Welcome to the June 4, 2025 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• Bengio Has a Plan to Make AI More Trustworthy
• U.K. Commits £1bn to Cyber, Digital Defense
• Meta Turns to Nuclear Power for AI
• Patient Receives Brain Implant That Can Wirelessly Control Computers
• Cyber Companies Hope to Untangle Hacker Nicknames
• Quantum ‘Transistor’ Could Lead to More Accurate Computers
• Congressional Robotics Caucus Relaunches
• David Cope, Godfather of AI Music, Dies at 83
• Norway Re-imagines Drone Inspections of Offshore Oil Platforms
• Pen with Magnetic Ink Could Test for Parkinson's Disease
• Self-Powered Artificial Synapse Mimics Human Color Vision
• EU to Launch Age-Check App
• Bypassing Internet Censorship

Bengio Has a Plan to Make AI More Trustworthy

ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate Yoshua Bengio launched the nonprofit LawZero to develop a "safe by design" Scientist AI system that would be fundamentally non-agentic, trustworthy, focused on understanding and truthfulness, and not designed to mimic human behavior or pursue its own goals. According to Bengio, Scientist AI potentially could be used to ensure the safety of agentic AI systems being developed by Big Tech companies.
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U.K. Commits £1bn to Cyber, Digital Defense

The U.K. on Monday unveiled plans to invest more than £1 billion (more than $1.3 billion) in cyber and digital capabilities over the coming years, announcing those plans alongside the release of the Strategic Defense Review. A cornerstone of the cyber initiative is the establishment of a Cyber and Electromagnetic Command, which will be tasked with defending U.K. Ministry of Defence networks against what officials described as "sub-threshold" cyberattacks.
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Meta Turns to Nuclear Power for AI

Meta on Tuesday announced a 20-year deal with New York-based electric utility Constellation Energy to secure nuclear-generated electric power to help meet demand for its AI and other computing needs. The deal will revive Constellation’s Clinton Clean Energy Center in Illinois. Constellation last September said it planned to restart its Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania to provide Microsoft with power for its datacenters.
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Patient Receives Brain Implant That Can Wirelessly Control Computers

University of Michigan researchers temporarily implanted Paradromics' Connexus brain-computer interface (BCI) into a person with epilepsy and reported the first in-human recording from the BCI. The dime-sized device, which features more than 400 microelectrodes for data collection, wirelessly communicates with a system outside the body. The device will undergo further clinical trials later this year.
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Cyber Companies Hope to Untangle Hacker Nicknames

Microsoft, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto, and Google on Monday said they would create a public glossary of state-sponsored hacking groups and cybercriminals, in a bid to ease confusion over their nomenclature. Vasu Jakkal at Microsoft Security said the new initiative will "accelerate our collective response and collective defense against these threat actors."
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Quantum ‘Transistor’ Could Lead to More Accurate Computers

Researchers at the U.K.'s University of Oxford demonstrated a single-qubit gate with an error rate of just one in about 10 million cases. The qubit was made using a positively-charged calcium ion, which was trapped above a chip using electromagnetic forces. The chip emitted microwaves that were aimed at the qubit to produce a gate capable of reliably changing the qubit's quantum state.
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Congressional Robotics Caucus Relaunches

The Congressional Robotics Caucus was relaunched last week, with U.S. Reps. Jim McGovern (D-MA), Bob Latta (R-OH), Haley Stevens (D-MI), and Jay Obernolte (R-CA) serving as co-chairs. The caucus was first launched in 2007 but has not met formally since 2019. It will work to increase awareness of robotics research and industry among lawmakers, and collaborate with industry experts on "efforts to improve the responsible, ethical, and robust deployment of robotics across many sectors."
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David Cope, Godfather of AI Music, Dies at 83

David Cope, a composer known as "the godfather of AI music," has passed away at age 83. Cope is known for developing one of the first computer algorithms able to generate classical music. In the 1980s, Cope developed Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI), a program trained on compositions by classical masters like Bach and Mozart that could replicate their styles by scanning and reproducing patterns that Cope would convert into a score.
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Norway Re-imagines Drone Inspections of Offshore Oil Platforms

From a control room in Norway’s city of Stavanger, pilots are performing inspections of the Edvard Grieg oil platform some 180 kilometers (112 miles) out at sea using drone technology. While the use of drones for inspections is nothing new for the industry, the Edvard Grieg deployment includes a permanent docking station for a drone, which can examine a platform’s structural integrity, or look for emissions and leaks, by streaming live footage to the control room onshore.
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Pen with Magnetic Ink Could Test for Parkinson's Disease

University of California, Los Angeles researchers developed a pen that could help detect hand tremors indicative of Parkinson's disease. The pen features a flexible magnetic tip comprised of small neodymium magnets mixed with silicone rubber, and ferrofluid ink in a reservoir surrounded by a barrel containing a coil of conductive yarn. The pen converts movement into magnetic flux, generating an electrical current in the built-in conductive coil. The researchers used the electrical signal to train a convolutional neural network, which was more than 96% accurate in identifying study participants with Parkinson's disease.
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Self-Powered Artificial Synapse Mimics Human Color Vision

A team at the Tokyo University of Science in Japan developed a self-powered artificial synapse capable of distinguishing colors with high precision. The device integrates two different dye-sensitized solar cells, which respond differently to various wavelengths of light. The team used their device in a physical reservoir computing framework to recognize different human movements recorded in red, green, and blue; it achieved 82% accuracy when classifying 18 different combinations of colors and movements.
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EU to Launch Age-Check App

A new age verification app will be rolled out in the EU in July, ahead of the bloc's 2026 launch of its digital identity wallet. The app will enable online platform users to verify their ages without disclosing other personal information. The EU is also considering measures to ensure minors' accounts are set as private by default.
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Bypassing Internet Censorship

Researchers from Paderborn University in Germany and the Technology Innovation Institute in Abu Dhabi demonstrated how Internet censorship can be circumvented by modifying encryption protocols. Their "Censor Scanner" open source tool encrypts Internet requests in such a way that censorship systems cannot recognize or block them.
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