Welcome to the May 19, 2023, edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for IT professionals three times a week.
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IBM, Google Give $150 Million for U.S.-Japan Quantum-Computing Push
The Wall Street Journal
Peter Landers
May 17, 2023
Quantum computing research has been given a boost at the University of Chicago and Japan's University of Tokyo with a $150-million investment from IBM and Google. The U.S.-Japan partnership comes as both nations work to continue to outpace China in quantum advancements. IBM's $100-million investment is intended to help the universities to build a quantum-centric supercomputer with 100,000 qubits within 10 years. Google will provide $50 million to the universities and, for the first time, share its quantum computer with university scientists. Google’s donation is intended to help educate new quantum specialists, with University of Chicago's Paul Alivisatos noting, "There's going to be a real need for people who understand the technology behind this and can help to implement it."
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AI Helps Place Drones in Remote Areas for Faster Emergency Response
USC News
Nina Raffio
May 18, 2023
University of Southern California (USC) researchers found that using artificial intelligence (AI)-driven decision-making to dispatch equipment to remote areas resulted in faster emergency response times. The researchers focused on a program in Toronto, Canada, that deploys drones equipped with automated external defibrillators together with ambulances in response to calls about cardiac arrest events. They learned using AI-powered decision-making on where to deploy life-saving equipment in data-scarce settings can facilitate more effective decisions on when to deploy drones and where to place drone depots in rural areas. USC's Michael Huang said this approach "can help us make more informed and efficient decisions across a range of fields where data is limited."
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UC Berkeley Spreads ‘Gospel of Data Science’ with New College, Free Curriculum
The Los Angeles Times
Teresa Watanabe
May 18, 2023
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) has approved a plan to open a College of Computing, Data Science, and Society and to provide a free curriculum to expand data science to institutions everywhere. University officials said the new college looks to meet what university officials called the "insatiable demand" for specialists who can structure and analyze data. By posting its curriculum online and sharing it with other campuses, UC Berkeley aims "to expand access to computing and the possibilities of how people can learn these skills that will get them a better job," according to faculty member Eric Van Dusen.
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Transparent Augmented Reality Display Opens Possibilities to See Digital Content in Real Time
University of Melbourne (Australia)
May 17, 2023
Researchers at Australia's University of Melbourne, Taiwan's KDH Design Corporation, and the Melbourne Center for Nanofabrication have created a transparent augmented reality (AR) display from inexpensive polymer and plastic via three-dimensional (3D) printing. The flexible display can bend and fit different shapes to suit various form factors and can overlay digital content without obstructing the user's view of the real world. KDH intends to integrate the screen into the visor of head-worn devices, including AR glasses, AR sports goggles, and AR helmet and automotive displays.
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Human-Evolution Story Rewritten by Fresh Data, More Computing Power
Nature
Jude Coleman
May 18, 2023
Computational models based on new software and a vast amount of genomic data are challenging the long-held belief that humans originated from a single region of Africa, instead springing from multiple ancestral populations across the continent. An international team of researchers used software to harness the computing power needed to create the models, which integrated genome-sequencing data from existing eastern and western African populations and the Nama tribe of southern Africa. The models predicted gene flow over millennia using factors like migration and population merging, then compared those predictions with modern genetic variation. The results suggest human evolution followed a "weakly structured stem" model rooted in "a very diverse overall population made up of fragmented local populations," according to Eleanor Scerri at Germany's Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology.
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A Better Way to Study Ocean Currents
MIT News
Adam Zewe
May 17, 2023
A multidisciplinary team led by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) developed a model that incorporates machine learning and fluid dynamics to better predict ocean currents and identify divergences. The model uses the same data from GPS-tagged buoys but has been given a basic knowledge of physics. It uses a Helmholtz decomposition to represent the principle of fluid dynamics, which breaks down the ocean current into a vorticity component to capture the whirling motion and a divergence component to observe water rising or sinking. The new model outperformed the conventional approaches in tests using both synthetic and real ocean buoy data. Said MIT's Tamara Broderick, "Our hope is to take this noisily observed field of velocities from the buoys, and then say what is the actual divergence and actual vorticity, and predict away from those buoys, and we think that our new technique will be helpful for this."
