Welcome to the April 26, 2019 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.

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(left to right) Robert Sedgewick, Victor Bahl, Meenakshi Balasrishnan, Chris Stephenson Leaders Recognized for Outstanding Impact on Computing Field
Association for Computing Machinery
Jim Ormond
April 24, 2019


ACM has recognized four scientists with 2018 awards, citing longstanding contributions to advance computing's societal role. ACM named Robert Sedgewick recipient of the Karl V. Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award for developing classic textbooks and online materials for studying algorithms, analytic combinatorics, and introductory computer science. Microsoft Research's Victor Bahl will receive the ACM Distinguished Service Award for his efforts in the mobile and wireless networking community, and for building strong academic-industrial-government relationships; he also co-founded ACM's mobile-oriented Special Interest Group ACM SIGMobile. The Indian Institute of Technology's Meenakshi Balakrishnan was named to receive the ACM Eugene L. Lawler Award for Humanitarian Contributions within Computer Science and Informatics, for research, development, and deployment of cost-effective embedded-system and software solutions for visually impaired citizens in the developing world. Chris Stephenson was named to receive the Outstanding Contribution to ACM Award for helping to create and grow the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) to include thousands of K-12 computer science educators and partners within the ACM community.

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Coming to Store Shelves: Cameras That Guess Your Age, Sex
Associated Press
Manuel Valdes; Anne D'Innocenzio
April 23, 2019


Retailers are testing new in-store cameras designed to guess shoppers' ages and genders, to inform real-time advertisements on store video screens. At the National Retail Federation trade show earlier this year, Mood Media’s smart shelf attempted to gauge people's emotions as they stood before it, which stores could use to assess reactions to products on shelves or onscreen ads. Meanwhile, the Kroger supermarket chain is piloting cameras embedded in a price sign above shelves in two stores to guess a shopper's age and gender, while attached screens show ads and discounts. Proponents say this technology could benefit shoppers by providing them tailored discounts or pointing to products that are on sale, but privacy advocates warn such information could be used intrusively, or in discriminatory practices.

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scooters spoofed on South Park In Australia, Hacked Lime Scooters Spew Racism, Profanity
The Washington Post
Peter Holley
April 24, 2019


Vandals hacked the audio files of scooters from international electronic-scooter company Lime in Australia, to make them generate profanities and racist speech. The incident, involving eight scooters in Brisbane, followed more serious hacks of the vehicles' operating system (OS). According to Lime, modifying the OS requires intimate knowledge of its software and engineering, which only a handful people currently possess; the vandals in this case physically broke into a scooter’s audio file port. However, some experts are concerned infecting e-scooter OSes holds the potential to put riders in lethal danger. They warn of scenarios in which someone using a Bluetooth-enabled app from nearly 330 feet away could lock a scooter or deploy malware that hijacks the device or targets an individual rider, causing the scooter to unexpectedly brake or speed up.

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Google’s Wing Drone FAA Certifies Google's Wing Drone Delivery Company to Operate as Airline
NPR Online
Bill Chappell
April 23, 2019


The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has certified Alphabet's drone delivery branch, Wing Aviation, to operate as an airline. U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine L. Chao said, "This is an important step forward for the safe testing and integration of drones into our economy." The FAA said Wing earned its air carrier certificate because it has shown "its operations met the FAA's rigorous safety requirements." Wing's electric drones fly using 14 mostly top-mounted propellers, and can carry payloads up to a maximum of 1.5 kilograms (3.3 pounds). Wing hopes to expand its southwest Virginia delivery area later this year; it also plans to launch a European trial in Helsinki, Finland.

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Researchers Develop Tool for Safety-Critical Software Testing
National Institute of Standards and Technology
April 23, 2019


U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers have developed new tools to make safety-critical software safer. The researchers augmented an existing software toolkit, called Automated Combinatorial Testing for Software (ACTS), to strengthen the safety tests that software companies conduct on the programs that help control vehicles, operate power plants, and manage other demanding technology. Software companies can use ACTS to ensure there are no simultaneous input combinations that might inadvertently cause a dangerous error. Thanks to the NIST team, even software that has thousands of input variables, each of which can have a range of values, can be tested thoroughly.

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stereo cameras, LiDAR alternative Future of Self-Driving Cars: New Way of 'Seeing' Objects
International Business Times
Nino Cabatingan
April 24, 2019


Cornell University researchers learned autonomous vehicles can perceive three-dimensional objects in their path with greater accuracy than Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) sensors, but at lower cost, via a simpler technique. The team determined analyzing images from two low-cost cameras on either side of the windshield, offers triple the accuracy of LiDAR. Cornell's Kilian Weinberger suggested such stereo cameras could function as the primary means to identify objects in lower-end cars, or as a backup system in higher-end cars outfitted with LiDAR.

