Welcome to the August 29, 2022, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
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NASA Mission Carrying Voice Assistant Tech to the Moon
Space.com
Brett Tingley
August 26, 2022
The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)'s Artemis 1 mission scheduled to launch today (but delayed) will carry an Alexa-enabled voice assistant called Callisto into lunar orbit. Designed by engineers at Lockheed Martin, Cisco, and Amazon, Callisto aims to enhance future spaceflights with real-time data, augmented connectivity, and mission-specific feedback. Lockheed Martin said Callisto will show "how voice technology, AI [artificial intelligence], and portable tablet-based videoconferencing can help improve efficiency and situational awareness for those on board the spacecraft," as well as providing "access to real-time mission information and a virtual connection to people and information back on Earth." Amazon said Callisto will link to mission controllers using NASA's Deep Space Network, and will feature Local Voice Control, which "allows Alexa to process voice commands locally, rather than sending information to the cloud."
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A Silicon Image Sensor That Computes
Harvard University John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Leah Burrows
August 25, 2022
U.S. and South Korean researchers have developed in-sensor processors that could be incorporated into commercial complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) image sensors. The researchers created an electrostatically doped silicon photodiode array, enabling voltage-based tuning of pixels' optical sensitivity. Harvard University's Houk Jang said, "These dynamic photodiodes can concurrently filter images as they are captured, allowing for the first stage of vision processing to be moved from the microprocessor to the sensor itself." Users can program the array into different image filters to eliminate unnecessary details or noise for various applications. Harvard's Henry Hinton predicted the processor will see use "not only in machine vision applications, but also in bio-inspired applications, wherein early information processing allows for the co-location of sensor and compute units, like in the brain."
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Voting Machine Tampering Points to Concern for Fall Election
Associated Press
Christina A. Cassidy; Colleen Slevin
August 25, 2022
Election officials and security experts in the U.S. are concerned that conspiracy theories related to the 2020 presidential election could encourage interference with, or even attempts to sabotage, voting machines during this fall’s elections. Such concerns were highlighted on the last day of voting in the Pueblo County, CO, June primary, when a poll worker found an error message on a voting machine's screen. Election officials can take measures to ensure unauthorized devices don’t infect voting equipment, by for example, configuring systems to recognize only proprietary devices. In the Pueblo County case, the tamper-evident seal on the voting machine appeared to be disturbed. The case remains under investigation.
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Quantum AI Breakthrough: Theorem Shrinks Appetite for Training Data
Los Alamos National Laboratory
August 23, 2022
A proof devised by a multi-institutional team of scientists demonstrates that quantum neural networks can train on minimal data. "The need for large datasets could have been a roadblock to quantum AI [artificial intelligence], but our work removes this roadblock," said Patrick Coles at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). Coles said quantum AI training occurs in a mathematical construct called a Hilbert space, and the theorem shows that navigating this space requires only as many data points as the number of parameters in a given model. The researchers could ensure that a quantum model can be compiled in far fewer computational gates relative to the volume of data. LANL's Marco Cerezo said, "We can compile certain very large quantum operations within minutes with very few training points—something that was not previously possible."
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Face Recognition Struggles to Recognize Us After Five Years of Aging
New Scientist
Matthew Sparkes
August 24, 2022
A test designed by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology's Marcel Grimmer and colleagues found that facial recognition algorithms start running into difficulty identifying people after they have aged five years. The researchers used open-source alternatives to face recognition tools used by police and smartphone manufacturers, as well as artificial intelligence-generated images of 50,000 humans aged synthetically. Grimmer said the tools' accuracy declined continuously from the point the reference image was captured. The algorithms used to age faces synthetically from reference images also proved more effective when the target was between 20 and 40 years, compared to children and older adults. The implication is that new photos may be needed more often to maintain accuracy and security.
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How Do You Build a (Digital) City?
Bloomberg
Immanual John Milton
August 27, 2022
Technology companies, governments, and retailers are generating three-dimensional worlds to create metaverse spaces, while some cities are developing virtual environments for their citizens. For example, Virtual Helsinki is a digital twin of the center of the Swedish capital, designed to be toured in virtual reality (VR). Although the metaverse-as-city concept is in its infancy, consultants foresee massive profits as VR, augmented reality, and mixed reality technologies overcome clunky interfaces. Consultancy McKinsey & Co. cites shopping, social events, fitness, dating, and education as the activities consumers most prefer in the metaverse. The University of California, Irvine's Ian Larson suggests the principles behind SimCity and other videogames, like socialization and digital community design, can serve as a model for digital city spaces.
