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

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• Prosthetic Enables Users to ‘Sense’ Temperature Difference
• UN Women Statement for International Day for Women and Girls in Science
• Blood Vessels Made with 3D-Printed Ice
• TikTok Removes Feature That Critics Used to Study Israel-Gaza War Videos
• Tech Giants Turn Ukraine into AI War Lab
• ASML Shows Off 165-Ton Machine Behind AI Shift
• Tiny Quadrotor Learns to Fly in 18 Seconds
• Computer Scientists Find Gaps in Privacy Practices of Political Campaign Websites
• Tech's Role in the Presentation of the Super Bowl
• Most Distant Space Probe Jeopardized by Glitch
• Attacks in the Metaverse Are Booming. Police Start to Pay Attention
• The Friar Who Became the Vatican’s Go-To Guy on AI

Prosthetic Enables Users to ‘Sense’ Temperature Difference

A prosthetic device created by researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne and colleagues allows people with amputations to experience temperature sensations. The team created the MiniTouch device, which places a temperature sensor on someone’s prosthetic hand at the location where phantom thermal sensations seem to arise. An amputee fitted with the device was able to distinguish between identical-looking bottles containing cold, hot, or room-temperature water with 100% accuracy.
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UN Women Statement for International Day for Women and Girls in Science

Sunday marked the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, an annual observance adopted by the UN General Assembly to promote the full, equal access and participation of women in STEM fields. Currently, women make up 29.2% of all STEM workers, compared to 49.3% across non-STEM occupations. Highlighting the discrepancy, UN Women wrote, "Both representation and retention of women are essential for the science and digital technology sectors to be more creative, innovative, and profitable, reflecting issues that matter to women."
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Blood Vessels Made with 3D-Printed Ice

Philip LeDuc and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University developed a technique that uses 3D printers to create a mold of the interior of an organ’s blood vessels in ice. In tests, the molds were embedded in a gelatine material that hardens when exposed to ultraviolet light, before the ice melted away. The resulting delicate, hollow network left space for the intricate artificial blood vessels required to develop lab-grown internal organs.
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TikTok Removes Feature That Critics Used to Study Israel-Gaza War Videos

TikTok has stopped displaying the number of views for videos with a specific hashtag, in response to research showing significant viewership differences between videos with hashtags for pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian content. The change by the social media platform, which had faced criticism for improperly boosting pro-Palestinian content, means hashtag searches now display only the number of related TikTok posts.
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Tech Giants Turn Ukraine into AI War Lab

The future of warfare is being piloted in Ukraine, which has been turned into a sort of lab by technology companies. AI software from data analytics firm Palantir Technologies, for example, is “responsible for most of the targeting in Ukraine,” according to CEO Alex Karp. Tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have worked to protect Ukraine from Russian cyberattacks, migrate critical government data to the cloud, and keep the country connected.
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ASML Shows Off 165-Ton Machine Behind AI Shift

Dutch semiconductor maker ASML Holding NV on Friday gave media outlets a tour of its latest chipmaking machine, a €350-million (U.S.$377-million) piece of equipment weighing 165 tons that can print lines on semiconductors 8 nanometers thick, 1.7 times smaller than the previous generation. ASML executives said the system will prove essential for artificial intelligence, a technology notorious for the intensity of the processing it requires.
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Tiny Quadrotor Learns to Fly in 18 Seconds

Using deep reinforcement learning and a MacBook Pro, researchers at New York University and the UAE's Technology Innovation Institute taught a tiny off-the-shelf quadrotor to achieve stable flight in just 18 seconds. During that time, the quadrotor also was taught to fly specific trajectories. The open source system is available on GitHub.
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Computer Scientists Find Gaps in Privacy Practices of Political Campaign Websites

A study by computer scientists at The College of William and Mary in Virginia, Google, and IBM revealed that interacting with political campaign websites puts people's personal information at risk. The analysis of 2,060 U.S. House, Senate, and presidential campaigns during the 2020 election cycle found that political campaign websites typically had incomplete or no privacy disclosures, retained private data for an unspecified time period, generally shared data with other campaigns, and even sold the data after the election.
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Tech's Role in the Presentation of the Super Bowl

Broadcaster CBS used technology to boost its presentation of Sunday’s Super Bowl LVIII game between the Kansas City Chiefs and San Francisco 49ers, which was won by the former. Six 4K "doink" cameras were placed in each goalpost, each with zoom and super-slow-motion capabilities to show kicks. There were also augmented reality cameras that both CBS and Nickelodeon used. The Nickelodeon kid-friendly broadcast featured animated characters SpongeBob SquarePants and Patrick Star calling the game with commentators Noah Eagle and Nate Burleson.
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Most Distant Space Probe Jeopardized by Glitch

Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory have not received telemetry data from the Voyager 1 space probe since a Nov. 14 computer glitch in its Flight Data Subsystem (FDS). They believe the problem involves corrupted memory in the FDS, but without the telemetry data, they cannot identify the root cause. Said Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd, "It would be the biggest miracle if we get it back. We certainly haven't given up."
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Attacks in the Metaverse Are Booming. Police Start to Pay Attention

Law enforcement is paying closer attention to reports of attacks, harassment, and sexual assault in virtual environments. The Zero Abuse Project received a grant from the U.S. Department of Justice to educate state and local police on crimes committed in VR. There are concerns about the psychological impact of harassment in VR, but legal precedent would need a significant overhaul for virtual crimes to be prosecuted.
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The Friar Who Became the Vatican’s Go-To Guy on AI

Father Paolo Benanti, an ordained priest and ethics professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University, the Harvard of Rome’s pontifical universities, is the Vatican and the Italian government’s go-to AI ethicist. In recent weeks, he has joined Bill Gates at a meeting with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and met with Vatican officials to further Pope Francis’s aim of protecting the vulnerable from technological overreach. Father Benanti believes the AI industry is incapable of self-regulation and needs restraints to prevent the development of systems that will deepen inequality.
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