Welcome to the February 15, 2023, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
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Black Girls Benefit Most When STEM Teachers Train Up
Rice University News
February 13, 2023
Rice University researchers found continuing professional development by middle and high school teachers in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) can benefit their students. The researchers tracked math teachers' progress over six years following participation in Rice's Applied Mathematics Program for inquiry-based instruction. They learned the teachers' former students were more likely to major in STEM in college than their peers in other teachers' classes. Those teachers’ Black female students were found to be 7.2% more likely to become STEM majors in college, as were 6% of Asian students, 6.6% of Black students overall, 5.2% of white students, and 4% of Hispanic students. Rice's Carolyn Nichol credits inquiry-based learning, which offers context for students that straightforward lectures frequently lack, with encouraging students' progress.
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Beyond Silicon Valley, Spending on Technology Is Resilient
The New York Times
Steve Lohr
February 13, 2023
Despite concerns about a recession, many companies continue to spend on technology, a trend that is expected to continue this year. Research firm IDC found 82% of U.S. corporate technology managers polled anticipate a recession this year, while 62% expect their companies to spend the same or more on technology compared with last year. Boston University School of Law's James Bessen cited government data that business spending on software hit $567 billion last year, 37% more than was spent on both factories and industrial equipment. This comes as technologies including cloud computing, data analytics, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity, are growing increasingly vital to company revenues and profits. Harvard Business School's David Yoffie said, "That's going to be a counterbalance for the economy that didn't exist in the last two downturns."
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Cerf Criticizes ChatGPT AI Tech for Making Things Up
CNet
Stephen Shankland
February 13, 2023
Speaking at Celesta Capital's TechSurge Summit, 2004 ACM A.M. Turing Award recipient and Google Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf criticized the technology underpinning OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot. Cerf warned the technology raises ethical issues when it produces plausible-sounding but wrong information, even when trained on factual content. Cerf said his request that ChatGPT write his biography generated multiple incorrect statements, indicating its artificial intelligence uses statistical patterns extracted from massive training datasets to structure its response. "It knows how to string a sentence together that's grammatically likely to be correct" without any actual knowledge of what it is saying, Cerf said. "We are a long way away from the self-awareness we want."
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Researchers 3D Print Prosthesis for Cancer Patients
King's College London (U.K.)
February 13, 2023
A chest wall prosthesis developed by researchers at King's College London in the U.K. can be three-dimensionally (3D) printed for about £40 (US$48), a vast improvement from traditional titanium implants that cost over £1,000 (US$1,200). The 3D-printed prosthesis was designed for patients who have had part of their chest wall removed during surgery to excise cancerous bone and tissue. The researchers developed software that can create a 3D-printable rib based upon patient characteristics such as age, weight, height, and sex. Once printed, the prosthesis is placed in liquid silicon to create a mold that is sterilized and filled with bone cement, which is inserted into the patient. The result is a prosthesis more flexible than titanium and supple like the human ribcage.
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Ingestible Sensor Could Help Doctors Pinpoint GI Difficulties
MIT News
Anne Trafton
February 13, 2023
An ingestible sensor developed by engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the California Institute of Technology can be monitored as it travels through the digestive tract, helping doctors to diagnose gastrointestinal ailments more precisely. After swallowing, the capsule-contained sensor detects a magnetic field generated by an electromagnetic coil outside the patient's body within 60 centimeters (23.6 inches) or less, with its position calculated according to its measurement of the field. A second sensor functions as a reference point outside the body, to pinpoint the ingested sensor's internal location. The device transmits magnetic field measurements to a computer or smartphone. The researchers demonstrated the sensor by tracked it as it moved through the digestive tracts of large animals.
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Simulation Could Help Explain Nutrients' Impact on Gut
University of Sydney (Australia)
February 14, 2023
Researchers at Australia's University of Sydney led a team that developed a computational tool to test the effect of nutrient combinations on gut microbes using metabolic simulation. In simulations of the interactions between vitamins B1, B12, K2, and the coenzyme CoQ8, the tool revealed gut bacteria known as Bacteroides can create vitamins that are lacking in a person's diet, while some varieties of gut bacteria cannot create vitamins, and need to access them from food or other human microbiota. University of Sydney's Erin Shanahan said the tool could "contribute to a greater understanding of why some individuals have an improved response to a tailored diet while others don't by examining the way in which gut microbes metabolize and share nutrients."
