Welcome to the December 28, 2022, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
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Designing with DNA
Duke Today
Robin A. Smith
December 23, 2022
An open-source software program developed by researchers at Duke University lets users take drawings or digital models of rounded shapes and turn them into three-dimensional structures made of DNA. While researchers have been experimenting with DNA as a construction material since the 1980s, designing structures with curved surfaces like those found in nature has been tricky. Duke's Dan Fu developed software called DNAxiS, which relies on a previously described way to build with DNA by coiling a long DNA double helix into concentric rings that stack on each other. DNAxiS lets users design shapes automatically, using algorithms to determine where to place short DNA “staples” to join the longer DNA rings together and hold the shape in place. Said Fu, “If there are too few, or if they're in the wrong position, the structure won't form correctly. Before our software, the curvature of the shapes made this an especially difficult problem."
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Esports Seen as Pathway to Boost Diversity in STEM Careers
Associated Press
Claire Savage
December 21, 2022
Schools and businesses are looking to esports to increase racial diversity in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) careers. Of the 10 freshmen given new academic esports scholarships by DePaul University this year, nine are students of color. The scholarships are intended to cultivate practical skills for the video game industry. Kevin Fair of Chicago-based I Play Games! said skills developed through video games prepare students for careers in IT, coding, statistics, and software engineering, among other fields. Fair added that gaming helps develop typing proficiency and analytical skills, which are useful in the modern workplace. University of California, Irvine researchers found that school-affiliated esports clubs helped increase math and science learning and STEM interest, particularly at low-income schools. However, there are concerns that lack of representation in video games and equipment costs, among other things, could worsen inequality.
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Using Additive Manufacturing to Detect Counterfeit Parts
Texas A&M Today
Steve Kuhlmann
December 20, 2022
Texas A&M and Purdue University researchers are using metal additive manufacturing to identify counterfeit part via a hidden magnetic tag. The tag is encoded with authentication data and embedded below the surface of nonmagnetic steel hardware during three-dimensional (3D) printing. The tag can be read by a magnetic sensor device like a smartphone by scanning near the correct site on the product, so the user can access the authentication information. Texas A&M's Deniz Ebeperi said the researchers developed a custom three-axis magnetic sensor to map the surface of the product and expose the regions where the magnetic tag was accessible. Said Texas A&M's Daniel Salas Mula, "This is the first time that magnetic properties of the material are being used in this way to introduce information within a nonmagnetic part, specifically for the 3D printing of metals."
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Tech Spending Pressures Fuel Demand for Specialized Industry Clouds
The Wall Street Journal
Angus Loten
December 20, 2022
Cost-conscious corporate technology leaders are turning to industry-specific cloud platforms, which offer the promise of efficiencies as more services are delivered in ways that align with common industry data collection and analysis. Most industry clouds began to hit the market during the height of the pandemic, in part sparked by demand for better healthcare data systems. Designed to more easily integrate specialized end-to-end business data, industry clouds are especially useful for financial-services firms in areas like regulatory compliance or healthcare providers sharing secure lab results and diagnosis and treatment data across different departments. Said Oracle's Mike Sicilia, “Technology built for industries generally is better than one-size fits all. What a major pharmaceutical company needs to bring new treatments to market isn't the same as what a telco needs to deliver text messages—or what a restaurant needs to shift to a hybrid takeout, dine-in model."
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Dendrocentric AI Could Run on Watts, Not Megawatts
IEEE Spectrum
Charles Q. Choi
December 20, 2022
A study by Stanford University's Kwabena Boahen proposes a method that would allow neural networks to run on watts drawn from a smartphone battery instead of megawatts of power in the cloud. Rather than mimic synapses (the spaces between neurons), Boahen's computational model emulates dendrites, where a neuron receives signals from other cells and which branch out to allow a single neuron to be connected with many others. The computational model is designed so that the dendrite responds only if signals are received from neurons in a precise sequence, which means each dendrite could encode data using higher base systems, based on the number of connections and the length of the signal sequences. Boahen said a 1.5-micrometer-long ferroelectric field-effect transistor, comprised of a string of ferroelectric capacitors, with five gates could mimic a 15-micrometer-long stretch of dendrite with five synapses.
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Madison Square Garden Uses Facial Recognition to Ban Its Owner's Enemies
The New York Times
Kashmir Hill; Corey Kilgannon
December 23, 2022
MSG Entertainment has put lawyers who represent people suing it on an “exclusion list,” using facial-recognition technology to keep them out of Madison Square Garden and other venues it owns in New York City. A city law introduced last year requires commercial establishments to notify customers when biometric technologies are in use. Signs at MSG venues inform patrons that the technology is in place “to ensure the safety of everyone.” High-tech surveillance by government is already common in the city. Its Police Department, for example, uses facial recognition and drones. But MSG's use of technology crosses a line, say critics. Said the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Adam Schwartz, “It raises the question of what's going to come next. Will companies use facial recognition to keep out all the people who have picketed the business or criticized them online with a negative Yelp review?"
