Welcome to the January 25, 2023, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
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ALS Patient Sets Record for Communicating via Brain Implant
Technology Review
Antonio Regalado
January 24, 2023
A brain implant restored communication for a woman with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), enabling her to express a record 62 words a minute. Stanford University researchers who developed the brain-computer interface (BCI) said the patient's word frequency rate is three times the previous best. An earlier BCI allowed subjects to speak via computer by placing electrodes on top of the brain; the Stanford team said their implant is more accurate and up to four times faster. They enhanced the system's accuracy using software to predict which word usually comes next in a sentence. The researchers found they made fewer errors in understanding the ALS patient as the number of neurons from which they could simultaneously read increased.
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Improving Data Security for a Hybrid Society
Tokyo University of Science (Japan)
January 23, 2023
Researchers from Japan's Tokyo University of Science (TUS) developed a secure computation method for encrypted data in which all computations are performed on a single server without incurring substantial computational costs. The system features a trusted third party (TTP) that generates random numbers for use in encrypting the data, while four players each use those random numbers to perform a computation and generate secret inputs. The shares, secret inputs, and new values generated by the TTP then are used by a single server to perform a serious of computations, with a final player using these results to reconstruct the computation result. Said TUS's Keiichi Iwamura, "We realize the advantage of homomorphic encryption without the significant computational cost incurred by homomorphic encryption, thereby devising a way to securely handle data."
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India Unveils Mobile Operating System in Self-Reliance Pursuit
Bloomberg
Sankalp Phartiyal
January 24, 2023
India unveiled the mobile Bharat operating system (BharOS) developed by researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT Madras) for businesses and high-security environments, designed to advance the Modi government's push for self-reliance. Education and Entrepreneurship Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said BharOS is part of a digital infrastructure that will benefit India's impoverished. IIT Madras' V. Kamakoti said the system is based on Linux, includes no default applications, and allows access to only trusted apps from private store services. Alphabet's Android is currently the dominant OS in India, running on about 97% of the nation's 620 million smartphones, while the rest use Apple's iOS.
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Muscle-Powered Robots Have Freedom of Movement
Northwestern Now
Liz Ahlberg Touchstone
January 18, 2023
Researchers at Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), and the University of Houston collaborated on the construction of remote-controlled electronic biological robots (eBiobots) powered by organic muscles. A research team led by UIUC's Rashid Bashir engineered biological robots powered by mouse muscle tissue cultured on a three-dimensionally-printed polymer framework. Northwestern's John A. Rogers and colleagues added remote control by integrating wireless microelectronics and battery-free micro-light-emitting diodes (LEDs). The researchers can transmit wireless signals to the eBiobots that cause the LEDs to pulse, stimulating muscle contraction and locomotion of the machines' polymer legs. "This unusual combination of technology and biology opens up vast opportunities in creating self-healing, learning, evolving, communicating, and self-organizing engineered systems," Rogers explained.
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Art, AI Collide in Landmark Legal Dispute
Financial Times
Madhumita Murgia; Ian Johnston
January 21, 2023
Human artists and artificial intelligence (AI) companies are disputing generative AI-intellectual property in a landmark legal case. Visual media company Getty Images filed a copyright claim against free image-generating Stable Diffusion tool developer Stability AI in the U.K. High Court. The tool was trained on 2.3 billion images harvested from the Web by a third-party website; Getty alleges Stability AI illegally copied and processed copyrighted images for its commercial benefit. Sandra Wachter at the U.K.'s Oxford Internet Institute said the case will decide whether companies can use such data for their own purposes. Said Estelle Derclaye at the U.K.'s University of Nottingham, "Ultimately, [AI companies] are copying the entire work in order to do something else with it — the work may not be recognizable in the output, but it's still required in its entirety."
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Combining Classical, Quantum Optics for Super-Resolution Imaging
Colorado State University Walter Scott Jr. College of Engineering
Anne Manning
January 24, 2023
Researchers at Colorado State University (CSU) and the Colorado School of Mines have theorized a super-resolution computational imaging method by combining optically derived quantum and classical information. The theoretical technique requires precisely counting the arrival of photons discharged by a biological sample with laser pulses. The researchers foresee applying an algorithm to the resulting series of quantum and classical images to generate images that detail small structures over large regions. The researchers were awarded a $1.2-million Dynamic Imaging Grant from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which will allow them to build the electronics and light detectors needed to verify their theory by capturing and counting single photons.
