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Welcome to the December 6, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.
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U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has chosen venture capitalist David Sacks of Craft Ventures LLC to serve as his AI and crypto czar, a newly created position. “David will guide policy for the Administration in Artificial Intelligence and Cryptocurrency, two areas critical to the future of American competitiveness," Trump said Thursday in a post on his Truth Social network. Trump said Sacks also would lead the Presidential Council of Advisors for Science and Technology.
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Bloomberg; Stephanie Lai; Hadriana Lowenkron; Sarah McBride (December 5, 2024)
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The European Commission on Wednesday ordered TikTok to preserve data on the Romanian election and for upcoming EU elections, amid suspicion of Russian interference. The order requires TikTok to "preserve internal documents and information regarding the design and functioning of the app's recommender systems, as well as the way it addresses the risk of intentional manipulation through coordinated inauthentic use of the service."
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UPI; Doug Cunningham (December 5, 2024)
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.svg.png) Canada plans to invest C$2 billion (U.S.$1.42 billion) to bolster its domestic AI computing capabilities by funding the development of new datacenters and computing infrastructure. With its Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy, Canada becomes the latest nation to push for sovereign AI investments, which emphasize home-grown models trained in domestic datacenters.
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The Register (U.K.); Tobias Mann (December 5, 2024)
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Google DeepMind's AI program GenCast performs up to 20% better than the ENS forecasts of the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), widely regarded as the world leader. In a model-to-model comparison, the AI program churned out more accurate forecasts than ENS on day-to-day weather and extreme events up to 15 days in advance, and was better at predicting the paths of destructive hurricanes and other tropical cyclones, including where they would make landfall.
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The Guardian (U.K.); Ian Sample (December 4, 2024)
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A new coding tool developed by researchers at the U.K.'s Lancaster University’s School of Computing and Communications and Microsoft makes it easier for children to program the popular educational micro-computer BBC micro:bit. The MicroCode tool is an on-screen visual programming language that enables users to create simple programs to run on the micro:bit V2, making use of the device’s basic functions and sensors.
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Lancaster University (U.K.) (December 4, 2024)
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Meta announced plans to invest $10 billion to set up an AI datacenter in Louisiana that would be the tech company's largest datacenter in the world. The announcement was made a day after Meta said it was seeking proposals from nuclear power developers to help meet its AI and environment goals, adding that it wanted to add 1 to 4 gigawatts of new U.S. nuclear generation capacity starting in the early 2030s.
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Reuters; Seher Dareen (December 4, 2024)
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A 3D bioprinting technique developed by researchers at Pennsylvania State University creates complex tissues using cell clusters (spheroids) that is about 10 times faster than previous methods. The High-throughput Integrated Tissue Fabrication System for Bioprinting (HITS-Bio) technique uses an array of digitally controlled nozzles to manipulate multiple spheroids simultaneously. In tests, HITS-Bio produced a cubic centimeter of cartilage tissue in under 40 minutes using 600 spheroids.
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Interesting Engineering; Mrigakshi Dixit (December 4, 2024)
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An electric Citi Bike reportedly used by a suspect in the murder of United HealthCare CEO Brian Thompson Wednesday creates “digital exhaust,” streams of data that can be used to track the rider. David Shmoys, a computer scientist at Cornell University who helped design the system, said every user creates many “streams of digital breadcrumbs” that can help Lyft, the company that operates Citi Bike, track the user’s location, and possibly their identity.
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The New York Times; Christopher Maag (December 4, 2024)
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University of South Australia researchers developed a system that combines celestial navigation and vision-based technology as an alternative to GPS. The star-based navigation system can be integrated into standard drones. It uses an algorithm to process data from stars through standard autopilot systems. The system is hard to detect because it does not emit signals and is useful in areas where GPS jamming is a risk.
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University of South Australia (December 3, 2024)
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An outage affecting the app and website of car share service Zipcar on Black Friday left a number of customers unable to access vehicles they had reserved, return or lock rented vehicles, unlock locked vehicles, or officially end the ride in the app. Customers also were unable to obtain assistance through Zipcar technical support. Zipcar attributed the outage to increased site traffic due to a Black Friday promotion and problems with its SMS service.
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404 Media; Jason Koebler (December 3, 2024)
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Giga, in a joint initiative of the International Telecommunication Union and UNICEF, is working to connect up to 6 million offline schools across the globe to the Internet by 2030. Giga's computer scientists have developed an infrastructure mapping and modeling tool and have mapped one-third of the world's schools to date; after identifying the geolocation of candidate schools, Giga works to connect them to the Web.
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IEEE Spectrum; Maurizio Arseni (December 2, 2024)
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