Welcome to the April 26, 2023, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
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Seltzer Named ACM Athena Lecturer for Technical, Mentoring Contributions
ACM
April 26, 2023
ACM has named Margo Seltzer at Canada's University of British Columbia the 2023-2024 ACM Athena Lecturer for her pioneering technical contributions and commitment to service and mentoring. At the University of California at Berkeley, Seltzer co-developed the BerkeleyDB database software, which has been incorporated into many popular operating systems. She later spearheaded the model of whole-system data provenance, which supports information quality assessment by understanding where data originates, who uses it, and how it was acquired. ACM President Yannis Ioannidis cited Seltzer in particular "for her efforts to broaden participation in computer science among traditionally underrepresented groups."
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Teaching Trucks to See
Princeton University
Daniel Oberhaus
April 25, 2023
Princeton University's Felix Heide pioneered the design of imaging systems that Daimler Truck subsidiary Torc Robotics has incorporated into a fleet of self-driving semi-trucks making test drives in Albuquerque, NM, over the last 18 months. Heide's holistic system development approach incorporates the use of cameras customized to specific tasks, which outperform existing autonomous vehicle systems in poor conditions. Heide said, "This approach of using AI [artificial intelligence] to create trainable models of the entire imaging and image analysis chain allows us to treat these camera systems as systems we can train and evolve so they are optimized for specific tasks."
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3D-Printed Microneedle Patches Bring Vaccines to the Masses
The Jerusalem Post (Israel)
Judy Siegel-Itzkovich
April 24, 2023
Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have developed a portable three-dimensional (3D) vaccine printer that could manufacture doses on demand. The device 3D-prints patches, each of which bear hundreds of vaccine-containing microneedles. Each patch could be affixed to the skin so the vaccine dissolves without requiring a traditional injection and can be stored for months at room temperature. The microneedles are printed from RNA vaccine molecules encased in highly stable lipid nanoparticles. The researchers fabricated thermostable COVID-19 RNA vaccines that would be stable at various temperatures and could induce an immune response similar to that of injected RNA vaccines in mice.
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Fingerprint of Wood Can Help Fight Illegal Trade
Wageningen University & Research (Netherlands)
April 20, 2023
Researchers at the Netherlands' Wageningen University & Research were part of an international team that developed a method of tracing timber’s origin and reducing illegal trade. The researchers analyzed the chemical composition of wood samples from almost 1,000 trees from Central Africa and Borneo and found chemical ‘fingerprints’ that can identify the wood's origin at spatial scales as small as 50 kilometers apart. Said Wageningen's Laura Boeschoten, "A large number of chemical elements were measured at once (such as magnesium and calcium) by using a mass spectrometer. As a next step, we used machine learning methods to relate the wood chemical composition to its geographic origin." The method was 85% to 98% accurate in tracing samples to their sub-national origin in Central Africa, and 88% accurate in tracing samples to their forests of origin in Borneo.
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Tracking Technology Reveals Hidden Foraging Lives of Desert Ants
University of Sheffield (U.K.)
April 21, 2023
An international team of researchers used computer vision to track individual desert ants as they forage, exposing their distinctive behaviors. The Combined Animal Tracking & Environment Reconstruction (CATER) system uses artificial intelligence and computer vision to track the position of an insect in high-resolution video. It uses a novel image ‘mosaicing’ method to reconstruct the landscape. The accumulated data shows the ants can memorize their homeward route after one successful journey, while their outward paths evolve over time. It also found the ants exhibited an imperceptible “underlying oscillatory movement,” which may contribute to how ants generate complex search patterns suited to the conditions in which they find themselves.
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App Users Wary of Health, Fitness Recommendations Based on Social Media Data
Penn State News
Matt Swayne
April 24, 2023
Users like health and fitness apps that provide personalized recommendations based on their self-reported preferences and allow them to choose among different recommendations, according to a study by researchers at Pennsylvania State University. However, the study revealed that users are wary of health and fitness apps that collect data from social media. The study of 341 participants considered three approaches for recommendation systems in two different ways; they looked at demographic filtering, collaborative filtering, and content-based filtering, using data from the app and from social media. The researchers found most users disliked the approaches that required social media access. Said Penn State's S. Shyam Sundar, "In terms of design applications, when developers create health applications, they should refrain from using social media data for generating recommendations. Instead, they should use more identity signaling and identity-protective information."
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Moderna Teams Up with IBM to Put AI, Quantum Computing to Work on mRNA Technology for Vaccines
CNBC
Annika Kim Constantino
April 20, 2023
Moderna and IBM have partnered to advance messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine technology via generative artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing. Their agreement will give Moderna's scientists access to IBM's quantum computing systems and experts and IBM's MoLFormer generative AI model to accelerate development of new mRNA vaccines and therapies. Said Moderna's Stephane Bancel, "We are excited to partner with IBM to develop novel AI models to advance mRNA science, prepare ourselves for the era of quantum computing, and ready our business for these game-changing technologies."
