Welcome to the September 20, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• David A. Padua to Receive ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award
• FTC Report Assails Social Networks’ Privacy, Safety Practices
• California Governor Signs Laws to Crack Down on Election Deepfakes
• Researchers Looking Beyond Digital Computing
• Wi-Fi World Record Is Near 5X Previous Best
• Can the Internet Archive Save Digital History?
• Chipotle Robot Helps Make Guacamole
• Researchers Run Small AIs on Their Laptops
• More Hawaii Schools Offer Computer Science, Not All Students Benefit
• Oxford Ionics Slashes Quantum Errors
• Chatbot Pulls People Away from Conspiracy Theories
• Apple Vision Pro's Eye Tracking Exposed What People Type

David A. Padua to Receive ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's David A. Padua has been named the recipient of the 2024 ACM-IEEE CS Ken Kennedy Award for his significant contributions in the fields of parallel and high performance computing. Padua, a fellow of ACM and IEEE, was recognized for his role in developing speculative parallelism and array privatization, which enable the correct synchronization of multiple threads during parallel computing; race detection for debugging parallel programs; array tiling to improve parallelism and cache performance; parallel Matlab compilation, and vectorizing compiler evaluation techniques.
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FTC Report Assails Social Networks’ Privacy, Safety Practices

In a staff report released Thursday, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) summed up a years-long study into industry practices by criticizing social media and online streaming companies for not “consistently prioritizing” users’ privacy, for broadly gleaning data to feed new AI tools, and for refusing to confront potential risks to kids. FTC’s Lina Khan said the report shows how companies’ practices “can endanger people’s privacy, threaten their freedoms, and expose them to a host of harms.”
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California Governor Signs Laws to Crack Down on Election Deepfakes

On Sept. 17, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law legislation prohibiting the creation and publication of election-related deepfakes 120 days prior to and 60 days after Election Day, while permitting courts to stop their distribution and impose civil penalties. Other bills signed by Newsom will require large social media platforms to remove deepfakes, and mandate that political campaigns publicly disclose if they run ads with AI-altered materials.
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Researchers Looking Beyond Digital Computing

University of California, Berkeley researchers found a tripling in processor performance every two years over the past two decades, accompanied by a 50% increase in memory access speed, indicates that processors are completing calculations faster than data can be fed from memory. In response, researchers are turning their attention to neuromorphic computing, where energy consumption is reduced by activating processing units only when needed, similar to neurons in the human brain.
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Wi-Fi World Record Is Near 5X Previous Best

Researchers at Australia’s Morse Micro have broken their prior world record of Wi-Fi range using the HaLow (802.11ah) standard, achieving a connection speed of 2 Megabits per second at a distance of 9.9 miles during a video call in California’s Joshua Tree National Park. Tests indicate HaLow may be suitable for users performing outdoor work outside urban areas, where cellular coverage is poor and cellular data is more costly.
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Can the Internet Archive Save Digital History?

The Internet Archive is trying to preserve digital history and has so far collected 866 billion webpages, 44 million books, and 10.6 million videos of films and television programs, among other things. Its efforts have been hampered by financial issues, legal challenges over intellectual property, technical issues, and cyberattacks. University of Virginia's Mar Hicks said another problem with decentralized Internet preservation efforts is "the varied priorities" of archival organizations, which are operated independently, largely by hobbyists and volunteers.
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Chipotle Robot Helps Make Guacamole

Chipotle has deployed an automatic bowl-and-salad maker and avocado-processing robot at two California locations. The "augmented makeline" will dispense rice, corn, lettuce, and other ingredients into bowls beneath the counter, while employees continue making burritos and tacos, adding side items, and monitoring the machine's performance. The "autocado" cuts, cores, and peels avocados that employees will use in guacamole.
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Researchers Run Small AIs on Their Laptops

Researchers increasingly are able to run local AI systems on their laptops. This comes as tech firms and research institutes, including Google DeepMind, Meta, Microsoft, and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, make available small and open-weight versions of large language models that can be downloaded and run locally, as well as scaled-down versions that can be run on consumer hardware. Local AIs are less expensive, allow open models to be fine-tuned for focused applications, and preserve data privacy.
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More Hawaii Schools Offer Computer Science, Not All Students Benefit

All Hawaii schools will be required to offer at least one computer science course by the end of the 2024-25 academic year. Around 75% of Hawaii schools met that threshold last year. However, small schools find it difficult to hire staff to teach new courses, and access to computers or the Internet for homework remains a problem for some students in rural areas.
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Oxford Ionics Slashes Quantum Errors

A protocol for identifying and rejecting faulty qubits developed by Oxford Ionics researchers reportedly has set a new world record for quantum state preparation and measurement (SPAM). Compared to the current best method, the new protocol achieved a 13-fold decrease in SPAM errors. The protocol merges standard SPAM methods and mid-circuit non-demolition measurements.
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Chatbot Pulls People Away from Conspiracy Theories

An AI chatbot developed by Cornell University researchers aims to persuade users to stop believing conspiracy theories. In their study, more than 2,000 U.S. adults were asked to describe a conspiracy they believed; some then engaged in discussions with DebunkBot in which they presented evidence supporting their position and DebunkBot provided information to combat their misinformation. Participants' belief ratings fell around 20% after three exchanges with DebunkBot, and around 25% of participants no longer believed the conspiracy theory.
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Apple Vision Pro's Eye Tracking Exposed What People Type

Computer scientists from the University of Florida, Texas Tech University, and blockchain security firm CertiK demonstrated that hackers can decipher the letters typed by users of Apple's Vision Pro mixed reality headsets with their eyes. The GAZEploit vulnerability involves a recurrent neural network that analyzes the user's 3D avatar to identify when they are typing and geometric calculations that determine the user's keyboard position and size. Apple has fixed the vulnerability.
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