Welcome to the February 14, 2022, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.

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ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient Judea Pearl was named to receive the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award. AI Pioneer Judea Pearl Receives BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award
UCLA Samueli School of Engineering
February 11, 2022


Judea Pearl at the University of California, Los Angeles has received Spain's 2021 Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the information and communication technologies category "for laying the foundations of modern artificial intelligence, so computer systems can process uncertainty and relate causes to effects." Pearl, a recipient of ACM's A.M. Turing Award, invented Bayesian networks, which enable computers to account for uncertainty, as well as a causation calculus that allows empirical scientists to measure and extract cause-and-effect relationships from statistical data and auxiliary knowledge. "Beyond its broader impact across science and engineering, this formulation is playing a critical role in current research in fairness in machine learning algorithms," the BBVA Foundation said.

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Fingerprinting the IoT
Carnegie Mellon University College of Engineering News
Madison Brewer
February 9, 2022


Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers strengthened the security of Internet of Things (IoT) devices by making them more resilient against exploitation through their development of radio-frequency fingerprinting (RFF). RFF can be used to identify specific IoT devices by detecting hardware variations that produce unique radio wave signatures. CMU's Jiachen Xu used power amplifiers to foil RFF exploits by changing the IoT signal's features, and a convolutional neural network classified incoming signals as safe or unsafe by assessing the RFF in the processed signal. The researchers also proved Bayesian neural networks could identify and classify RFF quickly and accurately, without requiring excessive computational power.

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Neutrophil segmentation using the proposed system with ACME software. Computer Vision System Designed to Analyze Cells in Microscopy Videos
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (Spain)
February 10, 2022


An international team of researchers has developed a computer vision system that can automatically analyze cells in biomedical videos captured through microscopy. The system incorporates deep neural networks, statistical techniques, and geometric models. Ivan González Díaz at Spain's Universidad Carlos III de Madrid said the system offers improved precision and speed. "It is not feasible to keep an expert biologist segmenting and tracking cells on video for months," he said. "On the other hand, to provide an approximate idea (because it depends on the number of cells and 3D [three-dimensional] volume depth), our system only takes 15 minutes to analyze a five-minute video." Scientists using this method discovered that neutrophil immune cells behave differently in the blood during inflammation, and one variety appears to be connected to the development of cardiovascular disease.

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Black Patients More Than Twice as Likely to Be Described Negatively in Medical Records
UChicago News
Alison Caldwell
February 9, 2022


Researchers at University of Chicago Medicine mined electronic health records with a machine learning algorithm to find that Black patients were much more likely to be described in a negative fashion. The algorithm searched the records of over 18,000 adult patients, including more than 40,000 history and physical notes, for sentences containing negative descriptors like "resistant" or "noncompliant." The researchers applied natural language processing to break down the contexts in which the terms were used to negatively describe patients or their behavior. Black patients were 2.54 times as likely as white patients to have at least one negative descriptor in their records; negative descriptors also were more frequently used to describe unmarried patients, and those receiving government insurance.

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European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen at a meeting of the College of Commissioners at EU headquarters in Brussels. EU Chip Production Plan Aims to Ease Dependency on Asia
Associated Press
Raf Casert
February 8, 2022


The EU has announced a $48-billion plan to curtail its reliance on Asia for semiconductors as part of its Chips Act. European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said the plan will integrate research, design, and testing, and coordinate European and national investment in chip production capabilities. The Chips Act will combine public and private funds, and accommodate state aid to launch the investments. Von der Leyen aspires to grow the bloc's share of the global semiconductor market from 9% to 20% by 2030, which "means basically quadrupling our efforts," given the sector is projected to double over that period. She said the plan will infuse another $17 billion in public and private investment into funds already pledged in the EU budget.

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A 46-inch woven display with smart sensors, energy harvesting, and storage integrated into the fabric. Scientists Develop Fully Woven Smart Display
University of Cambridge (U.K.)
February 10, 2022


An international team of researchers led by the U.K.'s University of Cambridge has fabricated a fully woven prototype smart textile display with active electronic, sensing, energy, and photonic functions incorporated directly into the weave. The researchers coated each fiber element with materials that are sufficiently elastic for textile-manufacturing equipment, and braided some of them for better reliability and durability. They also linked multiple components together via conductive adhesives and laser welding. The resulting fabric can function as a display, monitor inputs, retain energy for later use, and detect radio-frequency signals, touch, light, and temperature. Said Cambridge’s Jong min Kim, “This is a step towards the full exploitation of sustainable, convenient e-fibers and e-textiles in daily applications. And it’s only the beginning.”

