Welcome to the November 5, 2021 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
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Pamela McCorduck, Historian of AI, Dies at 80
The New York Times
Richard Sandomir
November 4, 2021
Pamela McCorduck, who authored a history of the first two decades of artificial intelligence (AI), has died at 80. She first co-edited an influential book of academic papers on AI at the University of California, Berkeley with computer scientists Edward Feigenbaum (an ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient) and Julian Feldman. As an English teacher at Carnegie Mellon University, McCorduck got to know AI pioneers like Turing Award recipients Herbert Simon and Raj Reddy. Feigenbaum said, "She was dumped into this saturated milieu of the great and greatest in AI at Carnegie Mellon—some of the same people whose papers she'd helped us assemble—and decided to write a history of the field." The book was "Machines Who Think: A Personal Inquiry Into the History and Prospects of Artificial Intelligence." Said Simon, "She was interacting with all the movers and shakers of AI. She was in the middle of it, an eyewitness to history."
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Most Popular, Fastest-Growing Programming Languages for Developers
ZDNet
Owen Hughes
November 4, 2021
SlashData's 21st State of the Developer Nation Report listed JavaScript as the most popular programming language in the third quarter, used by over 16.4 million developers worldwide. JavaScript's continued popularity in Web and backend applications supported its ongoing dominance, while 2.5 million-plus developers joined the JavaScript community in the past six months. The SlashData survey ranked Python a distant second with approximately 11.3 million users, mainly within data science, machine learning (ML), and Internet of Things (IoT) apps. C/C++, PHP, and C# rounded out the top five, with PHP gaining 1 million developers between the first and third quarters. SlashData found increased developer participation in 5G projects, especially those involving IoT, augmented reality/virtual reality, consumer electronics, and ML/artificial intelligence.
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Biden Administration Orders Federal Agencies to Fix Hundreds of Cyber Flaws
The Wall Street Journal
Dustin Volz
November 3, 2021
A new order released by Jen Easterly, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) at the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, directs almost all federal agencies to patch cybersecurity vulnerabilities deemed to be a "significant risk to the federal enterprise." The order covers about 200 known security flaws discovered from 2017 to 2020, and another 90 discovered this year. It applies to all executive branch departments and agencies except for the U.S. Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Said Easterly, "While this directive applies to federal civilian agencies, we know that organizations across the country, including critical infrastructure entities, are targeted using these same vulnerabilities. It is therefore critical that every organization adopt this directive and prioritize mitigation of vulnerabilities listed in CISA's public catalog."
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UCLA, Amazon to Create Science Hub for Humanity, AI
UCLA Newsroom
Christine Wei-li Lee
October 29, 2021
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Amazon will jointly establish the Science Hub for Humanity and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to harness industrial-academic AI research to address pressing societal challenges. The hub will engage Amazon AI experts and UCLA faculty to identify and solve research problems, focusing on issues of bias, fairness, accountability, and responsible AI. The center will be based at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, and will support AI research by faculty and students, as well as community and outreach activities, and collaboration between UCLA and Amazon scientists. UCLA's Stefano Soatto said, "The hub is designed to foster the educational mission of the university, so it can best educate the diverse talent needed to sustain the AI revolution in the years to come, in a way that benefits all sectors of society."
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Microsoft to Work with Community Colleges to Fill 250,000 Cyber Jobs
Reuters
Stephen Nellis
October 29, 2021
Microsoft announced plans to collaborate with U.S. community colleges to fill 250,000 cybersecurity jobs during the next four years. The company will offer scholarships or other assistance to approximately 25,000 students. It also will provide training for new and existing teachers at 150 community colleges, as well as giving free curriculum materials to community colleges and four-year schools nationwide. Microsoft's Brad Smith said, "This is an opportunity for us to get started. This is not the ceiling on what we'll do." Smith noted that many Microsoft customers could have prevented hacks with better practices but do not have the cybersecurity personnel to implement them.
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Superconducting Silicon-Photonic Chip for Quantum Communication
SPIE Newsroom
November 1, 2021
A superconducting silicon-photonic chip developed by researchers at China's Nanjing and Sun Yat-sen universities has been used to facilitate quantum communication. The chip's superconducting nanowire single-photon detector (SNSPD) supports optimal time-bin Bell state measurement and improves the key rate in quantum communication. The researchers tapped the optical waveguide-integrated SNSPD's high-speed feature to reduce the dead time of single-photon detection by more than an order of magnitude compared to traditional normal-incidence SNSPD. The end product is a server for measurement-device-independent quantum key distribution, which significantly augments the security of quantum cryptography. Nanjing University's Xiao-Song Ma said, "This work shows that integrated quantum-photonic chips provide not only a route to miniaturization, but also significantly enhance the system performance compared to traditional platforms."
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Antibiotic Resistance Outwitted by Supercomputers
University of Portsmouth (U.K.)
