Welcome to the February 24, 2023, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
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As War Enters Year Two, Ukrainians Are Filling Japan's Tech Gap
Al Jazeera
David McElhinney
February 22, 2023
Scholarships will be awarded to 10 Ukrainian emigrants granted temporary residency and work rights in Japan to participate in the Le Wagon Tokyo intensive coding boot camp. The scholarship, offered by non-governmental organization Stand With Ukraine Japan, the apparel tech company Virtusize, and the investment firm Nextblue as part of the Japan-Ukraine Tech Bridge initiative, aims to help Ukrainians find work in Japan while addressing Japan's shortage of tech workers. The program features nine weeks of programming instruction and a "career week" to ease graduates' transition into the workforce. Virtusize's Andreas Ueno-Olausson said, "I have a dream that Japanese companies will hire Ukrainians coming to Japan and use this opportunity to get access to arguably the world's best tech market, return on investment-wise."
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3D-Printed Heart Replicas Look, Pump Like the Real Thing
MIT News
Jennifer Chu
February 22, 2023
Physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) led a team that developed a procedure to enable the creation of three-dimensionally (3D) printed replicas of patients’ hearts. After converting medical images of a patient's heart into a 3D computer model, the researchers used a polymer-based ink to 3D-print a flexible shell identical to the patient's heart. The researchers developed sleeves that may be wrapped around a 3D-printed heart and aorta to replicate a patient's blood-pumping ability. Said graduate student Luca Rosalia, "The advantage of our system is that we can recreate not just the form of a patient's heart, but also its function in both physiology and disease."
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Quantum Computer Hits Key Milestone by Reducing Errors
Nature
Davide Castelvecchi
February 22, 2023
Google physicists have demonstrated that making their quantum code bigger can reduce the error rate of calculations. Although using multiple qubits for quantum error correction is beneficial in that it scales, adding additional qubits boosts the chances of multiple qubits being affected by simultaneous errors. The researchers addressed this by using two versions of a quantum error-correction procedure, one using 17 qubits that could recover from one error at a time, and another using 49 qubits that could recover from two simultaneous errors. Google’s Hartmut Neven acknowledged this latest innovation served to bring down the error rate “a little,” adding, “we need it to come down a lot.”
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How Digital Twins Could Protect Manufacturers from Cyberattacks
NIST News
February 23, 2023
At the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology and the University of Michigan, researchers have combined digital twin technology, machine learning, and human expertise into a cybersecurity framework for manufacturers. The researchers constructed a digital twin to mimic a three-dimensional (3D)-printing process, supplemented with information from a real 3D printer. Pattern-recognizing models monitored and analyzed continuous data streams computed by the digital twin as the printer created a part, then the researchers introduced various anomalies. The programs handed each detected irregularity to another computer model to check against known issues, for classification as expected anomalies or potential cyberthreats; a human expert made the final determination. The team found the framework could correctly differentiate cyberattacks from normal anomalies.
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How Asylum Seeker Credibility Is Assessed by Authorities
University of Copenhagen (Denmark)
February 22, 2023
Scientists at Denmark's University of Copenhagen (KU) found complex data practices used by authorities to rate the credibility of asylum seekers could undermine those applicants' rights. KU's Trine Rask Nielsen said the Refugee Appeals Board's credibility assessment procedure involves estimating various kinds of data produced in many different places, which can be interpreted differently by different agencies. Nielsen said analysis of 50 decision summaries showed applicants were denied asylum due to inconsistencies in data from different sources. She explained, "In some cases, social media data is used as documentation." Nielsen also said applicants face increasingly opaque decision-making protocols because of the increasing volume and diversity of data on refugees.
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Autonomous Ground Robot Helps Firefighters in Enclosed Spaces
Interesting Engineering
Nergis Firtina
February 21, 2023
Researchers at Spain's Universidad Rey Juan Carlos and Universidad Autónoma de Madrid developed an autonomous ground robot to help firefighters plan safe access routes to affected areas of a building and assist with evacuations. The robot is equipped with sensors to collect temperature, humidity, and air quality data and to identify its position and those of other objects. That data is stored in a database accessible through a smartphone app. Researcher Noelia Fernández Talavera said the robot’s evacuation mode "uses the prior knowledge of the scene to compute the shortest path from the current position to the target one. This target position can be the exit of the building or the location of a victim, among other things."
