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Welcome to the April 3, 2023, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.

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Turing Winner Bengio Calls for 'Pause' on Technology He Helped Create
Financial Post (Canada)
Marisa Coulton
March 30, 2023


Yoshua Bengio, considered a godfather of Canadian artificial intelligence (AI), believes the technology he helped create should be paused before it spins out of control. Last week, the 2018 ACM Turing Award recipient told reporters society is not ready to contend with AI's potentially negative uses, and "better guardrails" should be developed first. He and over 1,100 signatories of an open letter published by the Future of Life Institute warned of AI inundating information channels "with propaganda and untruth," replacing human jobs via automation, and creating "nonhuman minds" that might render humanity irrelevant. The signatories expressed concern OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot could trigger a race to develop more powerful AIs that not even their creators can comprehend or control.

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A robotic hand that can accurately identify objects after only one grasp features robotic fingers that incorporate powerful sensors along their entire length. Robotic Hand Can Identify Objects with a Grasp
MIT News
Adam Zewe
April 3, 2023


Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scientists engineered a robotic hand that could identify objects with by grasping them once. The researchers built each finger from a three-dimensionally-printed endoskeleton with high-resolution GelSight sensors embedded within a soft silicone layer, which collect information about object shape via a camera and light-emitting diodes. The rigid skeleton allows the fingers to pick up heavy objects, while the soft skin enables them to grip pliable items without crushing them. Each finger gathers data on multiple object components simultaneously; the three-fingered hand could identify objects from one grasp with roughly 85% accuracy.

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Dubai’s police run next-generation surveillance systems from a headquarters north of the city’s downtown skyscrapers and malls. The Spread of Police Surveillance Tech
The New York Times
Paul Mozur; Adam Satariano
March 30, 2023


A recent police conference in Dubai showcased next-generation surveillance technologies for use by law enforcement agencies across the globe. These included brain wave readers for lie detection, cameras that can zoom in over a kilometer, facial recognition eyeglasses, sentiment analysis software, and predictive policing software that uses machine learning to predict where criminals will strike next. Such technologies raise concerns about privacy and political power. Daragh Murray of the U.K.'s Queen Mary University said, "A lot of surveillance could ostensibly be benign or used to improve a city. But the flip side of the coin is it can give you incredible insight into people's everyday lives. That can have an unintended chilling effect or be a tool for actual repression."

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Circuit Model Offers Insights into Brain Function
EPFL (Switzerland)
March 31, 2023


A computational model of the thalamic microcircuit of the mouse brain, developed by researchers at Switzerland's École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) as part of the Blue Brain Project, demonstrates the role that circuit plays in brain function and dysfunction. Featuring 14,000 neurons connected by 6 million synapses, the model can highlight neural circuits' structural and functional complexity and replicate multiple independent network-level experimental findings across different brain states. EPFL's Henry Markram said, "This approach yielded the first morphologically and biophysically detailed model of a thalamic microcircuit, demonstrating that the modeling strategy Blue Brain developed for cortical microcircuitry can be applied to other brain regions."

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Amino acids and peptides modified and then coaxed it into a transparent glass, are molded into sea-shell shapes. 3D-Printable Glass Made from Proteins Biodegrades
Nature
Jude Coleman
March 30, 2023


Scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) have produced biodegradable glass from amino acids and peptides capable of being three-dimensionally (3D) printed and molded. The researchers altered the ends of the amino-acid chains to reorder how they assemble and to prevent their breakup. They melted, then supercooled the amino acids, keeping the frozen molecules liquid before solidifying them into glass with additional cooling. The glass remains solid at room temperature, and preventing crystallization keeps the material from becoming cloudy. Said Xuehai Yan of CAS, “The development of renewable, benign and degradable materials is highly appealing for a sustainable future.”

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$335,000 Pay for 'AI Whisperer' Jobs Appears in Red-Hot Market
Bloomberg
Conrad Quilty-Harper
March 29, 2023


Amid the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, companies are hiring "prompt engineers" tasked with getting better results out of their AIs and helping train their workforces to make use of the technology. Some of these positions can pay up to $335,000 annually and do not require a computer engineering degree. Albert Phelps at U.K. consultancy Mudano explained, "It's like an AI whisperer. You'll often find prompt engineers come from a history, philosophy, or English language background, because it's wordplay. You're trying to distill the essence or meaning of something into a limited number of words." Recruiters say those with Ph.D.s in machine learning or ethics, or who have founded AI firms, generally are offered the best-paying roles.