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NASA Needs Our Help to Find Exoplanets
PC Magazine
Stephanie Mlot
January 16, 2023
The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is soliciting the public's assistance in the search for exoplanets through the Exoplanet Watch citizen science program. Rob Zellem at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said the program teaches citizens "how to observe exoplanets and do data analysis using software that actual NASA scientists use." Participants must search for variations in the apparent brightness of stars, which the agency said "will help scientists anticipate the variability of a particular star before they study its exoplanets with large, sensitive telescopes like NASA's James Webb Space Telescope." The program allows anyone with a computer, tablet, or smartphone to help astronomers sift through a decade of observations.
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VR Glove Brings 'Natural, Realistic' Sense of Touch to Metaverse
National University of Singapore College of Design and Engineering
January 17, 2023
National University of Singapore (NUS) researchers invented a haptic glove to provide tactile perception for a more realistic experience in virtual reality (VR). HaptGlove offers users skin-like and movement sensations when engaging with virtual objects. The device integrates five pairs of wirelessly controlled haptic feedback modules to allow each finger to perceive virtual objects' shape, size, and stiffness; HaptGlove also can replicate an object's shape and stiffness by restricting finger positions. Proprietary software facilitates a visual-haptic delay of less than 20 milliseconds, providing a near-real-time tactile experience. HaptGlove earned the NUS research team The Institution of Engineers, Singapore’s IES Prestigious Engineering Achievement Award 2022.
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As Deepfakes Flourish, Countries Struggle with Response
The New York Times
Tiffany Hsu
January 22, 2023
Most countries do not have laws to prevent or respond to deepfake technology, and doing so would be difficult regardless because creators generally operate anonymously, adapt quickly, and share their creations through borderless online platforms. However, new Chinese rules aim to curb the spread of deepfakes by requiring manipulated images to have the subject's consent and feature digital signatures or watermarks. The implementation of such rules could prompt other governments to follow suit. University of Pittsburgh's Ravit Dotan said, "We know that laws are coming, but we don't know what they are yet, so there's a lot of unpredictability."
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Researchers Create Computational Reconstruction of Virus in Its Biological Entirety
Aston University (U.K.)
January 20, 2023
Dmitry Nerukh of the U.K.'s Aston University has developed the first complete computer reconstruction of a virus including its complete native genome, replicating the exact chemical and three-dimensional structure of a "live" virus. Nerukh used existing virus structure data measured using cryo-Electron Microscopy and supercomputers in the U.K. and Japan to perform computational modeling over a nearly three-year period. The findings could pave the way for more targeted treatments to kill bacteria and provide alternatives to antibiotics. Said Nerukh, "The ability to study the genome within a virus more clearly is incredibly important. Without the genome it has been impossible to know exactly how a bacteriophage infects a bacterium. This development will now allow help virologists answer questions which previously they couldn't answer."
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LG, Whirlpool Target Customers Disconnected from 'Smart' Appliances
The Wall Street Journal
Isabelle Bousquette
January 20, 2023
Appliance manufacturers LG Electronics and Whirlpool are trying to entice customers whose "smart" appliances are not connected to the Internet to embrace the technology. The manufacturers' continued development of smart devices hinges on consumers keeping them connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi. Connected appliances provide manufacturers with data and insights about how customers use their products. Henry Kim at LG platform ThinQ said the company is striving to better inform consumers on the sales floor about connectivity's perks; it also is working with delivery agents to ensure they connect appliances during installation. Whirlpool's Murat Genc said the firm is exploring "self-healing" capabilities so appliances can automatically reconnect to the Internet in the event of Wi-Fi outrages.
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Putting Clear Bounds on Uncertainty
MIT News
Steve Nadis
January 23, 2023
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of California, Berkeley, and Israel's Technion-Israel Institute of Technology acquired accurate measures of uncertainty and showed uncertainty in ways explainable to the average person. The work involved partially smudged or corrupted images decoded by algorithms. The researchers used an encoder to take a marred image and produce an abstract or latent representation of a clean image as a series of numbers; they then employed the StyleGAN generative adversarial network to decode the numbers into a clean image. MIT's Swami Sankaranarayanan said the approach focuses on an image's semantic properties "to estimate uncertainty in a way that relates to the groupings of pixels that humans can readily interpret."
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