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MoBIE Enables Microscopy with Massive Datasets
University of Göttingen (Germany)
February 22, 2023
The Multimodal Big Image Data Exploration (MoBIE) tool developed by researchers at Germany's University of Göttingen and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory Heidelberg allows scientists to incorporate multiple datasets into high-resolution microscopy. The researchers initially created MoBIE to generate a high-resolution cellular "map" of the worm Platynereis dumerilii by combining electron microscopy data with genetic expression profiles. The tool allowed anyone with a laptop to access the 10-terabyte dataset, prompting the team to extend it to hundreds more imaging data sources. MoBIE can access data on demand in the cloud, facilitating data visualization and analysis for massive datasets previously accessible only with more specialized instruments and computational knowledge.
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Rales Foundation Bets Big on Carnegie Mellon STEM Students
Associated Press
Thalia Beaty
February 23, 2023
The Norman and Ruth Rales Foundation and Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) hope to cultivate a new generation of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) students through a $150-million scholarship program. The foundation and CMU pledged $116 million and $34 million, respectively, to endow scholarships for graduate STEM students from underrepresented groups like women, racial minorities, and first-generation college students. The scholarships will provide 86 students a stipend, dedicated faculty, and other mentoring and career support starting next year. U.S. citizenship or permanent residency is required for the program; foreign students are not eligible. CMU's Farnam Jahanian said producing new STEM learners is critical "because of its implication for our economic prosperity, for our global competitiveness, as well as our national security."
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Mercedes-Benz Cars to Have 'Supercomputers'
Reuters
Victoria Waldersee; Joseph White
February 23, 2023
German automaker Mercedes-Benz said it will incorporate "supercomputer-like performance" into every one of its vehicles equipped with automated driving sensors. The company also said it would be able to offer traffic information and automatic rerouting in its cars through an alliance with Google. Drivers also will be able to view YouTube on in-vehicle entertainment system while the vehicle is parked or in Level 3 autonomous driving mode (in which the vehicle can perform most driving tasks, but a human driver still is required). Mercedes-Benz also said all cars on the modular architecture platform will feature hyperscreens spanning the cockpit, as part of the automaker's push to transition from patchwork software integration to developing core software in-house and bringing in partners.
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Hackers Could Try to Take Over Military Aircraft; Can Cyber Shuffle Stop Them?
Sandia LabNews
Troy Rummler
February 23, 2023
Researchers at Sandia National Laboratories and Purdue University tested a cyber-shuffling method to thwart attackers attempting to commandeer a military aircraft, and found implementing a moving target defense can shield military standard 1553 onboard computer networks from attacks by a machine learning algorithm. The method constantly shuffles the network addresses of each networked device. The researchers were uncertain it would work because the small 1553 address space complicates randomization, but the tests demonstrated the effectiveness of the moving target defense, provided the defenses designed by cybersecurity engineers are able to counter increasingly refined algorithms. Sandia’s Chris Jenkins said the work “showed that given the right type of technology and innovation, you can take a constrained problem and still apply moving target defense to it.”
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Diffractive Optical Networks Use Object Shifts for Performance Boost
UCLA Samueli Newsroom
February 23, 2023
A "time-lapse" technique developed by University of California, Los Angeles researchers achieved significant improvement in the image classification accuracy of diffractive optical networks on complex input objects. The technique involves moving the object and/or the diffractive network relative to one another during the exposure of the output detectors. The researchers observed blind testing accuracy of more than 62% on the all-optical classification of images in the publicly available CIFAR-10 dataset using their method; blind testing accuracy rose to more than 65% when ensemble learning was incorporated into time-lapse image classification.
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Kombucha Cultures Can Be Turned into Flexible Electric Circuit Boards
New Scientist
Matthew Sparkes
February 22, 2023
Researchers at the U.K.'s University of the West of England, Bristol developed flexible electric circuit boards using the mat of cells that form on top when brewing kombucha. The researchers printed circuits onto the mats after they dried, using either an aerosol jet of a conductive polymer or laying down a conductive mix of polyester and copper via a three-dimensional printer. They used a silver-impregnated epoxy adhesive to attach 3- and 5-millimeter LEDs to the circuits, which remained operable despite repeated bending or stretching. The researchers determined the kombucha circuits were lighter, cheaper, and more flexible than conventional circuits, and are suitable for use in wearable devices.
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