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A part of the GlucoScreen app diabetes screening process. Researchers Screen for Prediabetes with Smartphones
UW Allen School News
Kristin Osborne
March 30, 2023


University of Washington (UW) researchers have created GlucoScreen, a prediabetes screening tool that taps the capacitive touch-sensing capabilities of smartphones to measure blood glucose levels. Users apply a drop of blood to an enzyme-impregnated test strip, which sends data about the electrochemical reaction to a phone through a sequence of taps at varying speeds via pulse width modulation. A machine learning application analyzes the data and calculates blood glucose levels; early results suggest GlucoScreen has a similar accuracy to that of current glucometer testing. The method requires no complex electronic components, minimizing strip fabrication cost as well as power requirements.

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Ransomware Crooks Exploit IBM File-Exchange Bug with 9.8 Severity
Ars Technica
Dan Goodin
March 28, 2023


Security researchers warn that ransomware purveyors are targeting servers by leveraging a flaw in the IBM Aspera Faspex centralized file-exchange application that was assigned a severity rating of 9.8. Aspera employs IBM's Fast, Adaptive, and Secure Protocol to better allocate available network bandwidth, and to ease file transfer to recipients in distribution lists or shared inboxes or workgroups. In January, IBM cited a critical vulnerability in Aspera versions 4.4.2 Patch Level 1 and earlier that allows remote code execution by unauthenticated threat actors; the company urged users to correct it with an update. Rapid7 analysts highlighted an incident in which a customer was breached using the exploit, despite IBM having patched the vulnerability in January.

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Using a thermal video camera, WHOI scientists captured heart rate and respiration rate from a variety of species at the Cincinnati Zoo, including this barn owl. Tools to Test Heart Rate, Respiration in Wild Animal Populations
Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
March 29, 2023


Researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) are collaborating with zoos and aquariums to measure exotic animals' heart and respiration rates in a stable setting using infrared thermography and Eulerian video magnification (EVM) software. The controlled data gathered during these tests will be used to develop non-invasive methods for health assessments of animals in the wild, particularly threatened and endangered species. In tests at the Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden, the researchers found the two technologies must be used in tandem; said WHOI's Caroline Rzucidlo said, " Using the two together was the winning combination and offered us an unprecedented view of animal health."

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AI Could Set Bar for Designing Hurricane-Resistant Buildings
NIST News
March 29, 2023


U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers have created a new digital hurricane modeling technique that more accurately simulates storm trajectory and wind speeds. The researchers simulated the storms' inner workings to develop the latest maps; NIST's Adam Pintar said the team trained the model to mimic actual hurricane data with machine learning. The training data came from the National Hurricane Center's Atlantic Hurricane Database (HURDAT2), which encompasses information about more than 1,500 hurricanes going back more than a century. The researchers used the model to simulate sets of 100 years' worth of hypothetical storms in just seconds, which exhibited significant overlap with the HURDAT2 storms' behavior. The team suggests this method can help to improve guidelines for designing hurricane-resistant buildings.

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Researchers collaborated to observe nanoparticles self-assembling and crystalizing into solid materials. Researchers Reveal Real-Time Glimpse into Nanoparticles' Growth Habits
Illinois News Bureau
Lois Yoksoulian
March 30, 2023


A team of researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and Northwestern University used liquid-phase transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and computational modeling to witness the self-assembly and solidification of nanoparticles for the first time. The researchers observed cuboid, spherical, and indented cuboid nanoparticles to investigate how shape influences behavior. They visually modeled particles colliding and cohering into horizontal layers, stacking themselves vertically into crystals, and detaching to tumble onto lower layers. Said UIUC researcher Qian Chen, "Previously, our team resolved the mystery of nucleation, namely how the embryos of crystals composed of tens of nanoparticles are formed. With advances in liquid-phase TEM and data science, in this work, we can now capture and track motions of thousands of nanoparticles over time.”

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Tool to Provide Insight into Biological Processes
USC News
Paul McQuiston
March 31, 2023


Researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) and the Stowers Institute for Medical Research have developed a new method for collecting and arranging data about live organic tissue. The Hybrid Unmixing algorithm enhances the quality and differentiation of intrinsic-field signals emitted by tissues. USC's Francesco Cutrale explained the technique enables researchers to "look at very large datasets—associated by similarity into an enormous histogram—and analyze this data in record time and with very high sensitivity." The algorithm employs linear unmixing to analyze and visualize components in specimens marked by fluorophores, facilitating concurrent imaging of bright and dim labeled elements within organic tissue. The method is expected to yield more accurate insights into biological systems.

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