Welcome to the March 30, 2022, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
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Turing Award Won by Programmer Who Paved Way for Supercomputers
The New York Times
Cade Metz
March 30, 2022
ACM has named Jack Dongarra recipient of this year's Turing Award for his work on basic concepts and code that enabled software to keep up with hardware inside the most powerful computers. In the 1970s, Dongarra helped write the Linpack software library, which offered a means for running complex mathematics on what eventually were called supercomputers. "Basically, these are the algorithms you need when you're tackling problems in engineering, physics, natural science, or economics," said the University of Southern California's Ewa Deelman. In the 1990s, Dongarra co-created the Linpack benchmark, a test for quantifying a supercomputer's power, based on the number of calculations it could run per second. Said Argonne National Laboratory's Paul Messina, "People in science often say: 'If you can't measure it, you don't know what it is.' That's why Jack's work is important."
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Computer Made From DNA-Coated Beads Could Detect Viruses in Saliva
New Scientist
Carissa Wong
March 28, 2022
Emory University's Khalid Salaita and colleagues built a computer from DNA-coated glass microbeads that could massively boost parallel processing power. The beads either roll or stall on the surface of a gold substrate, depending on how the DNA strands engage with matching RNA molecules affixed to the chip's surface; rolling and stalling are equivalent to outputs of 1 and 0, respectively. The computation's results can be detected by tracking the beads' motion using a smartphone camera with an attached magnifying glass, which Salaita estimated takes 15 minutes. Adding a DNA "lock complex" into the computer enabled the presence or absence of a specific DNA molecule to control bead movement. Salaita said, "One hundred-fold is a conservative estimate of how much more parallel processing we can do with our DNA computer compared to ones that use fluorescent labels."
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Researchers Protect Solar Technologies from Cyberattack
UGA Today
Mike Wooten
March 28, 2022
University of Georgia (UGA) researchers unveiled a sensor system that watches power electronic converters at solar energy farms for signs of cyberattack in real time. The system can detect anomalies in a converter's operations using just one voltage sensor and one current sensor, applying deep learning methods to differentiate between normal conditions, open-circuit faults, short-circuit faults, and cyberattacks. A passive sensor linked to the power converter gathers data on electrical waveforms and feeds it to a computer monitor, and unusual activity is detectable in the converter's electrical current, even if the firewall or security software misses an attack. The system also can diagnose the nature of a problem, and the researchers said it can identify cyberattacks in a solar farm model more proficiently than current techniques.
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3D-Printed Tablets Offer Taste of Personalized Medicine
New Atlas
Nick Lavars
March 27, 2022
Researchers at the U.K.'s University College London (UCL) have demonstrated that three-dimensional (3D) printing could be used to produce personalized medicines, with dosages and drug combinations customized for a patient's needs. Building on the 3D-printing technique of vat photopolymerization, the new method, known as volumetric 3D printing, uses light during printing to form a resin containing dissolved drugs and a photoreactive chemical into a tablet. By curing the entire resin structure at the same time rather than extruding the resin layer by layer, the researchers shortened printing time to as little as seven seconds (it took 17 seconds to produce 3D-printed tablets containing paracetamol). UCL's Alvaro Goyanes said, "This technology could be a game changer for the pharmaceutical industry."
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Quantum Sensors: Measuring Even More Precisely
University of Innsbruck (Austria)
March 23, 2022
Physicists at Austria's University of Innsbruck and the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the Austrian Academy of Sciences have developed the first programmable quantum sensor. Using variational quantum algorithms, the researchers were able to optimize a quantum sensor so it can autonomously identify optimal settings. The method enables precision close to the optimum possible according to the laws of nature, with a minor increase in overhead, according to the researchers. University of Innsbruck's Christian Marciniak said, "In the development of quantum computers, we have learned to create tailored entangled states. We are now using this knowledge to build better sensors." The researchers used an ion trap quantum computer to perform frequency measurements based on variational quantum calculations, and confirmed the necessary parameters on a supercomputer at the University of Innsbruck.
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Engineers Build Robot to Perform Surgery Without a Doctor
Baltimore Sun
Meredith Cohn
March 22, 2022
Engineers at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and Children's National Hospital have developed the Smart Tissue Autonomous Robot (STAR) to perform surgical procedures without human intervention. The STAR is run by a computer algorithm that creates three-dimensional images through cameras, and perceives pressure from breathing, bleeding, and soft tissue with lasers and sensors. The robot executes about one stitch per minute, and tests have so far indicated its stitches are more consistent than those made by human surgeons. JHU's Jin Kang said surgeons and other surgical staff still would perform procedures like removing diseased tissue, before handing a patient off to STAR to close and suture.
