Welcome to the January 31, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• India's Ancient Carpet Weaving Industry Meets AI
• Neuralink Implants Chip in Human Brain
• Bob Kahn Awarded IEEE Medal of Honor
• One of ’Net's Oldest Software Archives Is Shutting Down
• Sleuths Use Technology to Find Fakery, Plagiarism in Published Research
• Canon to Ship Low-Cost 'Stamp' Chipmaking Machines
• Battery-Free Sensor Harnesses the Power of Speech
• Focused Cuts, Fewer Layers: New Phase of Tech Layoffs
• Companies Need Human ‘Robot Wranglers'
• Offshore Wind Farms Vulnerable to Cyberattacks
• Researchers Map Genomes of Dozens of Animals
• Coal: Don’t Burn It, Compute with It
• Robot Surgeon to Slice Through Fake Human Flesh on ISS

India's Ancient Carpet Weaving Industry Meets AI

Carpet weavers in India's Kashmir region have incorporated AI into their design process, shortening completion times from more than six months to around six weeks. The traditional design process involves a designer producing a carpet design, an expert incorporating the ancient symbolic code known as talim into the design, and several weavers translating the code in small sections. Now, computer software can handle the design and code creation, while weaving and knotting are still done by hand.
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Neuralink Implants Chip in Human Brain

A human that received an implant from brain-chip startup Neuralink is recovering well, according to founder Elon Musk. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave the company clearance last year for its first trial testing its implant on humans. The process involves using a robot to surgically insert the wires of the implant into a part of the brain related to movement. "The device is designed to interpret a person's neural activity, so they can operate a computer or smartphone by simply intending to move," Neuralink said.
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Bob Kahn Awarded IEEE Medal of Honor

ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate Robert E. Kahn, one of the "fathers of the Internet," has been awarded with the 2024 IEEE Medal of Honor. The IEEE Foundation cited Kahn’s work in packet communication technologies and foundations of the Internet as the basis for the award. Kahn, along with IEEE Life Fellow Vint Cerf, developed the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP), the core architecture of the Internet, in 1973. Kahn and Cerf founded the non-profit Internet Society in 1992.
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One of ’Net's Oldest Software Archives Is Shutting Down

New Mexico State University will close its Hobbes OS/2 Archive on April 15. Hobbes has served as a resource for users of the IBM OS/2 operating system and its successors since at least 1992, making it one of the Internet's oldest software archives. It features games, applications, utilities, software, development tools, documentation, and server software back to OS/2's 1987 launch. The Internet Archive's Jason Scott noted that the files hosted on Hobbes have been mirrored elsewhere.
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Sleuths Use Technology to Find Fakery, Plagiarism in Published Research

The announcement that Harvard Medical School-affiliated Dana-Farber Cancer Institute has requested that certain scientific papers be retracted and corrected in response to a U.K. blogger's claims of image manipulation highlights the work being done by amateur sleuths to help maintain scientific integrity. Technology has made it easier for these amateur investigators, who download scientific papers and use software and oversized monitors to spot images that have been flipped, duplicated, and stretched.
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Canon to Ship Low-Cost 'Stamp' Chipmaking Machines

Canon, the Japanese camera and printer manufacturer, plans to begin shipping low-cost chipmaking machines as early as this year. The machines use Canon's "nanoimprint lithography" technology, which stamps chip designs onto silicon wafers. Canon said its machines will be less expensive and use up to 90% less power than light-based extreme ultraviolet (EUV) machines from the Netherlands' ASML, which use EUV light to etch designs on silicon wafers.
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Battery-Free Sensor Harnesses the Power of Speech

A battery-free sensor developed by researchers at Switzerland's ETH Zurich reacts to sound waves, which produce enough vibrational energy to power an electronic device. The sensor incorporates passive speech recognition and is activated whenever a certain word is spoken, or a particular tone or noise is generated. Sound waves cause the sensor to vibrate enough that it generates an electrical pulse that switches on an electronic device.
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Focused Cuts, Fewer Layers: New Phase of Tech Layoffs

Big tech firms started the year by shifting from widespread layoffs to smaller, targeted cuts as they reduce their project load and shifted resources, while some startups made deeper cuts to survive. This comes as more executives acknowledge that they over-hired during the pandemic. Layoffs.fyi reported that as many as 260,000 jobs were cut by more than 1,000 tech companies last year. During the past 30 days, roughly 100 tech firms laid off about 25,000 workers.
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Companies Need Human ‘Robot Wranglers'

Companies are finding that the robots they increasingly depend on need help from human co-workers to learn how to function in the real world. These “robot wranglers" set the automatons on the right path when they wander off and bridge the gap between the warehouses of the past and the automated facilities of the future. They also help employees learn how to work with the robots, and how to see them as a help rather than a hindrance or a threat to their careers.
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Offshore Wind Farms Vulnerable to Cyberattacks

Researchers at Canada's Concordia University and the Hydro-Quebec Research Institute studied the cybersecurity risks associated with offshore wind farms, specifically those using voltage-source-converter high-voltage direct-current (VSC-HVDC) connections. In simulations, the researchers found that cyberattacks could cause blackouts or equipment damage by prompting poorly dampened power oscillations that are amplified by the HVDC system and spread to the main grid.
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Researchers Map Genomes of Dozens of Animals

A team led by researchers at Johns Hopkins University (JHU), in collaboration with the Vertebrate Genomes Project, sequenced the genomes of 51 vertebrate species. They reduced the sequencing time from months to days by developing new algorithms and open source software. In tests on the genome of the zebra finch, which had been sequenced previously, the researchers found the new technology produced a more accurate and complete genome map.
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Coal: Don’t Burn It, Compute with It

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Technology Laboratory, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. developed a method for creating ultrathin insulating films for semiconductors using coal. The resulting material, which features coal layered with graphene and molybdenum disulfide semiconductors, outperformed metal oxide and crystalline 2D insulators.
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Robot Surgeon to Slice Through Fake Human Flesh on ISS

A two-pound surgical robot from the medical startup Virtual Incision was aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that launched Jan. 30 as part of NASA's Northrop Grumman 20th Commercial Resupply Mission to the International Space Station (ISS). The MIRA (Miniaturized In-vivo Robotic Assistant) robot will undergo tests to assess its ability to perform surgeries in low Earth orbit. MIRA, equipped with two controllable arms, will complete tasks that simulate surgical movements, like cutting through stretched rubber bands (an alternative to human tissue).
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