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Mimicking Termites to Generate Materials
California Institute of Technology
Ben Peltz
August 26, 2022
California Institute of Technology (Caltech) scientists have developed a framework for the design of new materials that was inspired by termite nest-building. Caltech's Chiara Daraio said the researchers approached the challenge by considering limited resources, an architectural approach based on local rules. "We created a numerical program for materials' design with similar rules that define how two different material blocks can adhere to one another," she explained. The virtual growth program models the natural growth of biological structures, connecting L-shaped, I-shaped, T-shaped, and +-shaped virtual blocks whose availability is assigned a limit, mimicking the limited resources termites might encounter. The algorithm constructs an architecture on a grid, which can be rendered as two-dimensional or three-dimensional models.
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Kenya's Tech Hub: Meeting the DIY Coders, Gurus of the Future
BBC News
Ismail Einashe
August 27, 2022
Kenya's Stem Impact Center aims to incubate next-generation technology developers by providing schoolchildren a space to learn coding and robotics following do-it-yourself principles. The center cultivates talent for local startups, and founder Alex Magu said he created it out of a desire to "democratize computer science" in Kenya. Companies that have tapped the center for talent include a digital marketing company in Turkana, an organization that incinerates waste and uses water hyacinths to produce electricity in Kisumu, and an artificial intelligence firm that develops translation applications for the deaf in Nairobi. The success of the center's students inspired Magu to search for opportunities to expand the program through efforts that include a project in Sudan, with support from a refugee charity.
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Researchers Say Cloudflare Is a Haven for Misinformation
Time
Chris Stokel-Walker
August 26, 2022
Critics claim content delivery network (CDN) Cloudflare is riddled with misinformation that it and similar companies ignore. Stanford University researchers analyzed services hosting 440 of the most prominent misinformation websites worldwide; although Cloudflare hosts just one in five mainstream Internet sites, it also hosts one in three sites known for hate- or misinformation-peddling. The Stanford researchers found "anecdotally that sites prefer Cloudflare because of its lax acceptable use policies and its free DDoS [distributed denial-of-service] protection services that help protect against vigilante attacks." The researchers identified Amazon, Google, GoDaddy, and Unified Layer as the four most prominent misinformation-hosting CDNs after Cloudflare.
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North American Companies Send in the Robots, Even as Productivity Slumps
Reuters
Timothy Aeppel
August 29, 2022
North American companies ordered a record 12,305 robotic machines in the second quarter, 25% more than during the same period a year ago, according to data compiled by the Association for Advancing Automation (A3). Despite the increase in spending on automation, however, U.S. productivity fell in the second quarter at its steepest pace on an annualized basis since the government began reporting it in 1948. A3 president Jeff Burnstein says it takes time for companies to fully implement new machinery to maximize its potential, especially in sectors adopting entirely new technologies, such as the auto industry's turn toward electric vehicles. A3 found nearly 60% of the robots ordered in the second quarter went to automotive companies.
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AI-Created Lenses Let Camera Ignore Some Objects
New Scientist
Matthew Sparkes
August 23, 2022
University of California, Los Angeles researchers developed a deep-learning artificial intelligence (AI) model design three-dimensionally (3D) printed plastic camera lenses that capture images of certain objects, while ignoring others in the same frame. The researchers trained the model using thousands of images of numbers, designated either as target objects to appear in images or objects to ignore. The model was told when images that were supposed to reach the camera's sensor did and did not pass through a trio of lenses, and when images that were not supposed to reach the sensor did. The AI used the data to improve its lens design. The completed lenses use complex patterns printed into the plastic to diffract away light relating to objects that are not designated to appear in the final image. Unwanted objects are not captured digitally, so they do not need to be edited out of the image.
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LastPass, Password Manager with Millions of Users, Is Hacked
The Wall Street Journal
Alyssa Lukpat
August 26, 2022
On Aug. 25, online password manager LastPass reported the theft of some of its source code and proprietary information, but said there is no evidence customer information from its more than 33 million users or encrypted password vaults were accessed. LastPass' Karim Toubba said a developer account had been breached, allowing an unauthorized party to access the company's development environment. The unusual activity was detected two weeks ago, prompting an investigation. Toubba said the company is working with a cybersecurity and forensics firm and has rolled out additional security measures. LastPass stores encrypted login information that users can access online with a master password, but they cannot see customers' data.
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