Welcome to the February 9, 2022, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
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Where a Thousand Digital Eyes Keep Watch Over the Elderly
The New York Times
Ben Dooley; Hisako Ueno
February 2, 2022
Over 1,000 sensors line the streets of the Itami suburb of Osaka, Japan, as part of an effort to track elderly people with dementia. In Itami, one of several localities that have deployed electronic tracking in a nation with the world's oldest population and the highest proportion of people with dementia, the system records a person's location through a beacon hidden on their person. Family members can locate them easily if they wander off. Although the idea is to help those with dementia retain some independence, there are concerns about informed consent, especially when it can be hard to determine whether a person with dementia can give it. Miki Sato, diagnosed with dementia three years ago at age 43, helped develop a location tracking app to assist people with dementia as they shop for groceries. Sato said, "The most important thing is that it's that person's choice."
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Researchers Achieve 100 Million Quantum Operations
Tom's Hardware
Francisco Pires
February 4, 2022
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago (UChicago) have realized 100 million quantum operations, hailed as a key step toward achieving quantum supremacy. The team added single electrons to quantum bits (qubits) with laser pulses. "[The] emitted light reflects the absence or presence of the electron, and with almost 10,000 times more signal," said UChicago's Elena Glen. "By converting our fragile quantum state into stable electronic charges, we can measure our state much, much more easily. With this signal boost, we can get a reliable answer every time we check what state the qubit is in." The single-shot readout method deletes all previously loaded errors, enabling coherent quantum states to "perpetuate" themselves.
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Ancient Programming Language Is Way More Common Than We Thought
TechRadar
Joel Khalili
February 4, 2022
A report by enterprise software provider Micro Focus found that more than 800 billion lines of COBOL code are in daily use worldwide, about three times more than expected, despite a decline in the number of developers familiar with the 60-year-old programming language. Moreover, nearly half of developers surveyed predict an increase in the volume of COBOL used in their organization in the coming year, while a similar share said they expect COBOL applications to live on for at least another decade. The report found that 64% of companies reliant on COBOL prefer to modernize their apps rather than replace them, while 92% of respondents said COBOL will retain strategic importance to their business. Said Micro Focus' Ed Airey, "For IT leaders, supporting core business systems, COBOL application modernization lies at the heart of digital transformation."
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Digital Warfare Tech at Sea Helping U.S. Foes Evade Sanctions
Associated Press
Joshua Goodman
February 3, 2022
Some governments are bypassing U.S. sanctions on transporting foreign oil and other contraband by sea by using digital military technology to “hide” their ships. Israeli maritime intelligence company Windward reported detecting more than 200 vessels since January 2020 involved in over 350 incidents in which they appear to have electronically falsified their global positioning system (GPS) location. Windward uses technology that detects digital tracks inconsistent with actual vessel movements, including hairpin turns at breakneck speed. Researchers from Global Fishing Watch, which uses satellite data and machine learning to monitor commercial fishing activity, had findings similar to Windward’s.
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High-Speed Drones Revolutionizing How We Watch Winter Sports
CNN
Sandy Thin
February 8, 2022
Custom-built, high-speed racing drones are being used to film the Natural Selection Tour, marking the first time such technology has been used in live broadcast. The three-week-long event features competitive freeriding (a type of snowboarding) on wide-open natural terrain, for which traditional forms of sports broadcasting have proven inadequate. Freerider Travis Rice believes the use of drones will provide a more immersive experience for viewers, similar to that of a videogame. Swiss aerial cinematographer Gabriel Kocher created a system using an X8 drone platform with eight motors, a customized gimbal, a full broadcast system, and a stabilization platform. The system is agile, can reach speeds up to 100 mph, and requires an operator with athletic ability. Said Kocher, "It lends itself really well to all of the action sports that are out there, extreme sports."
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How Do You Teach a Goldfish to Drive? First, You Need a Vehicle
The Wall Street Journal
Daniela Hernandez
February 6, 2022
Researchers are teaching animals how to drive, in order to understand how experience affects learning and how brains adapt to change. Researchers at Israel's Ben-Gurion University of the Negev found that goldfish possessed the mental acuity to direct a water-tank-equipped robotic vehicle toward a target. Ben-Gurion's Ronen Segev said the goal was to show that animal brains are different from, not inferior to, human brains, and are flexible enough to adapt to new situations. Segev put a goldfish in a tank aboard a robot outfitted with computer vision software that tracked the fish’s movements so that when the fish moved, the robot moved in the same direction. The fish navigated the robotic vehicle to the correct location even when the target was moved or decoys were used to try to trick them.
