Welcome to the June 10, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• EU Struggles to Counter Russian Election Disinformation
• AI 'Gold Rush' for Chatbot Training Data Could Run Out of Human-Written Text
• Saudi Arabia's Chip Design Ambitions Take Shape with New Hub
• Researchers Demonstrate Chip-Based 3D Printer
• Japanese Companies Benefiting from Chips Battle
• 'Critical Oversight' Questions Perceived Security of Wireless Networks
• Mississippi Sued by Tech Group over Age Verification on Websites
• Breaking Data Transmission Barriers
• Fabric Necklace Monitors Care of Preterm, Low-Birth-Weight Infants
• AI Models Hold Opposing Views on Controversial Topics, Study Finds
• Dutch Police Trial Autonomous Robot Dog to Inspect Drug Labs
• Uganda's Sweeping Surveillance State Is Built on National ID Cards

EU Struggles to Counter Russian Election Disinformation

Stratcom, an EU team tasked with combating disinformation, struggled with a broad Russian disinformation campaign ahead of the European Parliament election, which ran June 6-9. While the EU's new Digital Services Act requires Big Tech to do more to counter illegal and harmful content, Generative AI has made it faster and easier for foreign actors to spread misinformation, EU officials say. The European Commission's Peter Stano said, "Before with trolls and bots, there was usually a person behind it. With AI, everything has multiplied."
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AI 'Gold Rush' for Chatbot Training Data Could Run Out of Human-Written Text

Epoch AI reported that the supply of publicly available data for training AI language models will run out between 2026 and 2032. Tech companies can forge deals for access to high-quality data sources in the short term, but they will have to tap into private data or depend on "synthetic data" produced by chatbots over the longer term. Said Epoch AI's Tamay Besiroglu, "If you start hitting those constraints about how much data you have, then you can't really scale up your models efficiently anymore."
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Saudi Arabia's Chip Design Ambitions Take Shape with New Hub

Saudi Arabia announced the launch of the National Semiconductor Hub, which will develop fabless chip companies, as part of a strategy to position itself as a leader in semiconductor design. It hopes to attract 50 firms by 2030 to develop simple chips, with manufacturing to be performed internationally in the medium-term. Said the hub's Naveed Sherwani, "We're not trying to replace Nvidia or challenge Intel. We want to do humble beginnings. Once we have built a base, then we can talk." Incentives offered by the hub include access to capital through a Saudi-backed fund.
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Researchers Demonstrate Chip-Based 3D Printer

A portable, palm-sized 3D printer developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and University of Texas at Austin researchers consists of a single, millimeter-scale photonic chip. Lacking moving parts, the photonic chip employs an array of 160-nanometer-thick optical antennas to direct a beam of light into a well of resin, which cures into a solid shape when exposed to the light. Said MIT's Jelena Notaros, "This system is completely rethinking what a 3D printer is. It is no longer a big box sitting on a bench in a lab creating objects, but something that is handheld and portable."
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Japanese Companies Benefiting from Chips Battle

As a leading producer of chemicals, packaging materials, and tools for the semiconductor industry, Japan has a seat at the table amid the chips battle between the U.S. and China. Toppan and Dai Nippon Printing hold much of the market share for photomasks, a type of master plate for printing circuit boards. Meanwhile, Fujifilm and JSR, which a Japanese state-backed fund is acquiring for $6 billion, account for much of the world's supply of photoresist, a chemical mix used to polish and flatten the surface of chips. Japanese suppliers are being urged by U.S. companies to diversify production to avoid supply-chain chokepoints.
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'Critical Oversight' Questions Perceived Security of Wireless Networks

Rice University, Brown University, and Northeastern University researchers identified a security flaw in high-frequency, high-speed wireless backhaul links for 5G wireless networks and other critical applications. They demonstrated the use of a metasurface-equipped drone to interfere with the links, easily intercepting high-frequency signals between rooftops in Boston, almost without a trace. Rice's Zhambyl Shaikhanov said, "Our discovery highlights a critical oversight in the perceived security of our wireless backhaul links."
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Mississippi Sued by Tech Group over Age Verification on Websites

A tech industry group said in a lawsuit filed Friday that a newly passed law in Mississippi requiring users of digital services to verify their age will unconstitutionally limit access to online speech for residents. The measure, designed to protect children from sexually explicit material and set to go into effect July 1, "mandates that minors and adults alike verify their ages — which may include handing over personal information or identification that many are unwilling or unable to provide — as a precondition to access and engage in protected speech," the lawsuit says. The lawsuit was filed by NetChoice, whose members include Google and Meta.
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Breaking Data Transmission Barriers

A novel digital signal processing technique used to overcome challenges in digital-to-analog converters (DAC) in data center interconnects achieved record-breaking data transmission performance. Researchers at China's Peng Cheng Lab and Shanghai Jiao Tong University and University degli Studi dell'Aquila in Italy used look-up-table-based predistortion to mitigate nonlinear impairment and digital resolution enhancement to reduce the demand for DAC resolution. The technique enabled the transmission of signals at rates exceeding 124 GBd PAM-4/6 and 112 GBd PAM-8 over 2 kilometers of standard single-mode fiber using 3/3.5/4-bit DACs.
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Fabric Necklace Monitors Care of Preterm, Low-Birth-Weight Infants

A lightweight sensing fabric developed by researchers at Columbia University is intended to simplify Kangaroo Mother Care, a practice that involves chest-to-chest skin contact for monitoring low-birth-weight infants. Joey is a soft fabric necklace worn on the caregiver's chest to continuously monitor the infant's heart and respiration rates, eliminating the need to place rigid, adhesive sensors on the infant's body. The device identifies the mixed electrocardiogram (ECG) signals of the caregiver and the infant to measure chest-to-chest skin contact duration, with algorithms used to distinguish the infants' ECG signals to monitor their vital signs.
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AI Models Hold Opposing Views on Controversial Topics, Study Finds

Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, the Netherlands' University of Amsterdam, and the AI startup Hugging Face found that generative AI models give inconsistent answers to questions on polarizing topics, such as LGBTQ+ rights, social welfare, and surrogacy. Their study of five models — Mistral's Mistral 7B, Cohere's Command-R, Alibaba's Qwen, Google's Gemma, and Meta's Llama 3 — indicated that the inconsistencies can be attributed to bias embedded in the training data. Said study co-author Giada Pistilli, "Our research shows significant variation in the values conveyed by model responses, depending on culture and language."
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Dutch Police Trial Autonomous Robot Dog to Inspect Drug Labs

Politie Nederland, the Dutch police force, is testing the use of autonomous robotic dogs in drug lab raids, with the goal of protecting officers from potential explosions and other risks. It already uses a manually controlled robotic dog, Boston Dynamics' Spot, for drug lab investigations, surveillance, and other operations, but the tests in a mock drug lab, if successful, would enable the use of an AI-controlled robotic dog. Said Politie Nederland's Simon Prins, "I want [officers] busy with the operation and not being busy with a robot. So that's the game that we are playing now: how autonomous can we make it?"
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Uganda's Sweeping Surveillance State Is Built on National ID Cards

An analysis of interviews and documents by Bloomberg and Lighthouse Reports indicates that Uganda's decade-old biometric identification system is being used for public surveillance. Around 60% of citizens have obtained National Identification and Registration Authority-issued ID cards, which are required to obtain a mobile SIM, perform bank transactions, register to vote, and seek medical treatment. Uganda plans to issue new national ID cards, expanding the biometric data collected from residents beyond faces and fingerprints to iris scans. It also plans to roll out a real-time vehicle location tracking system that is connected to the national IDs.
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