Welcome to the April 12, 2023, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
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ACM Prize in Computing Recognizes Yael Tauman Kalai for Fundamental Contributions to Cryptography
ACM
April 12, 2023
ACM has named Yael Tauman Kalai to receive the 2022 ACM Prize in Computing for fundamental contributions to cryptography that have influenced modern practices. Kalai created techniques for generating succinct proofs that certify the correctness of any computation, allowing weak devices to offload any computation to stronger devices while upholding efficient correctness checks. Her research spearheaded the study of "doubly efficient" interactive proofs, which guarantee small computational overhead on strong devices, making verifiable delegation practical. Kalai's cryptographic development of certificates of computation tapped quantum informational "non-signaling" strategies to erect a one-round delegation scheme for any computation. ACM President Yannis Ioannidis described Kalai as “a true star all around,” adding, “she has also established herself as a respected mentor, inspiring and cultivating the next generation of cryptographers.”
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Robotics Researchers Focus on Teamwork
The Wall Street Journal
Jackie Snow
April 11, 2023
Researchers say teams of autonomous robots need to significantly improve their ability to communicate, collaborate, and respond to each other and their surroundings in order to perform more complex tasks. Multirobot systems with differing degrees of autonomy are being deployed in Amazon fulfillment centers and other real-world settings. Giving robot systems more agency gives rise to challenges that require more effective communication and coordination algorithms, according to Michael Wooldridge at the U.K.'s University of Oxford. Multirobot systems also could enhance efficiency, as units can fill in for malfunctioning robots to complete tasks.
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Researchers Develop 'Seamless-Walk' VR Locomotion System
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
April 11, 2023
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and South Korea's Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST) have created a foot-based virtual reality (VR) locomotion system that eliminates technical encumbrances. The "Seamless-walk" system can enable a comfortable walking experience for VR users without requiring special walking equipment or videos of body pose. GIST's Kyung-Joong Kim said the team sought to develop a controller incorporating MIT's "intelligent carpet" sensor for VR gaming. The intelligent carpet records foot pressure imprints in real time for input into a machine learning model that uses K-means clustering to extract strong pressure points, then estimates angle and movement speed from the user's body direction and foot intervals. Kim described ‘Seamless-walk as “a gait recognition and analysis method” with the potential for use in the long term for healthcare applications.
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Can Intelligence Be Separated from the Body?
The New York Times
Oliver Whang
April 11, 2023
The growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) has raised questions about the relationship between mind and body. Like humans, AI chatbots can express emotions, but some say AI would have to be paired with a body that can perceive, react to, and feel its environment for it to achieve true intelligence. Researchers at the California startup Embodied have developed Moxie, a robot with a toddler-sized body that uses a large language model to analyze conversations and generate a verbal and physical response. Sensors also allow Moxie to observe, react, and mimic a person's body language. Meanwhile, Alphabet researchers have developed PaLM-E, a robot that can perform basic tasks without special programming. However, University of Vermont's Joshua Bongard said, "Slapping a body onto a brain, that's not embodied intelligence. It has to push against the world and observe the world pushing back."
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Formula Predicts Effects of Noise on Quantum Information
Cornell Chronicle
Eric Laine
April 6, 2023
A formula developed by researchers at Cornell University and the Netherlands' University of Amsterdam can predict the impact of environmental noise on quantum information. They analyzed the bosonic dephasing channel model, which represents dephasing (interfering with the phase of a quantum system) acting on a single mode of light at a specific wavelength and polarization. The researchers demonstrated how to calculate the quantum capacity (the number of qubits that can be transmitted safely per use of a fiber) of the bosonic dephasing channel for all possible forms of dephasing noise. They determined incorporating redundancy into the quantum message can help ensure the quantum information is retrievable at the receiving end.
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Germany Taps into Africa's IT Sector to Fill Labor Gap
Deutsche Welle (Germany)
Martina Schwikowski; Isaac Kaledzi
April 11, 2023
German companies hope to address domestic workforce shortages by training young Africans in information technology (IT). For example, German software firm AmaliTech trains Africans as software engineers, offering them paid positions following graduation. Eckhardt Bode at Germany's Kiel Institute for the World Economy said this model should serve as a template, as Africa can supply much-needed workers via outsourcing or immigration. Germany’s IT worker shortage is critical, given the unexceptional performance of many IT projects in German public administrations. Said economist Eckhardt Bode, "The African continent offers great potential to reduce the local labor shortage."
