Master's Degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering
 
Welcome to the May 2, 2022, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.

ACM TechNews mobile apps are available for Android phones and tablets (click here) and for iPhones (click here) and iPads (click here).

To view "Headlines At A Glance," hit the link labeled "Click here to view this online" found at the top of the page in the html version. The online version now has a button at the top labeled "Show Headlines."

A smartphone user can image the eye using the RGB selfie camera and the front-facing near-infrared camera included for facial recognition. 'Eye-Catching' Smartphone App Could Make It Easy to Screen for Neurological Disease at Home
UC San Diego News Center
Liezel Labios
April 29, 2022


University of California, San Diego (UCSD) researchers have enabled screening for neurological diseases through an eye-scanning smartphone application. The app employs the near-infrared camera built into many newer smartphones in combination with a conventional selfie camera to measure changes in the pupil's diameter, which could be used to evaluate a person's cognitive condition. The infrared camera allows the app to estimate pupil size with sub-millimeter accuracy across various eye colors, while the selfie camera records the stereoscopic distance between smartphone and user. Said UCSD's Colin Berry, “We hope that this opens the door to novel explorations of using smartphones to detect and monitor potential health problems earlier on.”

Full Article
Reforming Coral Reefs Using 3D Printing
Bar-Ilan University (Israel)
May 1, 2022


Researchers at Israel's Bar-Ilan University, Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, University of Haifa, and Tel Aviv University have developed a three-dimensional (3D) printing technique to help preserve coral reefs. The process incorporates 3D-scanning algorithms to analyze underwater photographs of coral reefs, environmental DNA sampling of the reef's organisms, and a 3D-printing algorithm that tailors the printed model to a specific reef environment. The 3D-printed reef is comprised of a type of ceramic that is naturally porous underwater. Said Bar-Ilan University's Natalie Levy, "Existing artificial reefs have difficulty replicating the complexity of coral habitats and hosting reef species that mirror natural environments. We introduce a novel customizable 3D interface for producing scalable structures, utilizing real data collected from coral ecosystems."

Full Article

A view of an exhibit at the Arcadia Earth immersive environmental art exhibition. AR Exhibit in New York Looks at Impact of Climate Change
Reuters
Roselle Chen
April 29, 2022


The Arcadia Earth immersive environmental art exhibit in New York City utilizes augmented reality (AR) to raise viewers’ awareness about the impact of climate change. Visitors wear a HoloLens AR headset that enhances installations and relays environmental facts during the tour. The AR tour was developed with metaverse platform company Enklu, and highlights ecosystems such as forests and the open ocean, as well as environmental problems like single-use plastic waste and overfishing. "The intention is to inspire people to come and ... to deliver a message," said founder, Valentino Vettori. "I really think that this technique, it's super fun and will work for everybody."

Full Article

MIT researchers used the RISP method to predict the action sequence, joint stiffness, or movement of an articulated hand like this one from a target image or video. A One-Up on Motion Capture
MIT News
Lauren Hinkel
April 29, 2022


Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and IBM researchers developed the rendering invariant state-prediction (RISP) neural network pipeline to eliminate pitfalls of motion capture by inferring environmental factors, actions, physical systemic characteristics, and control parameters. MIT's Tao Du said the method can "reconstruct a digital twin from a video of a dynamic system," which requires researchers "to ignore the rendering variances from the video clips and try to grasp of the core information about the dynamic system or the dynamic motion." RISP converts differences in images (pixels) into differences in systemic states, embedding generalizability and agnosticism in rendering configurations. RISP outperformed other techniques in simulations of four physical systems of rigid and deformable bodies—a quadrotor, a cube, an articulated hand, and a rod—and can accommodate imitation learning.

Full Article

Using artificial intelligence to draft product reviews can assist writers, marketers and consumers. Everyone Has Opinions, Even AI
Dartmouth College
David Hirsch
April 25, 2022


Dartmouth College computer scientists trained an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm to produce opinionated product reviews. They trained the algorithm on thousands of published wine and beer reviews, then had it generate its own human-like reviews of such products. With the help of faculty at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business, review-writing code was developed to turn the algorithm into a marketing tool. Said Tuck's Prasad Vana, "Using [AI] to write and synthesize reviews can create efficiencies on both sides of the marketplace. The hope is that AI can benefit reviewers facing larger writing workloads and consumers who have to sort through so much content about products."

Full Article
Engineers Develop Control Electronics for Quantum Computers That Improve Performance, Cut Costs
FermiLab
April 29, 2022


The Quantum Instrumentation Control Kit developed by engineers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FermiLab) and the University of Chicago can enhance quantum computer performance while reducing control/readout electronics' cost. The researchers created a field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based controller for quantum computing experiments, and reduced the size of an equipment rack to that of a single electronics board that can interoperate with many types of superconducting quantum bits (qubits). The radio frequency (RF) board and FPGA controller can control eight qubits in their simplest iteration, and combining all RF elements in one board increases operational speed and precision, allowing real-time feedback and error correction.