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Google Robots Learn to Sort Recyclables in Office Waste Bins
New Scientist
Alex Wilkins
April 21, 2023
Google researchers have developed waste-sorting robots which they say are able to learn on the job. In experiments, one group of 20 robots was taught to sort items into recycling, compost, and trash in a controlled environment using simulations and workstations where they could practice. A second group of 23 robots was allowed to wander around Google offices to locate stations with unsorted or incorrectly sorted waste and put the items in the appropriate receptacles. The robots all used the same model for sorting waste that improves regardless of whether they were in a controlled or real-world environment. In a test after two years and almost 10,000 hours of sorting, the robots achieved an average accuracy rate of 84%.
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World's Largest Grammar Database Reveals Accelerating Loss of Language Diversity
CU Boulder Today
Kelsey Simpkins
April 19, 2023
A study of Grambank, the largest publicly available comparative grammatical database in the world, determined that around one language will be lost per month for the next 40 years unless efforts are made to save them. The study covered over 400,000 data points and 2,400 separate languages and dialects. At highest risk of loss are indigenous languages in northeast South America, Alaska to Oregon, and northern Australia. Researchers at 68 institutions worldwide contributed to Grambank, which encodes 195 possible grammatical features for about 215 language families. The 4,300 languages with published grammatical descriptions amount to more than half of the approximately 7,000 known languages in the modern world. The study indicated that social, political, and economic pressures have increased the pace of language loss.
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How NFTs Can Be Used to Manage Health Data
Computer Weekly
Aaron Tan
April 25, 2023
Clinicians in Singapore public healthcare group SingHealth say non-fungible tokens (NFTs) can be used to help patients manage their own health data. The researchers believe NFTs will grant patients greater control over their health data's storage and use, making individuals responsible for owning and sharing the data. Such NFTs can be generated, shared, and stored in a health data ledger with blockchain technology, ensuring security and privacy. The blockchain's traceable and unalterable state means sharing health data as NFTs will ensure the authenticity of health research data. Said SingHealth's Teo Zhen Ling, "Using NFTs and blockchain technology to build a secure healthcare data exchange platform will greatly impact the way data is handled in both healthcare research and clinical pathways."
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Grasping the Future with a Robotic Hand-Arm Combo
Yale School of Engineering & Applied Science
April 21, 2023
Yale University's Daniel Rakita, Aaron Doll, and Vatsal Patel have created a robotic hand-arm combination that uses algorithms to optimize its degrees of freedom and control though unified movement. Having greater degrees of freedom indicates greater manipulability, flexibility, and general dexterity in the robotic system, which it can use in a wider range of options for completing tasks. The quality of those options also increases as the degrees of freedom increase. Rakita said, "This suggests that our algorithms are able to identify important criteria, and perhaps more fundamentally, complex arms and hands can indeed coordinate to achieve more effective movements together."
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DIY Neurotech: Making BCI Accessible
IEEE Spectrum
Michael Nolan
April 19, 2023
The costs of hardware required for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), particularly electrodes and amplifiers, have made it difficult for researchers outside big tech companies and DIYers to build such devices. That is why Ildar Rakhmatulin of the U.K.'s Heriot-Watt University designed PiEEG, an EEG acquisition board that can attach to a low-cost, open-source Raspberry Pi computer to produce an all-in-one BCI development platform. The PiEEG board was made available for $250 on the Crowd Supply crowd-funding website after it was found that most people interested in using it would rather buy the device than make it themselves via the open-source hardware diagram. Developer Adam Feuer's HackEEG, which extends the Arduino Due platform to collect and process EEG and ECG signals, also is available on Crowd Supply.
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Making Quantum Processors Even Faster
Bar-Ilan University (Israel)
April 24, 2023
Researchers at Israel's Bar-Ilan University (BIU) led a team that produced a Tunable Superconducting Flux Qubit to improve the speed of quantum processors. The micron-sized superconducting loop allows electrical current to flow clockwise or counterclockwise or in a quantum superposition in both directions. The benefits of superconducting flux qubits include their speed, reliability, and ease of integrating them in a quantum processor in large numbers. Said BIU's Michael Stern, "Imagine wanting to play a certain note on a piano, but actually playing a number of keys together simultaneously and inadvertently, since the distance between the various keys isn't large enough. One of the main advantages of flux qubits is that- the 'pianist' can always produce the sound they want due to the ample separation between 'keys.'" The tunable nature of the qubits allowed researchers to control their performance, and to change the frequency of each without hindering their performance.
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