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OpenAI Will Pay People to Report Vulnerabilities in ChatGPT
Bloomberg
Rachel Metz
April 11, 2023
OpenAI announced a new bug bounty program that will offer people $200 to $20,000 to find and report vulnerabilities in the ChatGPT chatbot. The artificial intelligence (AI) company is opening the program in association with bug bounty platform Bugcrowd. OpenAI said it established the program partly because it thinks "transparency and collaboration" are critical to uncovering flaws in its technology, while OpenAI head of security Matthew Knight blogged that the effort "is an essential part of our commitment to developing safe and advanced AI." The Bugcrowd page for the bounty program indicates certain safety issues related to the models are disqualified from rewards, including jailbreak prompts or queries that prompt the writing of malicious code, or questions that cause the model to say bad things to users.
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Detecting, Predicting, Preventing Aortic Ruptures with Computational Modeling
AIP Publishing
April 4, 2023
Researchers from the Indian Institute of Technology Varanasi and Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur developed a computational cardiovascular model to anticipate early abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) ruptures and determine the condition of patients' blood vessels. The researchers probed how patient-specific AAA shapes impact the hemodynamics of pulsatile Newtonian fluids in normal and diseased aortofemoral arteries. They produced patient-specific geometric models of arteries from three-dimensional medical imaging data, while finite element-based simulations addressed blood flow-governing equations under heartbeat-induced pulsation. The researchers found aneurysm size changes blood flow velocity distribution; this and other factors may affect blood circulation in the lower extremities.
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![Scanning electron microscope images of a microscopic octahedral truss structure at 100-micrometer scale [left], and zoomed in at 10-µm scale [right].](https://news.content.smithbucklin.com/c3/images/attachments/225/Holograms.jpg)
Holograms Supercharge Nanoscale 3D Printing
IEEE Spectrum
Charles Q. Choi
April 7, 2023
A three-dimensional printing technique developed by scientists at the Chinese University of Hong Kong uses holograms to manufacture nanoscale objects such as letters, numbers, lenses, rings, and gears that can be remotely controlled by magnetic fields. The new two-photon lithography method can print microscopic objects at up to 2 million voxels per second and 4.5 to 54 cubic millimeters per hour, realizing a maximum 90-nanometer resolution. The process also can concurrently run up to 2,000 individually programmable laser foci to produce complex structures, according to the researchers. The technique employs a near-infrared laser with roughly 10 gigawatts of peak power, which fires tens to hundreds of thousands of times slower than conventional two-photon lithography lasers. Said Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Shih-Chi Chen, “The technology can now be used for industrial-scale applications at a more reasonable price and fabrication rate.”
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Evidence That Quantum Machine Learning Outperforms Classical Computing
University of British Columbia (Canada)
April 5, 2023
Researchers at Canada's University of British Columbia Blusson Quantum Mater Institute (Blusson QMI) have demonstrated that two of the most popular quantum machine learning classification models achieved "quantum advantage," in which they outperform their classical counterparts. The models, Variational Quantum Classifiers (quantum neural networks) and Quantum Kernel Support Vector Machine, outperformed classical computers in solving a complex class of mathematical problems. Blusson QMI's Jonas Jäger said, "The mathematical problem that we've solved using these models is quite abstract and doesn't have many practical applications. But, because it presents such special properties under the complexity theory, it can be used by others as a benchmark to test how different quantum machine learning models perform."
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Smart Watches Could Predict Higher Heart Failure Risk
University College London (U.K.)
April 3, 2023
Scientists at the U.K.'s University College London (UCL), Queen Mary University of London, and Barts Heart Center suggest smart watches could rate one’s risk of developing heart disease later in life. The researchers analyzed data from 83,000 cardiovascular disease-free people aged 50 to 70 who had received a 15-second electrocardiogram similar to those conducted by smart watches and phone devices. Subjects with an extra heartbeat detected by machine learning and an automated computer tool were found to be twice as likely to experience heart failure or atrial fibrillation over the next decade than those lacking the extra heartbeat. UCL's Michele Orini said consumer-grade wearables like smart watches could help screen for future heart problems in combination with artificial intelligence and other computing tools.
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