ACM TechNews, Wednesday, September 18, 2024

Welcome to the September 18, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

A group of AI pioneers including Turing Award recipients Yoshua Bengio, Andrew Yao, and Geoffrey Hinton released a statement on Sept. 16 expressing their concerns that the capabilities of the technology could exceed that of its creators in a matter of years, leading "to catastrophic outcomes for all of humanity." They also proposed that countries establish AI safety authorities to register AI systems within their borders and collaborate to identify red lines and warning signs for the technology.
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A study by TeamLease Degree Apprenticeship predicts India's semiconductor industry will have a shortage of 250,000 to 300,000 professionals by 2027. To help bridge that anticipated skills gap, India's semiconductor companies are collaborating with academic institutions. Applied Materials India is working with the Indian Institutes of Technology and others to develop curricula for specific job roles and skills. Lam Research has signed a memorandum of understanding with the India Semiconductor Mission and the Indian Institute of Science, through which it will donate nearly $29 million in software licenses to train 2,800 students.
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Intel Corp. reportedly has reached a binding agreement with the U.S. government to make semiconductors for the Pentagon. Sources say Intel could receive federal grants of up to $3.5 billion as part of the Secure Enclave program, which is intended to boost production of advanced chips with military and intelligence applications. The Secure Enclave funding would be in addition to the potential $8.5 billion in grants and $11 billion in loans Intel was awarded under the Chips and Science Act earlier this year.
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The Swiss National Supercomputing Centre's (CSCS) new Alps supercomputer ranked sixth in Top 500's June global supercomputer rankings. CSCS Director Thomas Schulthess said the supercomputer’s high power consumption means it costs between 15 million and 20 million Swiss francs (€15 million to €21 million) to run. Alps can perform in one day calculations that would take a standard laptop 40,000 years to complete.
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Researchers at four Midwestern universities found that visits by U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) staff to public companies’ headquarters were linked to measurable declines in company share prices by mobile phone location data. The study tracked mobile phones that spent significant amounts of time at SEC offices and visited corporate headquarters around the world. While 84% of the visits were to groups that have never disclosed being under investigation, their share prices were 1.94% lower than the broader market in the three months after an SEC visit.
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Microsoft has developed robots for the purpose of disassembling hard disk drives (HDDs) so their components can be recycled. The robotic system identifies different HDD types, locates the screws, destroys the data-carrying platters, and salvages printed circuit boards and magnets, among other valuable parts, for reuse. Microsoft reportedly shredded 2 million hard drives in 2022, but its new "NoShred" initiative is intended to reuse and recycle 90% of hard drives by 2025.
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A survey by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and USAFacts found that two-thirds (67%) of U.S. adults lack confidence that AI-powered chatbots or search engines provide factual, reliable information. Of the survey’s 1,019 respondents, 25% believe the use of AI will make it "much" or "somewhat" more difficult to locate factual information about the 2024 election. Only 16% of those polled think AI will make finding accurate election information easier.
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Ada Lovelace Day, an annual global celebration of women working in STEM fields, may soon run out of funding. Creator and chair Suw Charman-Anderson said the tech community generally views Ada Lovelace Day as inspirational, but "organizations can't run on inspiration alone. Everyone in the Women in STEM sector is struggling for money. That's always been the case, but it seems to have got a lot worse."
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Through a partnership with the Internet Archive, Google is linking to cached versions of websites on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. This comes after Google removed a feature allowing users to view archived versions of old sites in February. Users can perform Google searches as usual, clicking the three dots next to the URL in the search results to open a new browser tab and then clicking "more about this page" to view a link to the Wayback archives.
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A study by University of Illinois and University of Louisville researchers found that gender stereotypes around STEM fields could form as early as kindergarten. Researchers asked students in kindergarten through third grade to predict how well fifth-grade students would perform on a challenging test on a complex subject; they found that "children viewed girls as less capable of learning about novel and difficult STEM subjects compared to non-STEM subjects, but they perceived boys as similarly capable of learning both STEM and non-STEM subjects."
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Malaysian Communications Minister Fahmi Fadzil said the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) will no longer re-route Web traffic through local domain name servers (DNS) beginning Sept. 30. The directive, which would have redirected user requests from third-party DNS servers to those operated by Malaysian Internet service providers, had generated concerns about online censorship and cybersecurity.
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Researchers at Israel's Ben Gurion University of the Negev discovered a side-channel attack that leverages the noise generated by pixel patterns on the LCD screens of air-gapped computers. Ben Gurion University's Mordechai Guri said the PIXHELL attack "exploits the sound generated by coils and capacitors to control the frequencies emanating from the screen." PIXHELL uses malware deployed on the compromised device to create an acoustic channel and exfiltrate sensitive data by encoding it within the acoustic signals.
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A neuromorphic device developed by an international research team is comprised of molecules that can alter their electrical properties when a charge is applied to them, allowing for the manipulation of materials for integration in electrical systems. The researchers integrated the 14-bit neuromorphic accelerator into a circuit board and achieved energy efficiency of 4.1 tera-operations per second per watt, making it suitable for neural network training, natural language processing, and signal processing.
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