Welcome to the September 22, 2023, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
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Google Mourns Engineer Luiz André Barroso, Who Invented the Modern Datacenter
Wired
Paresh Dave
September 21, 2023
Google engineer Luiz André Barroso, the 2020 ACM-IEEE CS Eckert-Mauchly Award winner whose datacenter designs laid the foundation for cloud computing, has passed away at age 59. Barroso built his datacenters from low-cost components rather than from expensive specialized hardware, and developed the modern concept of "the datacenter as a computer" by remodeling their integration. He conceived of this architecture when Google's Urs Hölzle asked him to rebuild the company's infrastructure, which then relied on datacenters maintained by other companies, which could not accommodate the business' expanding needs. Distributing software across thousands of more-affordable mid-grade servers instead of centralizing it on a few costly and powerful machines saved money and energy while also increasing the software's agility.
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How Drones Help Scientists Find Meteorites
ScienceNews
Katherine Kornei
September 21, 2023
Scientists at Australia's Curtin University search for meteorites using drones, which Curtin's Seamus Anderson said can reduce the duration of meteorite-hunting expeditions "from about 300 days of human effort down to about a dozen or so." Networks of ground-based meteoroid-tracking cameras alert the researchers to a fall site, to which they then transport drones and the accompanying hardware. The team flies a primary drone about 20 meters (65.6 feet) overhead as its camera photographs the ground once a second, downloading the data approximately every 40 minutes when the drone lands for fresh batteries. A typical flight can collect more than 10,000 images that are digitally segmented into roughly 100 million smaller "tiles" that a machine learning algorithm processes to identify possible meteorites.
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Quantum Machine Learning Solution for Faster Routing in Disaster Situations
HPCwire
September 21, 2023
A quantum machine learning solution developed by researchers at Terra Quantum and Honda Research Institute Europe (HRI-EU) aims to reduce evacuation times during natural disasters. The hybrid quantum computing tool, which performs quantum simulations on classical computing hardware, considers real-time variables and can make decisions using only local information. In a simulation of an earthquake on a realistic small-town map, the solution predicted efficient and dynamic vehicle escape routes and shortened evacuation times using less than 1% of the map information. HRI-EU's Sebastian Schmitt said, "Identifying realistic problems where quantum technologies may unfold their potential constitutes one of the biggest challenges in the field today. This work represents a promising step in that direction and shows how to employ hybrid quantum-classical learning architectures in a real-world-use case."
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Soft Robot Walks by Repeatedly Blowing Itself Up
IEEE Spectrum
Evan Ackerman
September 14, 2023
Researchers at Cornell University and Israel's Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have engineered a soft quadruped robot that locomotes via internal combustion. The machine features two combustion-chamber actuators within which a mixture of methane vapor and oxygen is ignited with an electric spark.The chambers' tops balloon upward, generating 9.5 newtons, with each chamber driving two legs; the combustion cycle can repeat 100 times per second. The researchers estimate the robot can run continuously more than 750,000 cycles (8.5 hours at 50Hz) without losing performance. The 1.6-gram device can jump 59 centimeters (23.2 inches) up and carry 22 times its own weight while walking.
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AI Accelerates Ability to Program Biology Like Software
The Wall Street Journal
Steven Rosenbush; Tom Loftus
September 19, 2023
In the field of synthetic biology, researchers leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to reprogram or repurpose proteins or other biological material or even develop new proteins. Alexandre Zanghellini of the startup Arzeda said large language models and generative AI, among other innovations, coupled with the increased availability of data to train these models, have given a boost to synthetic biology in recent years. Said Zanghellini, "I would say it's orders of magnitude, five times, 10 times faster in the way we can design and program biology. It enables us to go beyond what nature has provided us." However, Stanford University's Lloyd Minor cautioned, "The challenge in biology is that it is not terribly difficult to engineer organisms, to engineer living systems, to do things that can potentially be very harmful. So how do we think about monitoring, regulation, safe oversight in the biology world?"
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Shape-Changing Smart Speaker Lets Users Mute Different Areas of a Room
University of Washington News
Stefan Milne
September 21, 2023
A shape-changing smart speaker developed by University of Washington (UW) researchers allows users to mute or separate conversations when multiple people are talking in the same room. The system divides rooms into speech zones and tracks each speaker's position using self-deploying robot microphones and neural networks. The robots, which navigate obstacles and table edges using high-frequency sound and sensors, disperse as far as possible from each other to ensure maximum accuracy. UW's Tuochao Chen said, "You can have four people having two conversations and isolate any of the four voices and locate each of the voices in a room." In tests in various environments, the system could distinguish between different voices within 1.6 feet of each other 90% of the time, and processed three seconds of audio in an average of 1.82 seconds.