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'Digital Twin' of the Titanic Shows Shipwreck in Stunning Detail
The New York Times
April Rubin
May 17, 2023
Digital imaging by deepwater seabed mapping company Magellan for U.K. TV production company Atlantic Productions has yielded a "digital twin" of the RMS Titanic. A six-week expedition undertaken last summer to map the sunken ship more than two miles under the surface of the North Atlantic produced more than 16 terabytes of data, 715,000 still images, and high-resolution video. Two submersibles mapped the entirety of the wreck and its three-mile debris field. Atlantic Productions' Anthony Geffen said it took roughly eight months to generate the model. Geffen said the model reveals previously unknown details of the wreck.
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Invention for More Efficient Atomic Force Microscopes
TU Wien (Austria)
May 15, 2023
Researchers at Austria's Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) have upgraded the efficiency of atomic force microscopes (AFMs) by building a customized electronic circuit into the device's sensor element. The prototype circuit measures the movement of the AFM's cantilevered tip, resulting in required precision at less cost than conventional methods. TU Wien's Mathias Poik said the built-in data-processing element simplifies reading the amplitude and phase of the oscillations of an AFM’s sensory tip by ensuring "the signal is already processed before it is sent into a computer."
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Smart Glove Enhances Sense of Touch in VR
New Scientist
Alex Wilkins
May 13, 2023
A smart glove stimulates nerves on the back of the user's hands to create the sensation of grasping virtual objects. A web of electrodes covers the backs of the hand and fingers; each finger feels as if it is touching something because more touch receptors are concentrated on the front of the hands that sense the electrode-transmitted electrical signals from the back of the hand. The University of Chicago's Yudai Tanaka and colleagues said the device could be worn constantly, and could be used both inside and outside virtual reality (VR) because it only partly covers the hand.
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3D-Printing Method a 'Game Changer' for New Materials
University of Notre Dame News
Karla Cruise
May 15, 2023
A multi-institutional team of researchers led by the University of Notre Dame's Yanliang Zhang has accelerated new materials discovery and manufacturing from several decades to less than a year via a novel three-dimensional (3D) printing method. The high-throughput combinatorial printing (HTCP) technique blends multiple aerosolized nanomaterial inks in one printing nozzle, tuning the ink mixing ratio as it prints. The resulting materials exhibit thousands of gradient compositions and characteristics at microscale spatial resolution. The researchers used HTCP to identify a semiconductor material with improved thermoelectric properties.
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Dark Web ChatGPT Unleashed: Meet DarkBERT
Tom's Hardware
Francisco Pires
May 16, 2023
Researchers at South Korea's Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and data intelligence company S2W have created a large language model (LLM) trained on Dark Web data. The researchers fed the RoBERTa framework a database they compiled from the Dark Web via the Tor network to create the DarkBERT LLM, which can analyze and extract useful information from a new piece of Dark Web content composed in its own dialects and heavily-coded messages. They demonstrated DarkBERT's superior performance to other LLMs, which should enable security researchers and law enforcement to delve deeper into the Dark Web.
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Growing Sustainable Everyday Products Using Mushrooms
University of Sydney (Australia)
May 17, 2023
A biological growing process developed by a multidisciplinary team of researchers at Australia's University of Sydney transforms organic waste into compostable products using mushrooms and interactive software. Mycelium networks of fungal threads are produced when mushrooms bind together raw, organic waste matter into the root network as they grow. The researchers used the process to create simple shapes from mycelium, like a sphere, a teapot, and a rabbit, as well as growing mycelium around integrated electronics. University of Sydney's Philip Gough said, "The software pipeline we developed takes all the complexities associated with the process out of the way, so you can transform your designs into growable formats without worrying about all the underlying technical details."
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YouTube's Recommendations Send Graphic Gun Videos to Nine-Year-Olds, Study Finds
Associated Press
David Klepper
May 16, 2023
Researchers at the nonprofit Tech Transparency Project found the YouTube video-sharing platform's recommendation algorithms send graphic videos on school shootings, tactical gun training, and firearm assembly to children as young as nine. The researchers established accounts on a platform that emulated the behavior of typical American boys, simulating two nine-year-old videogame enthusiasts. The accounts that followed the recommended video selections received 382 distinct firearms-related videos in one month, many of them violating YouTube's policies barring violent or gory content. Accounts that mimicked 14-year-old boys received similar levels of gun- and violence-associated material. The Tech Transparency Project's Katie Paul said these findings demonstrate the need for greater investment in content moderation.
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