows in response to light sensors, a gyroscope, and other electronics located in its head.
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Few Companies Follow New York City's AI Hiring Law

Six months ago, New York City enacted a law requiring companies to disclose their use of AI algorithms in hiring decisions, and to audit their software annually to identify potential race and gender biases, with the results to be posted on the career sections of their websites. Cornell University Researchers analyzed 391 employers and found just 18 had posted the required audit reports as of early January. The researchers said it was "challenging, time-consuming, and frustrating" to find notices of the audit results. Cornell's Jacob Metcalf attributed the low compliance to the fact that employers are given "almost unlimited discretion" to determine whether they fall within the law's scope.
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