Welcome to the March 28, 2025 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• U.S. Companies Push for National Robotics Strategy
• MEPs Warn EU Against Weakening Landmark AI Rules
• Private Data and Passwords of Senior U.S. Security Officials Found Online
• U.S. Adds Export Restrictions to More Chinese Tech Firms over Security Concerns
• Making Graphs More Accessible to Blind, Low-Vision Readers
• Supercomputing Tool Makes Data Storage More Efficient
• Encryption Breakthrough Lays Groundwork for Privacy-Preserving AI Models
• Tech Chiefs, Foreign Leaders Urge U.S. to Rethink AI Chip Curbs
• 3D Printer Used to Construct Train Station Building in Japan
• Anthropic Scores Win in AI Copyright Dispute with Record Labels
• Gen AI Browser Assistant Extensions Beam Data to the Cloud
• NASA Tests Technology to Improve Firefighting from the Air
• A Long-Shot Bet to Bypass the Middlemen of Social Media

U.S. Companies Push for National Robotics Strategy

On March 26, representatives of robotics companies met with U.S. lawmakers to call for a national robotics strategy focused on promoting the industry. The Association for Advancing Automation said the U.S. will lose both the global robotics and AI races without such leadership. The association supports the creation of a federal robotics office, tax incentives, federally funded training programs, and federal funding for commercial innovation and academic research.
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MEPs Warn EU Against Weakening Landmark AI Rules

Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) instrumental in drafting EU's Artificial Intelligence Act have expressed concerns as EU officials consider whether to ease requirements for AI companies. Officials are weighing whether to make certain provisions of the Act voluntary. The code, being drafted by a panel of experts including ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate Yoshua Bengio, is expected to be finalized in May.
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Private Data and Passwords of Senior U.S. Security Officials Found Online

Private contact details of senior U.S. security officials, including National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, were found on the Web by reporters at Der Spiegel. The reporters were able to find mobile phone numbers, email addresses, and some passwords belonging to the officials using commercial search engines along with hacked customer data that had been published.
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U.S. Adds Export Restrictions to More Chinese Tech Firms over Security Concerns

The Trump administration added 80 companies and organizations on March 25 to a list of those prohibited from purchasing U.S. technology and other exports due to national security concerns. Among the 80 are 54 Chinese companies and organizations, including Nettrix Information Industry, which manufactures servers used to produce AI, and the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence, which reportedly has attempted to acquire AI models and chips to bolster China's military modernization.
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Making Graphs More Accessible to Blind, Low-Vision Readers

A tool developed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers simplifies the process of creating tactile charts, to make it easier for blind and low-vision readers to understand bar charts or line graphs. With Tactile Vega-Lite, users can turn data from Excel spreadsheets and other programs into both standard visual and touch-based charts. Part of the tool is a code editor allowing users to customize elements of the charts, such as axis labels and tick marks.
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Supercomputing Tool Makes Data Storage More Efficient

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, have developed an application to increase efficiency in memory systems for supercomputers. Explained ORNL’s Terry Jones, "Our work is to automatically put the frequently used objects into the right location in the faster tier of memory and put the less used objects, the things that aren't accessed as often, into the slower memory." The system automatically sorts and stores data based on need, making retrieval more efficient.
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Encryption Breakthrough Lays Groundwork for Privacy-Preserving AI Models

A framework developed by researchers at New York University brings fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) to deep learning, allowing AI models to operate directly on encrypted data without needing to decrypt it first. Using the Orion framework, the researchers demonstrated the first-ever high-resolution FHE object detection using YOLO-v1, a deep learning model with 139 million parameters.
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Tech Chiefs, Foreign Leaders Urge U.S. to Rethink AI Chip Curbs

With less than two months to comply with the U.S. framework for controlling AI development worldwide, tech companies are expressing concerns about business in foreign markets, and U.S. allies are seeking exemptions. The "AI diffusion rule" will restrict the number of AI processors that can be exported to most nations and require datacenters to comply with U.S. security standards. Some officials have floated eliminating the three tiers of chip access and associated compute caps, while maintaining export license requirements for most countries.
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3D Printer Used to Construct Train Station Building in Japan

West Japan Railway's Hatsushima Station building in Wakayama Prefecture is reportedly the first in the world to be constructed with 3D-printed materials. Scheduled to open in July, the building's four parts were produced by Japanese housing manufacturer Serendix. Mortar was used with a 3D printer to create the formwork, with reinforcing steel added to ensure earthquake resistance. Construction took around 2.5 hours and cost about 50% less than using reinforced concrete.
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Anthropic Scores Win in AI Copyright Dispute with Record Labels

A U.S. court on Tuesday denied an injunction sought by Universal Music Group and other record labels to prevent AI startup Anthropic from using their copyrighted lyrics to train its Claude chatbot. The music companies said Anthropic infringed copyrighted lyrics from at least 500 songs and sought to prohibit the company from using their works to train its AI models.
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Gen AI Browser Assistant Extensions Beam Data to the Cloud

Computer scientists led by Yash Vekaria at the University of California, Davis, found that generative AI browser extensions generally harvest users' sensitive data and share it with their own servers and third-party trackers. In some cases, this violates the browser extensions' privacy commitments and U.S. regulations governing health and student data. The study of 10 generative AI Chrome extensions found that some collect sensitive information from Web forms or full document object models of pages visited by users.
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NASA Tests Technology to Improve Firefighting from the Air

Researchers at the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Ames Research Center in California recently completed a wildfire test flight mission, with the goal of enabling aircraft to help fight wildfires 24/7. The researchers are testing portable aircraft management systems (PAMs), which are intended to keep drones and remotely piloted aircraft on approved flight paths within wildfire operation zones and prevent in-air collisions. With the PAMs, drones and remotely piloted aircraft would be able to fly at night and in thick smoke.
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A Long-Shot Bet to Bypass the Middlemen of Social Media

Flipboard's forthcoming Surf browser will join Bluesky and Mastodon as part of a community of decentralized social media options that aim to bypass big platforms like Facebook and TikTok to allow online publishers to connect directly to their audiences. Surf is built on the new technical standard ActivityPub, which allows communications between social media platforms using the protocol.
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