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Researchers 'Bioprint' Living Brain Cell Networks in the Lab
Monash University (Australia)
September 20, 2023
Researchers at Australia's Monash University used "bioinks" and a tissue engineering approach to three-dimensionally (3D) print living neuron networks. The 3D-printed nerve networks can be grown in the lab and have the ability to transmit and respond to nerve signals. This was accomplished using two bioinks, one containing living cells and the other containing non-cell materials. Monash's John Forsythe said, "The networks grown in this research closely replicated the 3D nature of circuits in a living brain, where nerve cells extend processes called neurites to form connections between different layers of the cortex. We found that the projections growing from neurons in the printed 'grey matter' or cellular layer readily grew through the 'white matter' layer and used it as a 'highway' to communicate with neurons in other layers."
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Humanoid Robot Will Aid Guests at Sphere's Las Vegas Arena
UPI
Steven Huff
September 19, 2023
Five humanoid "spokesbots" will assist guests at the Sphere concert venue at the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas. The Aura robots will communicate with visitors, using human-like facial expressions and mobility when answering queries. The devices reportedly will be able to "answer complex questions about the groundbreaking engineering, layers of custom-designed technology, and the creative mission at the core of venue," as well as provide directions and additional information on performances. David Dibble with Sphere Entertainment subsidiary MSG Ventures said the Aura robots can recognize individual humans, and artificial intelligence will help them learn through their interactions with people.
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Recreating Water Flow for Virtual Reality
Tohoku University (Japan)
September 20, 2023
Researchers at Japan's Tohoku University and China's Chuzhou University have replicated water flow in real time by reproducing agitated liquid motion using just a small amount of data from real water. The researchers deposited buoys outfitted with magnetic markers on water and tracked each buoy's movement using a magnetic motion capture system. Tohoku's Yoshifumi Kitamura said the researchers retrieved the water motion "by combining a fluid simulation with deep reinforcement learning." He added that this technology will enhance the immersive quality of virtual reality and augment online communication. In fact, "We may be able to transmit the movement of water over the Internet in real time so that even those far away can experience the same lifelike water motion."
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ChatGPT Can Now Generate Images
The New York Times
Cade Metz; Tiffany Hsu
September 20, 2023
OpenAI has integrated a new version of its DALL-E image generator into its ChatGPT online chatbot. DALL-E 3 generates more detailed images than its predecessors, with notable improvements in images featuring letters, numbers, and human hands. The new version of the image generator can create images from multi-paragraph descriptions and follow detailed instructions. OpenAI's Aditya Ramesh said DALL-E 3 was given a more precise understanding of the English language. The DALL-E/ChatGPT integration means ChatGPT can generate digital images based on detailed textual descriptions provided by users or produced by the chatbot itself. OpenAI has included tools in DALL-E 3 to prevent the generation of sexually explicit images, images of public figures, and images that imitate the styles of specific artists.
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NIST Face Analysis Program Helps to Find What’s Wrong with This Picture
NIST News
September 20, 2023
Scientists at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) evaluated facial recognition/analysis by state-of-the-art image-processing software. One evaluation rated face analysis algorithms' ability to detect whether defects constitute evidence of a spoofing attack, known as presentation attack detection. The researchers assessed 82 algorithms with nine types of presentation attacks that included masks and holding a photo of another person before the camera; they learned none of the programs could detect all spoof types. Another study tested seven algorithms designed to flag defects that make photos noncompliant with passport requirements, using 20 quality measures based on internationally accepted standards. NIST's Joyce Yang said the software's performance on some measures was better than on others, and the results will inform a new standard that sets guidelines for quality measures the algorithms should consider.
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Sentinel Satellites Map Methane Super-Emitters
The European Space Agency
September 20, 2023
An international team of researchers led by the SRON Netherlands Institute for Space Research have developed an algorithm that uses machine learning to automatically detect methane super-emitter plumes in data from the Copernicus Sentinel-5P, Sentinel-2, and Sentinel-3 satellites. The Sentinel-5P's high-precision methane measurements complement the Sentinel-2's ability to pinpoint major methane leaks via multi-band sensors, while the Sentinel-3 satellites provide daily global coverage and ground pixel resolution of 500 meters (1,640 feet). The researchers found the Sentinel-3 satellites can detect methane leaks of at least 10 tons per hour each day. Integrating Sentinel-2 and Sentinel-3 data enables researchers to zoom in precisely to identify, measure, and track methane sources correlating with plumes detected by Sentinel-5P's global observations.
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The Lizard You Actually Want Crawling in the Walls
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Steve Foskett
September 19, 2023
Worcester Polytechnic Institute scientists partnered with officials of Worcester, MA, to create a lizard-like deformable robot that can crawl into tight spaces to perform inspections and three-dimensional (3D) mapping. The prototype robot follows an "origami" design composed of plastic, 3D-printed, and laser-machined components, along with custom circuit boards, a small computer, sensors, metallic elements, a modular body structure, and motors. It can convey cameras and sensors for measuring temperature and contaminant levels, and uses artificial intelligence to operate with a degree of autonomy. The researchers tested the device in Worcester's City Hall and the Worcester Senior Center, where it was able to access narrow spaces and non-invasively navigate the environs horizontally and vertically.
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