Welcome to the January 29, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• Drones Look for Remains of the Missing in Mexico
• Data Science Major Takes Off
• Protocol Kills Dead Air for Quantum Communication
• Taiwan Builds AI Language Model to Counter China's Influence
• 3D-Printed Electronic Skin Replicates the Flexibility, Sensitivity of Human Skin
• Surveillance Tech Catches Students Vaping
• Life-Saving 'Robot Medics' for Triage in High-Risk Places
• Ingenuity Ends Its Mars Mission
• Wearable Device Monitors Tumor Size
• iPhone Apps Secretly Harvest Data When They Send Notifications
• Impact of AI on Software Development
• Programming Light Propagation Creates Highly-Efficient Neural Networks

Drones Look for Remains of the Missing in Mexico

A "missing persons" collective is using drones equipped with thermosensitive cameras to find unmarked graves in Mexico. The technology helps ensure "we don't waste time and energy searching hectares and hectares, but instead go straight to areas where there's a high possibility of finding remains," said Victor Hugo Avila Barrientos, commissioner for missing people in the Mexican state of Jalisco. Teams from the U.K.'s University of Oxford are supporting the effort in Jalisco with drone training and resources.
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Data Science Major Takes Off

The National Center for Education Statistics reported that 897 data science bachelor's degrees were awarded in 2022, up from just 84 in 2020. The U.S. Department of Labor forecast a 36% increase in data science jobs over the next 10 years. Research reveals that more females are majoring in data science than computer science and cybersecurity. Stuart Zweben of the ACM Education Board’s Actionable Enrollment and Retention Task Force attributed this to data science's cross-disciplinary focus and the fact that some universities are turning students away from computer science.
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Protocol Kills Dead Air for Quantum Communication

A protocol developed by researchers at South Korea's LG Electronics could improve quantum communication transmission rates and security. The new single-photon-based quantum secure direct communication (QSDC) protocol encodes information in two quantum states: the time state, used for quantum bit error rate estimation and message transmission, and the phase state, used for eavesdropping detection. The proposed protocol can transmit multiple bits of information through a single quantum state.
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Taiwan Builds AI Language Model to Counter China's Influence

Taiwan's government has invested about $7.4 million in the development of an AI language model free of China's political influence. The Trustworthy AI Dialogue Engine (Taide) could position Taiwan further up the AI development chain and serve as an alternative for governments and companies reluctant to put private data into ChatGPT. Taide's developers are licensing content from local media outlets and government agencies and adding it to Meta's open source large language model Llama 2. The content will be in the traditional Chinese characters used in Taiwan. Select partners will be able to test an early version of Taide in April.
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3D-Printed Electronic Skin Replicates the Flexibility, Sensitivity of Human Skin

3D-printed electronic skin embedded with electronic and thermal biosensing capabilities that mimic the ability of human skin to sense and stretch has been created by Texas A&M University researchers. The team introduced a "triple-crosslinking" strategy to enhance the hydrogel-based system, addressing stiffness concerns and facilitating signal transduction for improved interaction with the body's tissues. The ability of nanoengineered hydrogels to reduce viscosity under shear stress enables smoother handling and manipulation, vital for constructing intricate 2D and 3D electronic structures.
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Surveillance Tech Catches Students Vaping

Air quality sensors increasingly are being used to crack down on vaping in school bathrooms, often in conjunction with surveillance cameras to identify the students and impose punishments. Some schools used federal COVID-19 emergency relief money to purchase the sensors, given that indoor air quality monitoring was deemed an approved use for the funds.
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Life-Saving 'Robot Medics' for Triage in High-Risk Places

Researchers at the U.K.'s University of Sheffield developed an uncrewed ground vehicle (UGV) outfitted with robotic arms to serve as a medic in disaster and conflict zones. The mobile remote-operated UGV uses VR technology to allow doctors to perform medical triage without physically entering high-risk areas. The robotic medic can perform a thorough examination of a victim within 20 minutes, using its two robotic arms to check vital signs, palpate the abdomen, and provide pain treatments with an auto-injector.
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Ingenuity Ends Its Mars Mission

The Ingenuity robotic helicopter has been decommissioned after 72 flight missions in Mars' atmosphere. Ingenuity remains in contact with its companion, the Perseverance rover, which has been exploring a dried-up riverbed for signs of extinct Martian life. The Ingenuity team at NASA will conduct a few final tests on its systems and download images and data remaining in the helicopter’s memory.
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Wearable Device Monitors Tumor Size

A wearable device developed by researchers at Taiwan's National Tsing Hua University could allow for real-time continuous tracking of tumor size. The device, a flexible sticker that clings to the skin, transmits data to an app to monitor how well the tumor is responding to treatment. Made from soft and stretchy plastic, the device features spindle-shaped particles comprised of oxygen and hafnium that each are about 100 nanometers long. The nanoparticles rearrange and their electrical properties change as the tumor grows.
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iPhone Apps Secretly Harvest Data When They Send Notifications

Security researchers at the app development firm Mysk Inc. found that some iPhone apps are using notifications to get around Apple's privacy rules governing the collection of user data. The researchers said the data being collected through notification appears related to analytics, advertising, and tracking users across different apps and devices. The use of notifications for gathering user data also gets around the practice of closing apps to prevent them from background data collection.
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Impact of AI on Software Development

An analysis of 153 million lines of code changed by GitClear, a developer analytics tool built in Seattle, found that "code churn,” or the percentage of lines thrown out less than two weeks after being authored, is on the rise. It also found that the percentage of “copy/pasted code” is increasing faster than “updated,” “deleted,” or “moved” code. Said GitClear’s Bill Harding, “In this regard, the composition of AI-generated code is similar to a short-term developer that doesn’t thoughtfully integrate their work into the broader project.”
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Programming Light Propagation Creates Highly-Efficient Neural Networks

A team led by researchers at Switzerland's École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne developed an optical neural network framework that combines light propagation within multimode fibers with a small number of digitally programmable parameters. In terms of image classification tasks, the optical neural network's performance was on par with that of fully digital systems with more than 100 times more programmable parameters. The framework is based on wavefront shaping, which enables nonlinear optical computations using just microwatts of average optical power.
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