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AI Method Could Find Precious Rare-earth Compounds
ScienceAlert
David Nield
March 23, 2022
A predictive machine learning (ML) artificial intelligence system developed by researchers at Iowa State (ISU) and Texas A&M universities could enhance the search for new rare-earth compounds. "It's not really meant to discover a particular compound," said ISU's Yaroslav Mudryk. "It was, ‘how do we design a new approach or a new tool for discovery and prediction of rare-earth compounds?’" The researchers constructed the model using a rare-earth database and concepts from density functional theory, enabling rapid testing of hundreds of permutations, followed by assessment of each result’s phase stability. They supplemented these calculations with online data found via custom-made algorithms, prior to validation and multiple checks.
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Videos Show RNA Switching 'On' and 'Off'
Northwestern Now
Amanda Morris
March 28, 2022
Scientists at Northwestern University and the University at Albany have created video simulations of RNA switches (riboswitches) turning genes "on" and "off" via strand displacement. The reconstructing RNA dynamics from data (R2D2) simulation three-dimensionally models RNA as it performs this genetic switching. R2D2 records data on RNA folding as the RNA is being generated, then uses computational tools to sift and structure the data, showing where the RNA folds and what happens after it does. The videos modeled a riboswitch from the Bacillus subtilis bacterium, indicating the riboswitch probably communicates downstream through strand displacement. The researchers believe their findings could impact the design of new RNA-based diagnostics and RNA-targeting drugs that treat illness and disease.
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Climate Groups Say Change in Coding Can Reduce Bitcoin Energy Consumption by 99%
The Guardian (U.K.)
Dominic Rushe
March 29, 2022
Climate groups have launched a campaign urging bitcoin miners to change how they create the cryptocurrency, in order to reduce the energy requirements of the process. Bitcoin's "proof of work" software uses vast computer arrays to validate and secure transactions, while competing cryptocurrency ethereum is transitioning to a "proof of stake" system that the company thinks will slash its energy expenditure by 99%. The ethereum model requires miners to pledge their coins to confirm transactions, and exacts penalties for inaccurate information. Chris Larsen at crypto company Ripple warns bitcoin's code "incentivizes maximum energy use" in lieu of a basic change. The campaign's organizers are taking legal action against proposed mining sites, and using their memberships to urge bitcoin's top investors and influencers to demand a code change.
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'Momentum Computing' Pushes Technology's Thermodynamic Limits
Scientific American
Philips Ball
March 29, 2022
The University of California, Davis' James Crutchfield and Kyle Ray have proposed a computational method for dissipating a small fraction of the heat generated by conventional computer circuitry. The researchers say encoding information in electric currents within the momentum of moving particles, rather than as pulses of charge, could push heat dissipation below computer technology's theoretical thermodynamic minimum. The concept is that a bit-encoding particle's momentum can supply a form of memory "for free" because it conveys data about the particle's past and future motion, not just its instantaneous state. The additional data can be harnessed for reversible computing, and logical operations must occur much faster than the duration of the bit entering thermal equilibrium with its surroundings.
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Security Tool Guarantees Privacy in Surveillance Footage
MIT News
Rachel Gordon
March 28, 2022
A multi-institutional group of researchers has developed a system that can better guarantee privacy in video footage from surveillance cameras. When analysts submit video data queries, the Privid system adds noise to the result to prevent identification of individuals. Instead of running code over the entire video, Privid parses the video and runs code over each segment; the segments are aggregated with noise added, while data about the result's error bound also is provided. Privid lets analysts use their own deep neural networks to analyze the video, and make queries that the system's designers did not expect. The system was found to be accurate within 79% to 99% of a non-private system across different videos and queries.
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Using ML to Create Materials That Enable Energy-efficient Electronics
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Greta Harrison
March 28, 2022
Researchers at the University of Southern California Viterbi School of Engineering (USC Viterbi) have developed a machine learning framework to model optical manipulation of materials at an unprecedented scale. The team simulated light control of lead titanate, a ferroelectric material that has an innate electronic polarization. "By training the machine learning model to learn how the material behaves in response to a strong laser, we can perform our simulation on supercomputers," said USC Viterbi's Ken-ichi Nomura. Typical simulations of this phenomenon usually simulate just a few hundred atoms, but the new technique can generate a model with over 1 billion atoms.
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Speed Limit of Computers Detected
Graz University of Technology (Austria)
Christoph Pelzl
March 25, 2022
At Germany's Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics and Austria's Vienna (TU Wien) and Graz Universities of Technology, researchers have determined that a microchip's maximum signal transmission speed is about 1 petahertz (1 million gigahertz), roughly 100,000 times faster than current transistors. The researchers focused on increasing the switching signals of transistors to increase the speed of data transmission. They applied an ultra-short laser pulse with frequency in the extreme UV range to a lithium fluoride sample and found that by putting the electrons in the lithium fluoride into a more energetic state, the material became an electrical conductor for a brief period. The excited electrons were steered in a desired direction with a second laser pulse that lasted slightly longer. TU Wien's Joachim Burgförder said, "At about 1 petahertz there is an upper limit for controlled optoelectronic processes."
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