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How NFL's Digital Athlete Uses AI to Reduce Concussions, Injuries
New Scientist
February 13, 2022


The National Football League (NFL) and Amazon Web Services have created the Digital Athlete, an artificial intelligence tool that uses TV imagery and sensors in football attire to help reduce injuries in American football games. The system generates a digital replica of an athlete in a virtual environment and uses machine learning and computer vision to identify impacts and injuries to his/her virtual body. Priya Ponnapalli at Amazon Machine Learning Solutions Lab said the virtual setting allows limitless game scenarios and environmental conditions to be experienced, "giving the ability to test out new safety equipment, test out rule changes, and predict player injury events and recovery trajectories eventually." Said the NFL's Jeff Miller, "Having the computers understand how many times a player hits his helmet during the course of a game [helps] find ways to reduce the amount of helmet contact."

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ML Highly Effective at Identifying SARS-CoV-2 Variants
News-Medical Life Sciences
Priyom Bose
February 9, 2022


The machine learning (ML)-based KEVOLVE method can efficiently identify severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) variant-specific genomic signatures, according to research by Canadian scientists. The approach involves identifying motifs in a restricted set of nucleotide sequences; using the motifs to construct prediction models and evaluating them against a large set of SARS-CoV-2 sequences; analyzing KEVOLVE-identified motifs to emphasize their potential biological functions, and analyzing a target variant with this technique. KEVOLVE outperformed several benchmark reference statistical tools in identifying variant-discriminative signatures. Analysis of KEVOLVE-identified variant-discrimination motifs found omicron to be the most divergent SARS-CoV-2 mutation, compared to other variants. The researchers said benefits of the ML approach include not needing to rely on multiple sequence alignments, and the ability to apply the approach to different groups of viruses.

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Remote Sensing Technology Reduces Urban Air Pollution
University of Technology Sydney (Australia)
February 2, 2022


Researchers at Australia's University of Technology Sydney (UTS), the Hong Kong Environmental Protection Department, and the Hong Kong Vocational Training Council found that a city’s use of a remote emissions sensing system, in combination with programs to inspect and repair high-polluting vehicles, could significantly improve that city’s air quality. Analysis determined that Hong Kong’s remote sensing enforcement program led to significant, ongoing reduction in air pollution levels. "Targeting the small portion of high emitters for vehicle emission control significantly reduces the repair cost and time for both the government and vehicle owners, compared to passive sampling or periodic inspection," said UTS' Yuhan Huang.

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TAE's C2W Norman device carries out fusion at temperatures reaching tens of millions of degrees. Fusion Race Kicked Into High Gear by Smart Tech
BBC News
Paul Rincon
February 10, 2022


U.S. company TAE Technologies is stepping up the race to practical fusion energy by tapping Google's machine learning (ML) expertise to enhance its self-improving software. The ML expertise is used to optimize TAE's 100-foot-long fusion cylinder, where fast-moving particles are fused within plasma. TAE's Michl Binderbauer said, "We can now optimize in fractions of an afternoon" tasks that previously took two months. ML also is used to reconstruct what happens during fusion experiments, by pulling together multiple strands of data. Jeremy Chittenden at the U.K.'s Imperial College London said TAE's work differs from other fusion experiments by firing external particle beams into plasma to generate particles, rather than relying on the heat of the plasma itself.

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NFTs Offer Method to Control Personal Health Information
Baylor College of Medicine
Molly Chiu
February 3, 2022


Nonfungible tokens (NFTs) could be re-engineered to help patients control access to their personal health information, according to an international team of researchers led by Baylor College of Medicine bioethicists. The researchers propose using NFT digital contracts to allow patients to specify who may access their personal health information, and permit them to monitor how it is shared. "NFTs could be used to democratize health data and help individuals regain control and participate more in decisions about who can see and use their health information," said Baylor's Kristin Kostick-Quenet. The researchers acknowledged NFTs' complexity and susceptibility to data security flaws, privacy issues, and disagreements over intellectual property rights, as areas warranting further inquiry.

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Magnetic swirls called skyrmions fluctuate randomly in size, a behavior that can be harnessed to generate true random numbers. Researchers Use Tiny Magnetic Swirls to Generate True Random Numbers
News from Brown
February 7, 2022


Magnetic anomalies that manifest in two-dimensional (2D) materials can be harnessed to produce true random numbers, according to Brown University physicists. When 2D materials are excited by electricity or a magnetic field, some electron spins flip with rising energy levels, forming a magnetic whirlpool or skyrmion. The researchers used magnetic thin films containing defects or pinning centers that hold skyrmions in place, causing random fluctuations measured via changes in the voltage that propagates across the material. The team tapped those voltage changes to generate strings of random numbers, which Brown's Gang Xiao said could be used to create "potentially as many as 10 million digits per second."

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Computing and the National Science Foundation, 1950-2016: Building a Foundation for Modern Computing
 
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