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To Spare Research Volunteers, Robot Gets Mosquito Bites
Futurity.org
Jade Boyd
February 13, 2023
Scientists at Rice and Tulane universities have developed a system to study mosquitoes' feeding habits without the use of live subjects. Rice's Kevin Janson and colleagues combined cameras, machine learning software, and three-dimensionally-printed patches of hydrogel infused with flowing blood. Up to six hydrogels can be packed inside a plastic box while cameras point at each patch to record how frequently mosquitoes land on the patches, how long they remain, whether they bite, and their feeding duration. Experiments tested existing mosquito repellents made with DEET or a plant-based repellent extracted from lemon eucalyptus plant oil; the insects readily fed on repellent-free hydrogels and avoided patches coated with either repellent. Rice's Omid Veiseh suggested the system could facilitate laboratory research into mosquito behavior and repellent discovery.
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Algorithms That Adjust for Worker Race, Gender Still Show Biases
UT News
February 8, 2023
Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin (UTA), Stanford University, and Microsoft Research found biases remain evident in algorithms that purportedly adjust for race- and gender-based hiring discrimination. The researchers used a dataset of 397,340 third-person biographies covering 28 occupations, with a "she" or "he" pronoun associated with each biography; an additional set of biographies employed nonbinary pronouns. They applied three common interventions to increase the algorithms' fairness but found social norm bias—the tendency to prefer workers who mirror dominant groups—persisted despite the interventions. UTA’s Maria De-Arteaga said, “When there is social norm bias, the individuals in the minority who benefit from an intervention will be those who most adhere to the social norms of the majority. The findings have widespread implications for correcting algorithm bias.”
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The 'Flip-Flop' Qubit: Realization of Quantum Bit in Silicon Controlled by Electric Signals
UNSW Sydney Newsroom (Australia)
February 13, 2023
Andrea Morello, Rostyslav Savytskyy, and Tim Botzem at Australia's University of New South Wales, Sydney demonstrated an electrically controlled "flip-flop" quantum bit (qubit). The researchers demonstrated how the spin of an electron and the nuclear spin of a phosphorus atom in silicon could function as qubits. Savytskyy explained, "This new qubit is called 'flip-flop' because it's made out of two spins belonging to the same atom—the electron and the nuclear spin—with the condition that they always point in opposite directions." Botzem said the team was able to program arbitrary quantum states of the flip-flop qubit by swapping the electron and the nucleus' orientation "simply by applying a voltage to a small metallic electrode, instead of irradiating the chip with an oscillating magnetic field." Morello said this approach could support multi-qubit quantum logic operations for large-scale quantum computers.
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Critical Infrastructure at Risk from Vulnerabilities in Wireless IIoT Devices
The Hacker News
Ravie Lakshmanan
February 9, 2023
Researchers at Israeli industrial cybersecurity company Otorio found 38 new security vulnerabilities that could threaten critical infrastructure in wireless industrial Internet of things devices from four vendors. The bugs create a remote entry point for infiltration, allowing unauthenticated parties to gain access and proliferate to other hosts. Otorio's Roni Gavrilov said some of the vulnerabilities could be linked together to enable malefactors to directly access thousands of internal operational technology networks online. Exploits can run the gamut from targeting weak encryption schemes to coexistence attacks focused on combination chips used in many electronic devices. The researchers recommend disabling insecure encryption schemes, concealing Wi-Fi network names, deactivating unused cloud management services, and blocking public access to devices.
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Surfing the Research Data Wave
University of Stuttgart (Germany)
February 10, 2023
A new data exchange format developed by a team led by researchers at Germany's University of Stuttgart aims to provide a means for accessing and reusing large volumes of complex research data. With EnzymeML, researchers can record the comprehensive results of an enzymatic experiment and store that data in a structured and standardized manner, which ensures the machine-readable documents are interoperable and can be reused by other research groups. EnzymeML also allows for seamless communications between experimental platforms, electronic lab notebooks, enzyme kinetics modeling tools, publication platforms, and enzymatic reaction databases. Said University of Stuttgart's Simone Lauterbach, "We demonstrate the feasibility and usefulness of the EnzymeML toolbox using six scenarios where data and metadata from various enzymatic reactions is collected, analyzed, and uploaded to public databases for future use."
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Computer Model IDs Roles of Individual Genes in Early Embryonic Development
Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis
Julia Evangelou Strait
February 9, 2023
The open source CellOracle software developed by researchers at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis (WUSM) can model the response of gene networks when individual genes are disrupted in early embryonic development. CellOracle can simulate hundreds of genetic experiments in minutes. The researchers validated the software's function using data on blood cell formation in mice and humans, and embryonic development in zebrafish. WUSM's Samantha A. Morris said CellOracle also predicted effects when certain genes are dialed up past their usual expression limits, which in the case of two genes transformed skin cells into cells for repairing a damaged liver and intestine. Said Morris, "This computational method helps scientists narrow down which genes are most important."
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