Full Article
Ordinary Copper Telephone Wire Could Carry Gigabit Broadband Speeds
New Scientist
Matthew Sparkes
April 26, 2022


Ergin Dinc and colleagues at the U.K.'s University of Cambridge claim copper telephone wire already deployed across Britain can carry data at rates three times higher than fiber-optic cable at much less cost, over short distances. The researchers say twisted pairs of copper wire can bear a frequency five times higher than is currently employed, which may enable houses near fiber-optic cables to realize higher speeds than currently possible, without threading fiber all the way to their homes. In addition, the researchers learned that copper broadband connections' operating frequency of less than 1 gigahertz can theoretically be increased to 5 gigahertz through the use of an electrical device called a balun.

Full Article

A Bitcoin mining operation inside Fort Worth City Hall. Fort Worth Is First U.S. City to Mine Bitcoin
CNBC
MacKenzie Sigalos
April 26, 2022


Fort Worth, TX, has become the first U.S. city to mine bitcoin, through a mining farm based at City Hall. The city’s three mining rigs will run 24-7 on a private network to minimize security risks. Mayor Mattie Parker says the operation will be small at first, given its equipment, technical, and electrical requirements; the city estimates each mining rig will consume the same amount of power as a household vacuum cleaner, while the program's electricity costs should be offset by the value of bitcoin mined. Fort Worth partnered on the project with mining pool Luxor Technologies. Luxor's Alex Brammer expects the project to strengthen the legitimacy of bitcoin as a strategic asset for city governments.

Full Article
Open-Source 'Package Analysis' Tool Finds Malicious npm, PyPI Packages
BleepingComputer
Ax Sharma
May 1, 2022


The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF)'s prototype Package Analysis tool caught more than 200 malicious npm and Python Package Index (PyPI) packages in its initial run. Released this week on software development platform GitHub, the tool is designed to identify and counter malware in open source registries. OpenSSF's Caleb Brown and David A. Wheeler said the tool was developed to help users "understand the behavior and capabilities of packages available on open-source repositories: what files do they access, what addresses do they connect to, and what commands do they run? The project also tracks changes in how packages behave over time, to identify when previously safe software begins acting suspiciously." Most of the malicious elements the tool identified in its initial run were dependency confusion and typosquatting exploits.

Full Article
Can VR Help Ease Chronic Pain?
The New York Times Magazine
Helen Ouyang
April 26, 2022


Virtual reality (VR) has emerged as a tool to treat chronic pain and is gaining popularity because it has fewer side-effects than surgery and most drugs, headsets have gone down in price, and graphics have improved to enable a more immersive experience. In November, AppliedVR received the first authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to market a VR app for chronic lower-back pain, RelieVRx. The system features what Stanford University's Beth Darnall, AppliedVR's chief science adviser, calls a "breath-fed tree," which provides a visual way to "reflect back to the user the changes that are occurring in their own physiology." Researchers at AppliedVR reported an almost 43% decrease in chronic back pain among study participants who used RelieVRx, versus 25% for a control group.

Full Article
*May Require Paid Registration
Algorithm That Screens for Child Neglect Raises Concerns
Associated Press
Sally Ho; Garance Burke
April 29, 2022


A review of an algorithm designed to screen for child neglect has raised worrying issues, including questions of reliability. Carnegie Mellon University researchers analyzed a tool used by Allegheny County, PA, which in its first years of use identified a disproportionate number of Black children for "mandatory neglect" probes compared to white children; social workers also disagreed with the algorithm's risk scores about one-third of the time. Critics say the algorithm gives data on poor people excessive influence in deciding families' fates, and they caution against local officials' increasing reliance on artificial intelligence. Advocates fear that if similar tools are adopted by other child welfare systems with little to no human intervention, they could compound racial disparities.

Full Article

Operators are testing the use of drones for delivery of medical supplies. What a Drone Picking Up Blood Samples Tells About Healthcare in India
BBC News
Andrew Clarance
May 1, 2022


Drone manufacturers across India are testing deliveries via aerial drones of medical supplies, pathology samples, and blood units. Drone logistics company Skye Air Mobility recently flew blood samples about 72 kilometers (44 miles) from the state of Uttar Pradesh to Delhi's Noida suburb; the firm said it has mounted more than 1,000 flights since November. Skye Air Mobility's Ankit Kumar said the drone flights reduced conventional delivery times by roughly 48%, and Anand K at India's SRL Diagnostics expects the process "will help maximize sample processing abilities leading to an efficient lab operation, while benefiting patients who want faster delivery of vital results." Public health experts said there is little anecdotal evidence of the drones' healthcare impact, and cost remains the prevailing issue.

Full Article
ACM Survey on Research Publishing in AI and Machine Learning
 
2022 CACM Website Survey Notice
 

Association for Computing Machinery

1601 Broadway, 10th Floor
New York, NY 10019-7434
1-800-342-6626
(U.S./Canada)



ACM Media Sales

If you are interested in advertising in ACM TechNews or other ACM publications, please contact ACM Media Sales or (212) 626-0686, or visit ACM Media for more information.

To submit feedback about ACM TechNews, contact: [email protected]