ACM TechNews, Wednesday, October 9, 2024

Welcome to the October 9, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

Pioneers in AI Awarded Nobel Prize in Physics

ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate Geoffrey Hinton, known as the ‘godfather of AI’, and Princeton University's John Hopfield on Tuesday were named to receive the Nobel Prize in physics for helping to create the building blocks of machine learning. Hopfield created an associative memory that can store and reconstruct images and other patterns in data. Hinton used Hopfield’s work as the foundation for the Boltzmann machine, a type of stochastic recurrent neural network.
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IT Hiring Roars Back After Months-Long Slump

IT employment rebounded in September after months of reductions, according to a review of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data by IT trade group CompTIA. The IT unemployment rate dipped to 2.5% last month versus 3.4% in August, the largest single-month decrease in four years. Across the U.S. economy, technology employment expanded by 118,000 new positions, and the tech sector added more than 8,500 net new roles in September.
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Rust Resumes Rise in Popularity

Rust returned to No. 13 in the October edition of the Tiobe index of programming language popularity, the highest spot the language has reached. Rust ranked 13th in July before falling to No. 14 in August. Tiobe's Paul Jansen said an emphasis on security and speed is helping the programming language gain greater usage, even though it is not easy to learn.
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American Water Works Systems Hacked

New Jersey's American Water, the largest U.S. regulated water and wastewater utility, disclosed that a cyberattack caused it to stop customer billing. The utility, which became aware of the unauthorized activity last Thursday, shut down certain systems and took other precautions when the unauthorized activity was detected on Oct. 3. American Water does not believe the attack affected any of its facilities or operations.
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States Sue TikTok, Alleging It Is Designed to Addict Children

More than a dozen states are suing TikTok, claiming it was deliberately designed to addict young people to the platform. The lawsuits, filed separately on Tuesday by a bipartisan group of attorneys general in 13 states and the District of Columbia, argue TikTok has violated consumer protection laws and contributed to a teen mental health crisis. Said California Attorney General Rob Bonta, “TikTok intentionally targets children because they know kids do not yet have the defenses or capacity to create healthy boundaries around addictive content.”
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In America's Factories, Even the Robots Are Getting Less Work

The Association for Advancing Automation reported North American factory robot orders declined by nearly a third last year from the record levels of 2022. Orders also have fallen during the first half of this year. Jergens president Jack Schron says some companies that bought robots during the pandemic’s labor crunch underestimated the maintenance and programming skill needed to deploy them to more complicated tasks.
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Google Ordered to Open Android App Store

A U.S. judge on Monday ordered Google to offer alternatives to its Google Play store for downloading apps on Android phones. The tech giant also will be restricted from paying fees or sharing revenue with companies in exchange for them choosing not to compete with Google’s app store. The ruling is the most significant outcome of Epic Games’ antitrust lawsuit against Google to date.
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Smartphone's Motion Sensors Can Be Hacked for Eavesdropping

Android smartphones can eavesdrop on conversations by offsetting the timing of measurements taken by the device's gyroscope and motion sensor. Google restricted Android apps to sampling data from phones' inertial measurement units no more than 200 times per second. Researchers at Pakistan's Lahore University of Management Sciences increased the sample rate to 400 times per second, which reduced the word error rate when transcribing audio recovered by attackers using AI by 83%.
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Cerf Says Computer Professionals Need Advice on Tech's Impact

At the recent 11th Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany, ACM A.M. Turing Award laureate Vinton Cerf said computer scientists should be advised by economists, psychologists, neuroscientists, and other experts with regard to technology's societal impact. Cerf noted that computer scientists 50 years ago were not focused on the ethical and philosophical questions that AI, social networks, and the Internet have prompted today.
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AI Filling Customer Service Roles in Japan amid Labor Shortage

Japan's labor shortage has prompted firms in a range of industries to fill customer service roles with AI technology. At Ridgelinez Ltd., for instance, an AI assistant recommends auto parts based on the customer's needs, car model, and available stock. An AI assistant deployed by Oki Electric Industry Co. and Kyushu Railway Co. helps passengers navigate station maps and transfers in Japanese, English, and Chinese. Startup Sapeet Co. uses an AI to train its customer service staff.
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Wi-Fi Goes Long Range on New WiLo Standard

A team of researchers from Hong Kong, China, South Korea, the U.S., and the U.K. developed WiLo, a long-distance wireless concept that combines Wi-Fi with the Long Range (LoRa) networking protocol. Used on existing Wi-Fi and LoRa hardware, WiLo could help improve long-range sensor networks. The researchers created an algorithm that matches Wi-Fi data transmission signal frequency to the signal used by LoRa devices to communicate with other devices, eliminating the need for additional hardware.
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LAPD Adds a Crimefighting Robot Dog

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is using Boston Dynamics' robotic dog to protect human lives. The Spot robot recently was utilized in a barricade situation to identify and retrieve a weapon next to a suspect, who was then arrested without incident. The LAPD said it intends to use the robot only in high-risk situations to safeguard officers and civilians.
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Optical Storage Could Get ‘Ultra-High-Density' Reprieve

Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago leveraged classical physics and quantum modeling to create a new type of efficient, ultra-high-density optical memory storage. The new system transfers optical data from rare earth elements (manganese, bismuth, and tellurium) in a solid material to a quantum defect in close proximity, taking advantage of wavelength multiplexing and quantum spin state transitions to increase the bit storage density of the optical media.
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