Welcome to the February 25, 2022, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.

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High school students using laptop computers in a classroom. Studies Examine Effects of California's Push for Computer Science Education
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign News Bureau
Sharita Forrest
February 24, 2022


Two studies investigating the impact of California's computer science (CS) education push at high schools found that a greater emphasis on CS education did not produce anticipated spillover effects, although a trade-off of increased enrollments in computing courses may be that students are taking fewer humanities courses. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's Colleen M. Lewis and Paul Bruno said a review of school-level test scores indicated that the increased focus on CS education neither improved nor harmed students' math or English skills, despite enrollments in humanities courses declining. The researchers also found that while the number of students attending California high schools offering at least one CS course rose from 45% in 2003 to over 79% in 2019, Black, Hispanic, and Native American students often were less likely to attend those schools, compared to Asians or whites.

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Measuring Up: Coming Out From the Cold
U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology
February 24, 2022


U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) scientists have built a system that allows commercial electronic components to operate near ultra-cold devices used in quantum information processing. This overcomes signal degradation typical of setups where quantum computing elements and external electronics are farther apart. The new cryo-circuit is designed to eliminate the time needed to cool quantum devices, and the limited number of measurement wires. NIST's Joshua Pomeroy said because just one device at a time is measured, the cryo-circuit directs each measurement line to a selected quantum device, "like a railroad switch yard where the track to a distant destination can be connected to many different local destinations."

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A boy viewing videos on a laptop computer. YouTube's Captions Insert Explicit Language in Kids' Videos
Wired
Tom Simonite
February 24, 2022


A study of over 7,000 videos on 24 top-ranked children's channels that were captioned by YouTube algorithms found 40% displayed words from a list of 1,300 "taboo" terms, with roughly 1% displaying "highly inappropriate" words. Examples include substituting "porn" for "corn" and "crap" for "crab," as documented by researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) and the Indian School of Business. The phenomenon is not restricted to YouTube or video captions; RIT's Ashique KhudaBukhsh said speech-to-text systems contain oversights "that can require checks and balances." KhudaBukhsh said he suspects YouTube's insertion of profanities is a result of its training data featuring more speech from adults than children.

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Medical personnel in a hospital corridor. Open-Source Patient Model Tops Industry Standard
University of Michigan News
February 17, 2022


Patient care in the University of Michigan (U-M) health system is improving due to a new open-source patient deterioration model, which a study found outperformed the EPIC Deterioration Index by more than 21%. U-M researchers trained the M-CURES model on five years’ worth of data on pre-pandemic patients who experienced respiratory symptoms similar to those caused by COVID-19. The team then worked with doctors at Michigan Medicine (formerly the University of Michigan Health System) to quickly narrow thousands of data points into a handful of key predictive indicators. Data scientists and clinicians used a hybrid framework to eliminate potentially misleading variables, validating M-CURES' efficacy in just weeks.

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COVID-19 in the Classroom: Simulating the Spread
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
Rachel McDowell
February 24, 2022


Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)'s Argonne National Laboratory used the Summit supercomputer at DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to simulate the spread of aerosol viral particles in an elementary school classroom. The team used large eddy simulations to model the unsteady motions of gases and fluids with a distribution of aerosol particles ranging in size from 0.1 to 5 microns in a 14×12×3-meter (45x39x9-foot) classroom. The researchers found the traditional classroom ventilation pathway, with the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) outlet and the classroom door opposite each other, creates dead zones where particles emitted during normal breathing and speaking tend to persist. The researchers determined that positioning the HVAC inlet and the door on the same wall reduces these dead zones significantly.

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A facial image behind a jumble of words and type. Who Is Behind QAnon? Linguistic Detectives Find Fingerprints
The New York Times
David D. Kirkpatrick
February 19, 2022


Two teams of forensic linguists traced formative texts from the conspiracy theory-espousing QAnon movement back to two men. Claude-Alain Roten and Lionel Pousaz at Swiss startup OrphAnalytics and French linguists Florian Cafiero and Jean-Baptiste Camps used machine learning to compare subtle patterns in the anonymous texts that casual readers would not spot. Software deconstructed the texts into three-character sequences and tracked the recurrence of each possible combination. Both teams identified South African software developer Paul Furber, one of QAnon's first online commentators, as lead author of the texts that kicked off the movement; they also fingered Ron Watkins, who ran a Website where the messages began appearing in 2018, as a main author who allegedly took over QAnon from Furber.