November 2, 2021
An international team of scientists has used supercomputing to strengthen existing antibiotics' effectiveness against bacterial resistance. The researchers crafted a strategy to model many aspects of a redesigned antibiotic simultaneously, including solubility, bacteria infiltration, and protein production inhibition. A leading European supercomputer completed the model in weeks, but the team spent several years validating the approach experimentally. "Using a computational approach makes the development of new antibiotic derivatives faster and cheaper, and predicting whether a chemical compound is going to be active before it is synthesized also avoids chemical waste," said Gerhard Koenig at the U.K.'s University of Portsmouth.
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Algorithm Accurately Predicts When Teens are Likely to Have Suicidal Thoughts, Behavior
Brigham Young University
Todd Hollingshead
November 3, 2021
Researchers at Brigham Young, Johns Hopkins, and Harvard universities developed an algorithm which they say is 91% accurate in predicting suicidal thoughts and behavior (STB) among adolescents. The researchers reviewed data from 179,384 junior high and high school students, plus participants in the 2017 Student Health and Risk Prevention survey; 1.2 billion data points were processed in total. The team applied various algorithms to the data, which yielded a machine learning model that accurately forecast which adolescents later had STB. Females were more likely than males to exhibit STB, while adolescents lacking a father at home also were more likely to think of suicide than those who did not.
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Identity Verification Technique Offers Robust Solution to Hacking
McGill University Newsroom (Canada)
November 3, 2021
Scientists at Canada's McGill University and Switzerland's University of Geneva have developed a secure identity verification technique based on the precept that information cannot exceed the speed of light. "Our research found and implemented a secure mechanism to prove someone's identity that cannot be replicated by the verifier of this identity," said McGill's Claude Crépeau. The technique expands the zero-knowledge proof through a system involving two physically separated prover-verifier pairs. The two provers must demonstrate to the verifiers that they possess a shared knowledge of a method for using three colors to color in an image comprised of thousands of interconnected shapes, without coloring two adjacent shapes the same. Geneva's Hugo Zbinden said, "It's like when the police interrogate two suspects at the same time in separate offices. It's a matter of checking their answers are consistent, without allowing them to communicate with each other."
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Creating an Artificial Material that Can Adapt to Its Environment
University of Missouri
November 3, 2021
A team of researchers from the University of Missouri (MU) and the University of Chicago has developed a metamaterial that can respond to its environment, make decisions, and take actions without input from a human. A computer chip manipulates the processing of information necessary to the material’s performance of requested actions, and uses electricity to convert the resulting energy into mechanical energy. MU's Guoliang Huang said, "Basically, we are controlling how this material responds to changes in external stimuli found in its surroundings. For example, we can apply this material to stealth technology in the aerospace industry by attaching the material to aerospace structures. It can help control and decrease noises coming from the aircraft, such as engine vibrations, which can increase its multifunctional capabilities."
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Toward Speech Recognition for Uncommon Spoken Languages
MIT News
Adam Zewe
November 4, 2021
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed the Prune, Adjust, and Re-Prune (PARP) technique to simplify an advanced speech-learning model to learn uncommon spoken languages more easily. It entails eliminating unnecessary components of the Wave2vec 2.0 neural network, then making small adjustments so it can recognize a specific language. Wave2vec 2.0 is pretrained to learn basic speech from raw audio, and requires massive computing power to train on specific languages. The researchers pruned network connections that were unnecessary for learning language, then trained the subnetwork with sets of labeled Spanish and French speech, which had 97% overlap. PARP outperformed other common pruning techniques for speech recognition, especially when trained on a very small amount of transcribed speech.
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Facebook, Citing Societal Concerns, Plans to Shut Down Facial Recognition System
The New York Times
Kashmir Hill; Ryan Mac
November 2, 2021
Facebook intends to shutter its facial recognition system, deleting the face-scan data of over 1 billion users and removing a feature that has provoked privacy concerns, government probes, litigation, and regulatory distress. Jerome Pesenti at Facebook's recently renamed parent firm, Meta, said the closure was prompted by "many concerns about the place of facial recognition technology in society." The software feature introduced in 2010 automatically identified people appearing in users' digital photo albums and suggested users tag them with a click, linking their accounts to the images. Although Facebook limited facial recognition to its own site and kept it from third parties, privacy advocates questioned how much facial data was collected and what the company could do with it.
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Novel Tag Provides First Detailed Look Into Goliath Grouper Behavior
Florida Atlantic University News Desk
Gisele Galoustian
November 4, 2021
Novel multi-sensor tags developed by Florida Atlantic University scientists have compiled detailed data on the behavior of the Atlantic goliath grouper. The devices combine an inertial measurement unit (IMU) with a video camera, a hydrophone for detecting underwater sounds, and a temperature, pressure, and light sensor. The researchers used machine learning (ML) to automatically classify IMU data on the reef fish's behavior. The IMU data and video was recorded simultaneously to differentiate behaviors, as well as to train and compare two conventional ML algorithms and one deep learning algorithm. The deep learning technique classified the fish's habit of generating booming noises for courtship, spawning, and agonistic behavior.
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