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Alexa Researchers Find Text-to-Speech Models Trained on Multiple Speakers Beat Single-Speaker Systems
VentureBeat
Kyle Wiggers
April 25, 2019


Researchers in Amazon's Alexa division determined a text-to-speech (TTS) system trained on voice data from multiple speakers produced more-natural-sounding speech than a single-speaker model trained on more samples. The same neural TTS (NTTS) model also had more overall stability, as it dropped fewer words, "mumbled" less often, and avoided repeating single sounds in rapid succession. Alexa Speech's Jakub Lachowicz said NTTS models usually feature a network that converts text into 50-millisecond snapshots of specific frequency, and a vocoder to render the "mel-spectrograms" as finer-grained audio signals. When human research participants were tasked with listening to live recordings of a human speaker and synthetic speech modeled on the same speaker, the multi-speaker-trained NTTS system performed as well as the one trained on a single speaker. Said Lachowicz, "This opens the prospect that voice agents could offer a wide variety of customizable speaker styles, without requiring voice performers to spend days in the recording booth."

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Astrobee robot during testing at NASA's Ames Research Center. NASA Launching Astrobee Robots to Space Station
IEEE Spectrum
Evan Ackerman
April 16, 2019


The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has sent two robots to the International Space Station on a cargo vehicle, to autonomously perform experiments and shoot video. The cubical Astrobee robots use air-pressurizing impellers for propulsion, and feature sensing and computing equipment to enable autonomous operation; upgradable, ROS-based flight software is included as well, with the robots outfitted to convey modular payloads. The machines also will have a small arm to grab onto handrails, and capture video of astronauts without running motors.

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Two students illustrate how the “patch” and detection box works. Academics Hide Humans From Surveillance Cameras With 2D Prints
ZDNet
Catalin Cimpanu
April 23, 2019


Researchers at Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium, have developed a technique of using simple two-dimensional (2D) images to render wearers invisible to surveillance cameras. The cameras rely on machine learning to identify humans in live video feeds. The research team experimented with various types of images, but found out that photos of random objects that go through multiple image processing operations were best at tricking machine learning systems into misclassifying a human as something else. The same system can be modified to mask certain objects from view, if the surveillance system is configured to spot certain objects instead of people.

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Yoshua Bengio Universite de Montreal Prof Wins $100K Killam Prize for AI Research
Montreal Gazette (Canada)
T'Cha Dunlevy
April 25, 2019


The Canada Council named the Universite de Montreal's Yoshua Bengio one of this year’s recipients of the $100,000 Killam Prize for his work on artificial intelligence (AI). Bengio founded the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms and is a co-recipient of the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award, as well as an Officer of the Order of Canada. Bengio said AI has passed a threshold in terms of use, having transitioned from academic research to industrial applications and self-driving cars. He is concerned about its potential for misuse, and aims to use his growing prominence in scientific circles to advise against such scenarios. Said Bengio, "It's going to take individual and collective wisdom—governments stepping in to establish social norms and frameworks—to make sure the technology is used for good."

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An illustration of notes going into computer and article coming out. Can Science Writing Be Automated?
MIT News
David L. Chandler
April 17, 2019


Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed artificial intelligence (AI) that can read scientific papers and produce a plain-English summary in a sentence or two. The team's neural network is based on vectors rotating in a multidimensional space, rather than on multiplication of matrices. The rotational unit of memory (RUM) system basically represents each word in the text by a vector in multidimensional space, with each subsequent word skewing this vector in some direction, represented by a theoretical space that can ultimately have thousands of dimensions. At the conclusion, the final vector or set of vectors is translated back into its corresponding string of words. Testing suggested RUM could be useful with natural language processing, so the researchers fed scientific papers through the network, generating a much more readable summary than a conventional neural network yielded.

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Nanocomponent is Quantum Leap for Danish Physicists
University of Copenhagen
April 23, 2019


Researchers at the University of Copenhagen (KU) in Denmark have developed a nano-scale component that emits light particles carrying quantum information, enabling upscaling and ultimately quantum computer- or quantum Internet-capabilities. The nanomechanical router, which is a tenth of the size of a human hair, channels the particles in different directions within a photonic chip, by combining nano-opto-mechanics and quantum photonics for the first time. Said KU's Leonardo Midolo, "We have calculated that our nanomechanical router can already be scaled up to 10 photons, and with further enhancements, it should be able to achieve the 50 photons needed to reach 'quantum supremacy.'" The router's smallness means several thousand can be integrated in the same chip. Current technology permits only a few routers to be combined in one chip, because of the large device footprint.

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A pile of bitcoins. Cryptocurrency Mining Malware Uses Leaked NSA Exploits to Spread Across Enterprise Networks
TechCrunch
Zack Whittaker
April 25, 2019


Symantec researchers warn malware that employs leaked U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) exploits is being used to infiltrate corporate networks, and hijack computers into running mining code to produce cryptocurrency. Symantec's Alan Neville said the "Beapy" malware was first detected in January, but has ballooned to more than 12,000 unique infections across 732 organizations since March. Beapy gains access via a malicious email opened by a corporate employee, which drops the NSA-developed DoublePulsar malware to install a persistent backdoor on the infected system. A lateral network infection is then orchestrated with NSA's EternalBlue exploit. Once the backdoor is entrenched, Beapy is pulled from the hacker's command and control server to penetrate each computer with the mining software.

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