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Illustration of a microchip designed for security apps. Toward a Stronger Defense of Personal Data
MIT News
Adam Zewe
February 18, 2022


Saurav Maji and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have designed an integrated circuit chip that can thwart power side-channel attacks with less energy expenditure than common security methods. The chip is based on threshold computing, which splits data into random components for individual processing by the neural network before assembling the final result. Maji said information leakage from the device is always random, and can never expose any side-channel data. An optimization function reduces computing power by cutting the amount of multiplication needed to process data, and shields the network by encrypting the model's parameters.

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The facial-recognition protocol developed by researchers. Deep Learning Toolbox Now Apparently Includes Ground-Up Glass
IEEE Spectrum
Charles Q. Choi
February 18, 2022


Scientists in China, Hong Kong, and Singapore suggest ground-up pieces of glass could help in securely encrypting facial images via a new optical cryptosystem. The system transmits facial-image data through the glass, producing speckles with apparently random scattered patches of light and dark recorded by camera as a secret message. The researchers said the process generates keys 17.2 billion bits long; they trained a deep learning neural network to decrypt messages by feeding it 19,800 facial images before and after being sent through a given set of ground glass. Preliminary tests showed the network could decrypt the images with over 98% accuracy. Hong Kong Polytechnic University's Puxiang Lai described the system as "fast, low-cost, and easy to integrate with other systems."

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Brazilian Academics Create Automated Fake News Detection Platform
ZDNet
Angelica Mari
February 23, 2022


A team of researchers at Brazil's University of São Paulo (USP) has developed a Web platform that can automatically detect fake online news. The platform statistically analyzes writing characteristics of content in Brazilian Portuguese, which is fed into a machine learning-based classifier that can differentiate the linguistic, vocabulary, and semantic patterns of fake and real news. The classifier can automatically deduce whether the submitted content is false; initial tests indicate the system can detect fake news with 96% accuracy. USP's Francisco Louzada Neto said the project intends "to offer society an additional tool to identify, not only subjectively, whether a news item is false or not."

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A dairy worker using equipment. Robot Helps Dairy Workers Make Havarti, Danbo
University of Copenhagen (Denmark)
February 22, 2022


A cheese robot created by Klavs Martin Sørensen at Denmark's University of Copenhagen is employed at Danish dairy company Arla to help with quality control. The robot is deployed at an Arla dairy in the town of Taulov, where it reads cheeses' chemical makeup and quality by shining near-infrared light into the curd. "It can notify a dairy within seconds if something is off, and how, for example, the dairy should adjust a cheese's recipe for it to be perfected again," Sørensen said. The cheese robot will help dairies save time and money by enabling them to continuously retrieve data about product condition and quality, and also can be used to investigate the use of sustainable production methods.

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Medical professionals review a radiograph. AI Outdoes Radiologists in Identifying Hip Fractures
The Washington Post
Erin Blakemore
February 20, 2022


A U.K. study found artificial intelligence could outperform radiologists in identifying hip fractures. The study compared the results of clinicians in classifying over 3,600 hip radiographs against the findings of a pair of computer models. The algorithms were accurate 92% of the time overall, versus 77.5% of the time for the radiologists. The researchers believe the algorithm could unclog the U.K.'s radiology bottleneck, which arose due to a shortage of radiologists at a time when demand for radiology services has risen sharply. Richie Gill at the U.K.'s University of Bath said the technique could facilitate greater access and accelerate diagnoses.

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An FUS transducer in use. Low-Cost, 3D-Printed Device May Broaden Use of Focused Ultrasound Technique
Washington University in St. Louis
Beth Miller
February 16, 2022


Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis have developed a focused ultrasound (FUS) transducer that is user-friendly, highly precise, and costs only about $80 to produce using a three-dimensional (3D) printer. Researchers were able to integrate the FUS transducer with a commercially available stereotactic frame to improve the precision of its blood-brain barrier (BBB) opening volume in a mouse brain, targeting the exact location in the brain. Washington University's Hong Chen said, "We showed that under the same pressure level, a higher-frequency FUS transducer achieved a small drug delivery volume, improving the spatial precision of BBB opening compared with what has been achieved with lower-frequency transducers." The design has been made available via GitHub.

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