|
Welcome to the March 29, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.
|
|
|
To attract workers with generative AI expertise, tech companies increasingly are offering million-dollar annual compensation packages with accelerated stock-vesting schedules. Others are poaching entire engineering teams. This comes as other areas of the tech industry have seen major layoffs. In high demand are those who have experience training large language models (LLMs) and AI salespeople. SBT Industries' Justin Kinsey said some candidates can be persuaded to switch companies with promises of autonomy over their work.
[
» Read full article
*May Require Paid Registration
]
The Wall Street Journal; Katherine Bindley (March 27, 2024)
|
A software system developed by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the U.K.'s University College London (UCL) allows blind and low-vision users to build customized, multimodal data representations without an initial visual chart. The Umwelt (German for environment) system lets screen-reader users create customized representations with three modalities: visualization, textual description, and sonification. It features a viewer that makes the data representations interactive and allows for seamless movement between the modalities.
[
» Read full article
]
MIT News; Adam Zewe (March 27, 2024)
|
An autonomous drone "ecosystem" from DroneUp will be used by Walmart (a partial owner of the Virginia startup), 7-Eleven, and Chick-fil-A for aerial deliveries. After the retailer places a bar code on a package, it is placed inside an automated, climate-controlled storage locker, where a robot weighs it and checks its center of gravity. A drone is dispatched to the landing pad on top of the DBX locker, and the package is auto-loaded into the drone by the robot. A single human operator can monitor multiple drones.
[
» Read full article
]
Axios; Joann Muller (March 26, 2024)
|
John Pettigrew of U.K.'s National Grid predicts a six-fold increase in datacenter power use over the next decade as use of AI and quantum computing grows, necessitating "larger scale, energy-intensive computing infrastructure." With the U.K.'s electrical power network already more than 70 years old, Pettigrew said, "[We are at] a moment in time that requires innovative thinking and bold actions to create a transmission network for tomorrow's future."
[
» Read full article
]
BBC (March 26, 2024)
|
Researchers at NTT Research Inc.'s Physics & Informatics (PHI) Lab, Switzerland's ETH Zurich, Stanford University, and Japan's National Institute for Materials Science demonstrated quantum control of exciton wave functions in 2D semiconductors. The researchers were able to control excitons on heterostructure devices featuring a 2D semiconductor flake using electric fields, and to contain them in quantum dots and quantum rings.
[
» Read full article
]
Inside HPC (March 26, 2024)
|
Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and other U.S. institutions developed a snake robot that eventually will be used to explore oceans underneath the crust of Saturn's icy moon Enceladus. The Exobiology Extant Life Surveyor (EELS) robot is being tested on glaciers, to simulate Enceladus' terrain. In a release, CMU said the robotic snake “is equipped with risk-aware planning, situational awareness, motion planning, and proprioceptive control to allow it to move autonomously far from Earth and the clutches of human control."
[
» Read full article
]
Tech Crunch; Brian Heater (March 26, 2024)
|
Sensors developed by researchers at the U.K. universities of Warwick and Cambridge can detect low concentrations of formaldehyde in indoor air. The 3D-printed sensors are comprised of aerogels, called ‘frozen smoke’ due to their see-through appearance, that are made from tin dioxide, a semiconductor known for its sensing properties, and reduced graphene oxide, which has high electrical conductivity. The researchers also developed a gas species recognition algorithm to classify different gases.
[
» Read full article
]
Interesting Engineering; Tejasri Gururaj (March 25, 2024)
|
 Green software engineering is picking up steam as software developers seek ways to reduce the industry's carbon footprint. To reduce the carbon footprint of its website, for example, Netherlands-based Web design and branding firm Tijgerbrood used low-resolution images and modern image formats to optimize code and speed data transfer, loading, and processing on user devices. Making greener AI systems involves using smaller training datasets and algorithms that consume less energy, among other considerations.
[
» Read full article
]
IEEE Spectrum; Rina Diane Caballar (March 23, 2024)
|
A machine learning tool developed by Google researchers can assess noises like coughing, breathing, and throat clearing to detect certain health conditions. The self-supervised learning system, Health Acoustic Representations (HeAR), was trained on 300 million audio clips of human sounds extracted from YouTube videos. HeAR can be fine-tuned to detect specific diseases and characteristics by feeding it limited datasets with the appropriate labels. Tests showed that HeAR outperformed existing models trained on speech data or general audio for COVID-19 and tuberculosis detection.
[
» Read full article
]
Nature; Mariana Lenharo (March 21, 2024)
|
More than 120 software industry leaders are calling on the U.K. government to increase support for European software companies, through means including tax incentives and talent visas. Industry body Boardwave has released a new policy document spotlighting Europe's "dreadful" track record of scaling software firms. Boardwave's Phill Robinson said, "A vast part of the tech ecosystem has been disregarded. Software is going to underpin the digital economy of the future, but it's been neglected."
[
» Read full article
]
Reuters; Martin Coulter (March 27, 2024)
|
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) announced the launch of real-time terrorist threat section software, which already has been credited with saving lives. The Hunter system detects rocket launches, drones, and other possible terrorist activities in real time, allowing soldiers to respond accordingly. Information about the threats comes from sensors in the field and what the IDF’s intelligence units already monitor.
[
» Read full article
]
The Jerusalem Post (Israel) (March 27, 2024)
|
Northwestern University researchers have developed a soft, flexible, wireless implant that attaches to the bladder wall for real-time monitoring of bladder fullness. The device uses several sensors to track strain on the bladder. As the bladder fills, it expands and stretches, pulling on the device and allowing it to track strain on the bladder, data that it transmits to a smartphone app.
[
» Read full article
]
UPI; Dennis Thompson (March 26, 2024)
|
 Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), whose inventions defined the personal computing revolution, was donated to the independent research laboratory SRI last year. In 1973, PARC created Xerox Alto (pictured), the first modern personal computer. With PARC, SRI plans to create a combined nonprofit research organization with around 1,000 researchers, along with a modern research campus and a residential community in hope of attracting other high-tech companies.
[
» Read full article
*May Require Paid Registration
]
The New York Times; John Markoff (March 26, 2024)
|
|
