Welcome to the August 10, 2022, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
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Experiment Could Solve Huge Challenge in Quantum Computing
ScienceAlert
Michelle Starr
August 8, 2022
Scientists at Japan's National Institutes of Natural Sciences built an ultrafast two-quantum bit (qubit) gate, which could address a massive challenge in quantum computing. By speeding up quantum gate operations beyond a millionth of a second, the gate can outpace noise and generate accurate calculations. The researchers laser-cooled two gaseous rubidium atoms to near absolute zero, and manipulated them into micron-scale distance from each other using laser-powered optical tweezers. They then used laser pulses to inflate the particles into Rydberg atoms, inducing a 6.5-nanosecond periodic exchange of orbital shape and electron energy between the atoms, which exceeded the speed of previous Rydberg atom experiments over 100-fold.
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U.S. Space Force Tests Robot Dogs to Patrol Cape Canaveral
Space.com
Brett Tingley
August 8, 2022
The U.S. Space Force held a demonstration of dog-like quadruped unmanned ground vehicles (Q-UGVs) for patrols at Cape Canaveral. The demo involved at least two Vision 60 Q-UGVs from Ghost Robotics, and the U.S. Department of Defense said the Space Launch Delta 45 unit responsible for all space launch operations from Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral will use the robot dogs for "damage assessments and patrol." The robots are capable of autonomous, human-controlled, and voice-controlled operation. They also can function as miniaturized communications nodes, carrying antennas to extend networks outside existing infrastructure or in locations lacking infrastructure.
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Encrypted One-Touch Human-Machine Interface Technology Reveals User Physiology
UCLA Samueli Newsroom
August 8, 2022
A team of researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and Stanford University has developed an encrypted, one-touch human-machine interface that can reveal physiological details about users. The cryptographic bio-human-machine interface (CB-HMI) uses hydrogel-coated chemical sensors to collect and identify circulating molecules on the skin through perspiration, and to record heart rate and blood oxygen levels. Said UCLA's Sam Emaminejad, "It also can encrypt the data at the point of collection by leveraging the individual's unique fingerprint as a key, so the collected data remain secure and private." The sensors measure users' ethanol and acetaminophen concentrations. UCLA's Shuyu Lin said the researchers used CB-HMI to develop a medication dispenser that administers "the appropriate amount of acetaminophen depending on current levels in the blood."
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Researchers Create First Artificial Vision System for Land, Water
MIT News
Rachel Gordon
August 4, 2022
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and South Korea's Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology and Seoul National University have developed an artificial vision system suitable for use on land or in water. The researchers integrated an array of flat microlenses with a graded refractive index profile and a flexible photodiode array with comb-shaped patterns, wrapped around a three-dimensional sphere, ensuring that light rays from multiple sources always converge at the same spot on the image sensor. The team tested the system's amphibious and panoramic imaging in air and water by imaging five objects at different distances and orientations, and it yielded consistent image quality and a nearly 360-degree field of view in both environments.
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Supermarket Food Could Soon Carry Eco-Labels
BBC News
Pallab Ghosh
August 9, 2022
Consumers could soon be checking the environmental impact of food items at supermarkets through an eco-labeling system based on work by researchers at the U.K.'s Oxford University. The researchers estimated the composition of 57,000 food products in U.K. and Irish supermarkets from public databases, and designed an algorithm to calculate an eco-score for individual products; the higher the score, the greater the environmental impact. U.K. caterer Compass Group has worked with the researchers, and the company's Ryan Holmes said the algorithm "made us think about how we approach sustainability within the workplace" as the business seeks to realize net-zero carbon emissions by 2030.
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Coin-Sized Wearable Biosensing Platform Monitors Digital Health
The University of Hong Kong
August 9, 2022
Researchers at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) have developed a wearable biosensor platform able to perform continuous health monitoring. The coin-sized system, called PERfECT (Personalized Electronic Reader for Electrochemical Transistors), weighs just 0.4 grams and can be integrated with a smartwatch or patch to measure glucose levels and antibody concentrations in blood or sweat, among other things. The PERfECT system can act as a miniature electrochemical station for wearable devices and measure the outputs of low-voltage transistors in those devices. Said HKU's Shiming Zhang, "Our wearable system is tiny, soft, and imperceptible to wearers, and it can do continuous monitoring of our body condition."