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The Physical Intelligence of Ant, Robot Collectives
Harvard University John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
Leah Burrows
December 19, 2022
Harvard University scientists modeled a team of robots after social insects to perform complex tasks collaboratively using only a few parameters. The researchers observed black carpenter ants as they collaboratively excavated out of and escaped a soft corral, identifying the strength of collective cooperation and the rate of excavation as relevant parameters. Numerical simulations of mathematical models encoding these parameters indicated the ants' success relied on sufficiently strong cooperation and efficient excavation. The researchers constructed robotic ants (RAnts) to perform a similar task, using light fields or "photormones" that emulated ants' pheromone fields or antennation. Harvard's S. Ganga Prasath said, "We showed how the cooperative completion of tasks can arise from simple rules, and similar behavioral rules can be applied to solve other complex problems such as construction, search and rescue, and defense."
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See Spot Spy? New Generation of Police Robots Faces Backlash
Los Angeles Times
Libor Jan; Gregory Yee
December 21, 2022
Critics are eyeing the deployment of more sophisticated robots by U.S. police forces with suspicion, fearing their use for surveillance and potential threat to privacy and safety. For example, the Los Angeles Police Department intends to purchase a Spot robot from manufacturer Boston Dynamics to reportedly gather information in a "narrow set" of hazardous circumstances. This provoked opposition, as did recent attempts by San Francisco police to deploy weaponized robots in certain scenarios. The University of South Carolina's Geoff Alpert said the core issue is not whether police should use robots, but how police overseers should craft policies to guide their use. The University of California, Davis' Elizabeth Joh said local officials' "piecemeal efforts" to rein in police use of robots have mostly failed to keep pace with the technology's evolution, citing "increasing reliance by police on machine-made decisions."
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The World's Largest Turbulence Simulation Unmasks the Flow of Energy in Astrophysical Plasmas
Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory
December 23, 2022
Using over 200 million computer central processing units at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility, researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) and other institutions have simulated a previously hidden heating process that helps explain how the atmosphere that surrounds the Sun can be vastly hotter than the solar surface that emits it. The hidden ingredient is magnetic reconnection, a process that separates and reconnects magnetic fields in plasma. The simulation revealed how rapid reconnection of the magnetic field lines turns the large-scale turbulent energy into small-sale internal energy. As a result, the turbulent energy is efficiently converted to thermal energy at small scales, thus superheating the corona. Said PPPL's Chuanfei Dong, “Our direct numerical simulation is the first to provide clear identification of this heating mechanism in 3D space."
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Amazon Begins Drone Deliveries in 2 U.S. Cities
The Hill
Megan Camponovo
December 26, 2022
Amazon has officially begun making shipment deliveries with drones to customers in Lockeford, CA, and College Station, TX. Calling the service Prime Air, Amazon says that after a customer has been “onboarded” and orders a package, a drone will fly to the customer's backyard and descend enough to drop off the package, then fly away. In a blog post earlier this year, Amazon representatives said the goal is to deliver packages under 5 pounds in less than an hour. Said Amazon's Natalie Banke, “Our aim is to safely introduce our drones to the skies. We are starting in these communities and will gradually expand deliveries to more customers over time."
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Film Characters' Actions Reflect Gender Bias
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Rachel Levin
December 21, 2022
University of Southern California researchers created a machine learning framework that exposed a pattern of stereotypical behavior by film characters over a century, based on scene descriptions in movie scripts. The model analyzed more than 1.2 million descriptions for 912 scripts in 31 genres produced over more than 100 years, identifying 50,000 actions performed by 20,000 characters. Statistical analyses showed female characters exhibit less agency than male characters and are more likely to be gawked at, while male characters are less likely to portray emotion and affection than female characters. The researchers found some of these stereotypical patterns have persisted for decades, despite shifts in gender roles during the century of film covered.
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Apple Fixes Bug That Let Malicious Apps Skirt macOS' Security Protections
Tech Crunch
Carly Page
December 20, 2022
Microsoft researchers have determined that a flaw in a core macOS security feature could enable attackers to deploy malware on affected devices. The "Achilles" vulnerability exploits the Gatekeeper security feature's Access Control Lists file permissions model, which quarantines apps and files downloaded from a web browser until Gatekeeper checks them. The vulnerability adds extremely restrictive permissions to downloadable files that prevents the quarantine attribute from being set. This means users could download and open malicious files on macOS without Gatekeeper's security protections being triggered. Apple recently reported that the flaw, which was identified in July, had been fixed.
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DeepMind's AI Cuts Energy Costs for Cooling Buildings
New Scientist
Jeremy Hsu
December 20, 2022
Researchers at DeepMind, Google, and building control system manufacturer Trane Technologies developed an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can control building cooling systems in various weather conditions in a way that maintains occupants' comfort while minimizing energy usage. The AI was used to control cooling systems at university campus buildings and a mixed-use building comprised of apartments, restaurants, and shops. It was trained with less than a year of historical data from each building's standard cooling system. The AI generated and assigned scores to possible actions for each decision it made, based on knowledge gained from monitoring factors like weather patterns and changing levels of cooling demand. The researchers determined that the AI saved 9% to 13% on energy required for cooling over a three-month period.
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