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Instagram Teaches AI to Recognize Rooms
University of Groningen (Netherlands)
January 26, 2022
Estefania Talavera Martinez at the Netherlands' University of Groningen has taught an artificial intelligence system to identify specific indoor spaces using images and speech recorded in Instagram videos. Standard Google speech recognition software transcribed the speech, and Talavera Martínez and student Andreea Glavan designed the system to recognize videos from nine types of indoor spaces, which it did accurately 70% of the time. "Tests that we performed confirmed that using this combination results in a better performance of this system than training it using only images or text," said Talavera Martínez.
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NIST Researchers Resurrect, Improve Technique for Detecting Transistor Defects
NIST News
February 3, 2022
Scientists at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have resuscitated and enhanced a technique for detecting transistor defects by modifying the charge-pumping technique to detect individual defects as small as the diameter of a hydrogen atom. Quantum tunneling caused by the ultrathin insulating oxide layer in transistors can thwart accurate defect readings through traditional charge pumping. The researchers solved this problem after observing quantum tunneling-produced current remains virtually unchanged at whatever frequency the charge pumping pulses positive and negative voltages. Said NIST's James Ashton, "The modulated-frequency technique is now useful for looking at single interface defects, which gives engineers control of single electron charges in a very sensitive measurement scheme."
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Computational Tool Predicts Cell Fates, Genetic Perturbations
MIT News
Greta Friar
February 3, 2022
A machine learning framework developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine can define the mathematical equations describing a cell's journey from one state to another. The framework, called "dynamo," also can determine the underlying mechanisms driving cell changes. Dynamo produces math-based maps, with the terrain of each determined by factors like the relative expression of key genes. In tests on blood cells, dynamo accurately mapped blood cell differentiation and identified the mechanism behind why one type of blood cell, megakaryocytes, forms earlier than others. Said MIT's Xiaojie Qiu, "We want to be able to map how a cell changes in relation to the interplay of regulatory genes as accurately as an astronomer can chart a planet's movement in relation to gravity, and then we want to understand and be able to control those changes."
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Satellite Images Show Biggest Methane Leaks Come From Russia, U.S.
New Scientist
Adam Vaughan
February 3, 2022
Researchers from Duke University were part of a multinational team that determined methane "ultra-emitter" sites account for about a tenth of the oil and gas industry's global methane emissions. The researchers identified the biggest plumes of methane from oil and gas facilities across the globe by running images from an instrument aboard a satellite through an algorithm. They found these ultra-emitters pumped out more than 25 tons of methane per hour, with Turkmenistan releasing over 1 million tons of methane between 2019 and 2020. Russia ranked second with slightly less than 1 million tons over the same period, followed by the U.S., Iran, Algeria, and Kazakhstan. The International Energy Agency's Christophe McGlade said the research "demonstrates the increasing viability of satellites to improve our understanding of methane emissions and highlights the importance of super-emitting events."
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Bubbles, Bubbles Everywhere
Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Leah Burrows
February 2, 2022
The activities of tens of thousands of bubbles in foamy flows can be simulated computationally, thanks to researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich (ETH Zurich). Rather than color-coating each bubble, the researchers deconstructed foam into a grid, with each cell containing a part of four bubbles at most; each bubble then was color-coded yellow, green, blue, or red. "We developed an algorithm that can go into other cells and find the remaining pieces of the bubble, matching green to green, blue to blue, etc.," explained SEAS' Petr Karnakov. "So, instead of needing millions of colors, you just need four." ETH Zurich's Sergey Litvinov said the method can enable large-scale predictive models of flows with multiple interfaces.
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Fog Detection Software Helps Airlines Keep Travelers Safe
University of Wisconsin-Madison Space Science and Engineering Center
Eric Verbeten
February 2, 2022
The U.S. National Weather Service is utilizing new fog detection software developed by scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to warn airlines of fog on their routes. The GOES-R (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-R series) Fog and Low Stratus software combines machine learning and near-real-time data from weather satellites to monitor conditions around the clock and issue potential fog warnings. UW's Corey Calvert said the system incorporates atmospheric data employed in Numerical Weather Prediction algorithms, which "helps identify the type of fog over an area by evaluating every pixel in an image and generating a probability of the presence of fog and its intensity."
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Deep Learning Model Simulates Brain Topography
Carnegie Mellon University
Caroline Sheedy
February 3, 2022
A deep learning model developed by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers can simulate the spatial organization, or topography, of the brain's inferotemporal cortex, to further understanding of the impact of damage to that area. Understanding how neighboring clusters of brain tissue are organized and interact could help researchers develop better treatments. After the Interactive Topographic Network model was trained to recognize images from different domains (faces, objects, and scenes), it produced selective spatial areas for each domain, as in the brain. The researchers observed a decline in the model's ability to recognize faces, objects, and scenes after it simulated lesions in each domain. Said CMU's Nicholas Blauch, "It shows us that the specialization within these networks can be strong, but also somewhat mixed." Blauch said that implies "that it may be better thought of as one system with internal specialization, rather than a collection of independent modules."
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