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The Tech That Tries to Tackle NIMBYs
Bloomberg
Patrick Sisson
August 8, 2022
Officials of Fairfax, CA, are adopting virtual tools to overcome residents' resistance to new "Not In My Backyard" (NIMBY) developments. Balancing Act is a map-based interactive simulation that allows online participants to decide where to permit additional housing, and to submit their own maps to fulfill state-required housing production mandates. Fairfax mayor Stephanie Hellman said the city's version of Balancing Act gamified the housing process, helping residents to better understand the challenges of an affordable housing shortage for planners. Eastvale, CA, planning manager Gustavo Gonzalez said Balancing Act helped explain that city's housing element planning process, and how planners operate, to residents. "The beauty of this tool is that literally, unit by unit, you can say where the housing should go," he said.
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Robot Unties Knotted Cables but Can't Pick Them Up
New Scientist
Matthew Sparkes
August 2, 2022
University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) researchers have developed a robot that can untie knotted cables using the grippers on its arms. The table-mounted robot features a camera that observes visible light, measures depth, and feeds images into an artificial intelligence algorithm, which uses the data to generate a map of the cables’ orientations and configurations. The robot achieved a 67% success rate in untangling simple knots in a braided 2.7-meter micro-USB to USB cable; that dropped to 50% for more complex knots. Said UC Berkeley’s Ken Goldberg, “Cables are difficult to perceive, even with the best of cameras and techniques, and they’re also difficult to manipulate because of their flexibility and their small size and their tendency to spring out and do things that are very unpredictable.”
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Finding Bugs Faster Than Hackers
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Julia Cohen
August 8, 2022
Researchers at the University of Southern California's Viterbi School of Engineering (USC Viterbi), Arizona State University, Cisco Systems, and French graduate research center EURECOM have proposed a novel automated discovery method for finding bugs in software that hackers could exploit. "Because computer programs are so large and complicated these days, we'd like to automatically detect these vulnerabilities instead of having a human expert analyzing the program to find them," said USC Viterbi's Nicolaas Weideman. The ARBITER technique analyzes software at the binary level, combining static and dynamic vulnerability detection to enhance the static method's precision and the dynamic method's scalability.
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First Studies with Quantum Machine Learning at LHCb
University of Liverpool (U.K.)
August 4, 2022
The Data Processing & Analysis Project team, led by a researcher at the U.K.'s University of Liverpool, demonstrated the use of quantum machine learning (QML) to identify the charge of b-quark initiated jets at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research). This marked the first time QML techniques were applied to hadronic jet charge identification. The researchers compared the performance of a variational quantum classifier, based on two different quantum circuits, with that of deep neural network (DNN); they found the classical DNN performed only slightly better than the QML algorithms. However, they found QML reaches optimal performance with a lower number of events, while DNN performance exceeds that of QML with larger numbers of features.
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Framework Models Post-Earthquake Infrastructure Resilience
Oregon State University News
Steve Lundeberg
August 8, 2022
Oregon State University (OSU) researchers have developed a computational framework for predicting the resilience of post-earthquake infrastructure networks and the recovery time for impacted communities in the Cascadia Subduction Zone, which extends from British Columbia to northern California. "Our work looks at the connectivity of Oregon communities after 'the really big one' and how long it might take the transportation network to recover from the damages due to a magnitude 9 earthquake and tsunami," explained OSU's Dan Cox. The researchers analyzed 18 communities individually and collectively, factoring in ground temblors, tsunami inundation depth, and proximity to airports and to highway and bridge maintenance facilities. OSU's Andre Barbosa said the framework can support decision-making by state or federal agencies at local and regional levels.
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How the Secrets of Ancient Cuneiform Texts Are Being Revealed by AI
New Scientist
Alison George
August 3, 2022
Artificial intelligence (AI) is being used to read and translate cuneiform, helping to recreate ancient libraries by piecing together fragmented tablets and predicting missing text. The Fragmentarium, part of the Electronic Babylonian Literature project set up by Enrique Jiménez of Germany's Ludwig Maximilians University in 2018, is using algorithms to determine which tablet fragments belong together. The AI can predict missing segments and search for cuneiform signs in a database of fragments. As part of the project, 40,000 smashed tablet pieces at the British Museum in London are being photographed, and software is being used to stitch the images together so cuneiform experts can translate them. The entire collection of images will be made public by next year.
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Researchers Create Bio-Realistic, Complex Computer Models of Brain Cells
News-Medical Life Sciences
Emily Henderson
August 9, 2022
Researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and the Allen Institute for Brain Sciences in Seattle have produced what they described as the most bio-realistic and complex computer models of individual neurons to date. Cedars-Sinai's Costas Anastassiou said, "These models capture the shape, timing, and speed of the electrical signals that neurons fire in order to communicate with each other, which is considered the basis of brain function. This lets us replicate brain activity at the single-cell level." The models, which integrate two datasets from different types of laboratory experiments on the mouse primary visual cortex via machine learning, can be used to assess hypotheses that otherwise might require dozens of physical experiments.
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