Welcome to the January 4, 2023, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.

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Ukrainian troops operate a telescopic tower with a remote camera on a Soviet car at the front line near Kharkiv, Ukraine. Ukraine Has Digitized Its Fighting Forces on a Shoestring
The Wall Street Journal
Sam Schechner; Daniel Michaels
January 3, 2023


Ukraine has digitally networked its fighting forces, intelligence, and weapons on the cheap through satellite communications and custom software. Veterans of U.S. and allied digitization projects see Ukraine's patchwork command-and-control system as embodying the need to experiment and involve nonmilitary experts. Ukraine's domestic technology-outsourcing industry and hacker community have proven invaluable by repurposing commercial technologies for the insurgency. Examples include consumer drones modified to drop grenades, software to automate payroll on the front lines, and real-time battlefield intelligence relayed to local commanders from drones and spotters. Ukrainian Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov said on Twitter last week, “The enemy has been preparing for full-fledged [technology] war for 20 years. We made a technological leap in 10 months.”

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Using Computer Generated Images to Create Unbiased Facial Recognition
USC Viterbi School of Engineering
Nicholas Nuccio; Magali Gruet
January 3, 2023


Jiazhi Li and Wael AbdAlmageed at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute have developed a method for generating unbiased facial recognition software by artificially producing new images. Said AbdAlmageed, "We were able to create synthetic training datasets that, combined with real data, contain a balanced number of examples of facial images with different attributes [such as age, sex, and skin color]." The Controllable Attribute Translation for Fair Facial Attribute Classification methodology enables the software to analyze data with far less significant bias because the sample images have balanced levels of all attributes. Li said facial recognition programs could be trained with synthetic images just as well as they can with real images.

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Rescue workers carry a rubber dinghy as they search a flooded area in the aftermath of Typhoon Hagibis in Nagano, Japan, in October 2019. Japan Boosting Use of Digital Tools for Natural Disasters
The Japan Times
December 31, 2022


A growing number of municipalities in Japan are deploying digital tools to better mitigate natural disasters and to reduce the burden of local government workers in responding to them. Last year, Japan's land ministry conducted tests with five municipalities and companies to detect flooding via small sensors attached to power poles and installed next to waterways. A private weather information service provider also began sending weather and river data for Tokyo's Itabashi Ward; the provider’s website allows residents to check weather data and disaster risk. Tatsuya Unozawa at weather-driven solutions provider Weathernews said, "Digital transformation in disaster prevention can be a means of bridging information gaps among disaster management workers at municipalities."

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NSF Spearheads Funding to Improve Diversity in AI Workforce
Nextgov
Alexandra Kelley
January 3, 2023


The U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and six other federal research organizations will push to foster a more inclusive artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) workforce through the ExpandAI program. The program will channel more federal funding into AI research and development education within universities boasting a diverse student population and focusing on AI education. ExpandAI will provide funding for development projects and collaboration among participating National AI Research Institutes. Capacity development projects will aim to establish new AI education centers within minority-serving institutions that currently lack AI/ML curricula and will host large numbers of African American/Black American, Hispanic American, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander students. Said NSF's Margaret Martonosi, "We hope to see a more diverse, more inclusive participation of talented innovators from across our nation, driving AI research and innovation."

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Google Home Speakers Could Have Been Hijacked to Spy on You
TechRadar
Sead Fadilpašic
December 31, 2022


Cybersecurity researcher Matt Kunze discovered an exploit that could have enabled the hijacking of Google Home smart speakers to eavesdrop on conversations. Attackers must first be within wireless proximity of the device and monitor media access control addresses with Google-associated prefixes. They can transmit deauthentication packets to sever the device from the network and trigger the setup mode to request device information, then employ that data to link their account to the device and spy on device owners online. Kunze also was able to exploit the "call phone number" command so the device calls the hacker at a specified time and feeds live audio. Kunze reported the bug to Google, which had it patched by April 2022.

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Software engineer Priya Natarajan left Amazon to work for Optum Labs, a research arm of UnitedHealth Group. As Silicon Valley Retrenches, Tech Talent Shift Accelerates
The New York Times
Steve Lohr; Tripp Mickle
December 29, 2022


More technology professionals are pursuing employment outside of Big Tech, looking to sectors that increasingly offer more interesting challenges. Recruiters and labor analysts say the restructuring of the tech employment market is accelerating this trend amid an economic downturn. Most current tech jobs are concentrated in non-technology companies such as banks, retailers, healthcare providers, and manufacturers in need of talent as they undergo digitization. JPMorgan's Lori Beer said Silicon Valley's retrenchment has helped the bank recruit tech-skilled people, with particular emphasis on cloud computing, machine learning and artificial intelligence, data science, and cybersecurity. Said Tim Herbert at trade association CompTIA, "If this transition redeploys skilled tech workers to other sectors of the economy, that may very well be a healthy development."

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Program 'Learns' to Identify Disease-Causing Mosaic Mutations
UC San Diego Today
Scott LaFee
January 2, 2023


Researchers at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) and the San Diego-based Rady Children's Institute for Genomic Medicine have developed a deep learning technique for teaching a computer to identify disease-inducing mosaic mutations. UCSD's Xiaoxu Yang said the researchers trained the DeepMosaic program on nearly 200,000 simulated and biological variants across the genome, until "we were satisfied with its ability to detect variants from data it had never encountered before." Tests on several independent large-scale sequencing datasets that DeepMosaic had never seen showed the program outperformed prior approaches. "The prominent visual features picked up by the deep learning models are very similar to what experts are focusing on when manually examining variants," according to former UCSD researcher Xin Xu.

