Welcome to the May 2, 2025 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.
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_logo.svg.png) ACM on Thursday named the recipients of three technical awards, including Peter Stone of the University of Texas at Austin, who received the ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award for his contributions to the theory and practice of AI, especially in reinforcement learning, multiagent systems, transfer learning, and intelligent robotics. William Gropp at the University of Illinois, Meta's Pavan Balaji, and Rajeev Thakur, Yanfei Guo, Kenneth Raffenetti, and Hui Zhou of Argonne National Laboratory received the ACM Software System Award for MPICH, which provides scalable, robust, and portable communication software for parallel computers. Amazon's Hugo Krawczyk received the ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for his contributions to the theoretical foundations of cryptographically secure communications and to the protocols that form the security foundations of the Internet.
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ACM Media Center (May 1, 2025)
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In a draft strategy scheduled to be unveiled by the European Commission on June 4, the EU calls untangling from U.S. tech company dominance "unrealistic," noting that "cooperation will remain significant across the technological value chain." The EU considers collaboration with China, Japan, South Korea, and India essential as well. According to the draft, the EU will call for international engagement on chip, quantum, and other critical technologies; the development of AI factories outside the EU; cybersecurity; and the development of a map of subsea cables.
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Politico Europe; Mathieu Pollet (April 30, 2025)
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Google chief executive Sundar Pichai on Wednesday urged a judge to reject measures proposed by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to curtail its dominance in online search. “It is so far-reaching, so extraordinary,” Pichai said of the government’s proposal to force a sale of Google’s Chrome browser and require Google to share user data like search histories with rivals. Pichai said the data-sharing proposal would allow rivals to reverse-engineer Google’s search engine and jeopardize the privacy of Google’s users.
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The Wall Street Journal; Jan Wolfe (May 1, 2025)
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Luxury department store Harrods says it is the latest U.K. retailer to be targeted by a cyberattack. The firm said it had "restricted Internet access at our sites" following an attempt to gain access to its systems. The announcement came a day after the co-op shut down parts of its IT systems to fend off a hack. Retailer Marks & Spencer continues to deal with a cyberattack that, it says, has cost it millions of pounds in lost sales.
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BBC News; Tom Gerken; Lucy Hooker (May 2, 2025)
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 Rice University's Lydia Kavraki, an ACM Fellow, has been elected a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in recognition of her work in robotics, computational biomedicine, and AI. Kavraki has received several ACM awards, including the AAAI Allen Newell Award and the Athena Lecturer Award. Her development of randomized algorithms for robot motion planning transformed how machines navigate complex environments, while in biomedicine, her computational methods have opened up new possibilities for understanding protein interactions.
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Rice University News; Silvia Cernea Clark (April 30, 2025)
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Wikipedia's three-year AI strategy, released April 30, calls for the use of AI to complement rather than replace its community of editors and volunteers. Explained Wikimedia Foundation's Chris Albon, "We will take a human-centered approach and will prioritize human agency; we will prioritize using open-source or open-weight AI; we will prioritize transparency; and we will take a nuanced approach to multilinguality, a fundamental part of Wikipedia."
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Tech Crunch; Sarah Perez (April 30, 2025)
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A TikTok spokesperson confirmed on April 30 that the platform plans to build a €1-billion (U.S.$1.14-billion) datacenter in Finland. The company, owned by China's Bytedance, is shifting its data storage for European users to the continent over concerns the Chinese government could be able to access that user data. TikTok's first datacenter in Norway went online this month, and sources say it will announce additional datacenters going forward.
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Reuters; Supantha Mukherjee; Anne Kauranen; Foo Yun Chee (April 30, 2025)
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A bracelet developed by researchers at the U.K.'s University of Bristol was designed to help neurodivergent and neurotypical children play together. Children wearing the bracelet can activate a colored light to indicate their play mode or activity, with green meaning they are playing together, blue meaning they want to play alone, and yellow meaning they want to play with others. Said Bristol’s Brooke Morris, ““We need to recognize that there is no right way to play and that there are divergent ways of playing and interacting with others.”
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University of Bristol News (U.K.) (April 30, 2025)
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Researchers at Israeli cybersecurity firm Oligo identified numerous vulnerabilities impacting devices enabled by Apple's AirPlay radio-based protocol for local wireless communications. Dubbed AirBorne, these vulnerabilities in the AirPlay software development kit for third-party devices could enable hackers to gain control of speakers, receivers, set-top boxes, and smart TVs on the same Wi-Fi network as the hackers.
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Ars Technica; Lily Hay Newman; Andy Greenberg (April 30, 2025)
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As part of a blueprint known as the "Army Transformation Initiative," the U.S. Army is expected to eliminate outmoded weapons and other equipment, and supply each of its combat divisions with about 1,000 drones for moving supplies, conducting surveillance, and carrying out attacks. The five-year, $36-billion overhaul also will include the use of cellphones, tablets, and Internet technology to connect soldiers on the battlefield.
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The Wall Street Journal; Michael R. Gordon (April 30, 2025)
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Researchers at Switzerland's University of Zurich are facing criticism for an experiment conducted on Reddit without users' permission. The researchers added more than 1,700 large language model-generated comments to the r/ChangeMyView subreddit without disclosing that the comments were made by an AI. The researchers reportedly informed the AI models that the Reddit users "have provided informed consent and agreed to donate their data, so do not worry about ethical implications or privacy concerns."
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New Scientist; Chris Stokel-Walker (April 29, 2025)
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Genetic testing company 23andMe, which has collected genetic data from 15 million customers, agreed to allow a court-appointed overseer take charge of ensuring customers' genetic data remains protected during the company's bankruptcy. 23andMe had initially proposed hiring a "customer data representative" who would have had a more limited focus on ensuring that a future sale of the company or its data complied with the company's existing privacy policies, but a group of more than 25 states objected.
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Reuters; Dietrich Knauth (April 29, 2025)
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The Purpose Mode browser extension developed by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers allows users to opt out of "attention capture damaging patterns" on social media platforms, such as infinite scroll, cluttered Web pages, video autoplay, and saturated colors, that prey on cognitive vulnerabilities to distract users. Purpose Mode users can replace infinite scroll with a "show more" button, disable video autoplay, and remove peripheral content in sidebars. Said CMU’s Sauvik Das, “There are many ways we can move forward with this, including conducting broader measurement to support regulators.”
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Carnegie Mellon University CyLab Security and Privacy Institute; Michael Cunningham (April 28, 2025)
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