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Virtual singer Luo Tianyi performing with renowned pianist Lang Lang at the Mercedes-Benz Arena in Shanghai, China, in 2019. Companies Can 'Hire' Virtual Person for About $14k a Year in China
CNBC News
Evelyn Cheng
January 2, 2023


Companies in China are "hiring" virtual employees, with technology firm Baidu saying it has doubled its number of virtual people projects since 2021. Baidu uses animation, sound technology, and machine learning to produce digitized and sometimes interactive human beings that companies may purchase for customer service and entertainment applications. Baidu's Li Shiyan said buyers of virtual people to date include financial services companies, local tourism boards, and state media. While the cost of a virtual employee has fallen by roughly 80% since last year thanks to technological improvements, a three-dimensional virtual person can cost a company about 100,000 yuan ($14,300) annually. Sirius Wang at the Greater China at Kantar marketplace said Chinese brands see virtual people as reliable alternative spokespersons, following scandals involving human celebrities.

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Swiss Researchers Create Self-Healing Skin for Robots
Swissinfo (Switzerland)
December 30, 2022


Researchers at Switzerland's Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich three-dimensionally (3D)-printed a self-repairing skin for robots, based on the regenerative characteristics of materials like plant stems and animal bones. The researchers 3D-printed a grid of hydrogel impregnated with Ganoderma lucidum fungus, which regenerates when damaged. After 20 days' maturation, the skin was able to grow back when cut, thanks to the fungal mycelial cells' metabolic activity. The researchers then rolled the robot over various surfaces and immersed it in water, which did not result in any problems. The team concluded the technology could ultimately "bring life to the world of materials."

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Linux Malware Uses 30 Plugin Exploits to Backdoor WordPress Sites
BleepingComputer
Bill Toulas
December 30, 2022


Antivirus vendor Dr. Web disclosed a new Linux malware that exploits 30 flaws in multiple outdated WordPress plugins and themes to inject malicious JavaScript and give attackers remote command capabilities. The vendor said the trojan targets 32-bit and 64-bit Linux systems; it is mainly designed to penetrate WordPress websites via a series of hardcoded exploits that run successively until one breaks through. If the sites run outdated or vulnerable plugins, the malware automatically injects malicious JavaScript from its command-and-control server. The exploit is most effective on abandoned sites, because infected pages can redirect visitors to a location of the hacker's choosing. Dr. Web advised WordPress website admins to update to the latest available version of the themes and plugins running on the site, and to replace those that are no longer developed with alternatives now being supported.

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The spotted lanternfly. A North Carolina State University study shows the potential for using Twitter and online news articles to track the timing and location of invasive insect spread. Tweets, News Offer Insights on Invasive Insect Spread
NC State University News
Laura Oleniacz
January 3, 2023


North Carolina State University (NC State) researchers analyzed Twitter posts and online news to gain insights on the proliferation of invasive insect species in the U.S. and globally. "Even though these are not formal scientific sources, we found that we could clearly see some of the major events that were occurring about two invasive pests in the news, and on Twitter," said NC State's Laura Tateosian. The researchers tracked previous tweets about the spotted lanternfly and Tuta absoluta compiled by the Brandwatch subscription service, as well as news aggregated by Google News and the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone Project. The researchers learned activity on Twitter and in news stories corresponded with some of the spread patterns in official surveys, which suggests such sources could supplement official data sources.

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At Midway International Airport in Chicago last week, a traveler searched for her luggage among hundreds of bags separated from their owners during the Southwest Airlines meltdown. Southwest Meltdown Shows Airlines Need Tighter Software Integration
The Wall Street Journal
Belle Lin
January 2, 2023


The Southwest Airlines meltdown that stranded thousands of travelers during the recent winter storm reflects the growing obsolescence of General Electric's SkySolver crew-scheduling software. Airline executives said SkySolver was unable to match crew members to flights amid a massive number of schedule changes. Analysts and insiders said many airlines still rely on in-house solutions mainly built on legacy mainframes and are urging a major overhaul that leverages cloud technologies and fully integrated real-time data sources to better coordinate crews with flights. Tim Crawford at enterprise information technology advisory firm AVOA said air carrier operations software has persistently trailed other technologies, partly because a small number of providers have built dedicated systems that can manage the scale of major airlines. Southwest's Bob Jordan said some of the airline's operations use solid systems, but those systems still need "better intelligence to talk to each other."

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Nvidia's Robot Simulator Now Includes Human Characters Too
ZDNet
Danny Palmer
January 3, 2023


Software company Nvidia unveiled an updated robotics simulator that incorporates human characters at the 2023 Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2023). The company’s Isaac Sim scalable robotics simulation application toolkit can model human behavior in industrial settings, in order to help collaborative or autonomous mobile robots understand and detect common behaviors and potential hindrances. The toolkit can simulate both normal and abnormal events, so robots learn to respond appropriately to situations in busy environments. Isaac Sim uses Nvidia RTX technology to enhance sensor support, allowing real-time rendering of physically accurate sensor data to ensure the robots are as accurately trained as possible.

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