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Welcome to the March 27, 2024 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

3D-Printing a School in a War Zone The nonprofit Team4UA collaborated with design studio Balbek Bureau and architecture firm Ars Longa on a project to build Europe's first 3D-printed education center, and the first 3D-printed building in a war zone. Located in Lviv, Ukraine, the 3,983-sq.-ft. Project Hive was printed in 40 hours with a COBOD gantry printer, giving Lviv's School No.23 an additional four classrooms to accommodate students displaced by the war.
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CNN; Rebecca Cairns (March 25, 2024)

China Pulls Ahead of the U.S. in AI Talent The MacroPolo think tank found that nearly half of the world's top AI researchers come from China, up from about 33% three years ago, while only around 18% come from U.S. undergraduate institutions, essentially unchanged. Of the AI researchers working in the U.S., 37% are American, up from 31% three years ago, and 38% are from China, up from 27%. The U.S. is home to around 42% of the world's top AI talent, down from about 59% three years ago.
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The New York Times; Paul Mozur; Cade Metz (March 23, 2024)

Chemical Computers Vie with Quantum Rivals Researchers at the U.K.'s University of Glasgow developed a pulsating chemical computer that uses Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction color oscillations in two 3D-printed arrays of interconnected wells to encode data. The wells fluctuate between red and blue due to sulfuric and malonic acids interacting with ferroin indicator and potassium bromate. The BZ color changes are synchronized using magnetic stirrer bars in each well and gap. The researchers used AI to control digital inputs to the stirrers related to the next occurring pulse state and addition of reagents.
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Chemistry World; Andy Extance (March 26, 2024)
With the rise of AI in the manufacturing sector, there are concerns production-line workers, quality-control assessors, and machine operators are at risk of job loss. However, some say manufacturing workers could be retrained to operate and monitor AI machines, program robots, and serve on cross-disciplinary teams that require data science and manufacturing expertise. McKinsey's Marie El Hoyek anticipates some manufacturing jobs “will need to evolve.” Said El Hoyek, "You would need digital champions who are core manufacturing people but know how to translate their needs and their work into digital language."
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Financial Times; Nick Huber (March 26, 2024)
A black Uber Eats driver has received an out-of-court settlement after "racially discriminatory" facial-recognition checks prevented him accessing the app to secure work. Pa Edrissa Manjang (right) was subject to an increasing number of verification checks by the Microsoft-powered Uber Eats app prior to being told that after "careful consideration" his account would be removed, due to "continued mismatches." The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which helped to fund Manjang's case, was concerned the AI in the facial-recognition checks had deprived him of his income.
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BBC News; Shiona McCallum (March 26, 2024)

Camera Captures 156.3 Trillion Frames per Second Scientists led by Jinyang Liang (above, far left) of Canada's Institut national de la recherche scientifique, created a scientific camera that shoots images at an encoding rate of 156.3 terahertz to individual pixels, equivalent to 156.3 trillion frames per second. Dubbed SCARF (swept-coded aperture real-time femtophotography), the camera uses a computational imaging modality to capture spatial information by letting light enter its sensor at slightly different times; an algorithm then decodes the time-staggered inputs.
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Engadget; Will Shanklin (March 26, 2024)

Bitcoin 'Halving' Spurs Exodus of Old U.S. Mining Computers Abroad With the reward for mining Bitcoin being halved next month from 6.25 to 3.125 Bitcoin in an event that occurs every four years, U.S. cryptocurrency miners are either seeking out overseas mining facilities or selling their machines to buyers in locales where electricity costs are low enough to allow them to turn a profit. Colorado-based wholesaler SunnySide Digital will refurbish and resell around 6,000 outdated Bitcoin mining machines, while Bellevue, WA-based Luxor Technology expects around 600,000 S19 series computers to move from the U.S. to Africa and South America.
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Bloomberg; David Pan (March 23, 2024)

AI Takes On India's Most Congested City M.N. Anucheth, a former chip engineer turned traffic czar for Bengaluru, India, is using AI to address traffic issues in the city of more than 14 million people. The city's new Actionable Intelligence for Sustainable Traffic Management system combines data from several mapping services and specific road information to rate congestion on a severity scale and features an incident logging app that officers can use to report potholes, accidents, and more. Said Anucheth, "In traffic, there are a lot of tasks which are repetitive and easily reducible to an algorithmic kind of process, which AI is really good at."
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IEEE Spectrum; Edd Gent (March 21, 2024)

Autonomous Street Crawlers Could Eliminate Potholes Robotiz3d, a spin-out of the U.K.'s University of Liverpool, has completed a trial of its robotic maintenance system, designed to autonomously identify and repair road cracks and potholes. Robotiz3d's Autonomous Road Repair System (ARRES) is comprised of ARRES Eye, which detects surface problems and prioritizes them based on severity, and ARRES Prevent, which uses an unmanned robotic vehicle to identify and seal small cracks to prevent potholes. Further tests will help refine the system prior to its full production.
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New Atlas; Paul Ridden (March 25, 2024)

China to Block Use of Intel, AMD Chips in Government Computers As it looks to replace foreign technology with domestic solutions, China has rolled out guidelines calling for the phased elimination of Intel and AMD microprocessors from government computers and servers. The guidelines also call for a shift away from Microsoft Windows and foreign-made database software. A list of "safe and reliable" processors and operating systems, published by the China Information Technology Security Evaluation Center, includes 18 approved processors from Huawei and Phytium, both on the U.S. government's export blacklist.
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Financial Times; Ryan McMorrow; Nian Liu; Qianer Liu (March 24, 2024)

First Messages Sent with Magnetism of Magnons Researchers at Germany's Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) research laboratory have developed a technique for transducing quantum information using the magnetic field of magnons to control qubits. The researchers studied the interaction between qubits and magnons (magnetic excitation waves that pass through a magnetic material and exist inside microscopic magnetic disks) created by silicon atom vacancies in the crystal structure of silicon carbide. Said HZDR's Helmut Schultheiss, "The advantage here is that the wavelength of magnons lies in the micrometer range and is significantly shorter than the centimeter waves of conventional microwave technology."
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Interesting Engineering; Jijo Malayil (March 21, 2024)

VW, Mobileye to Bring New Automated Driving Functions to Series Production Volkswagen (VW) said its partnership with Israeli automotive tech firm Mobileye will result in new automated driving technologies being integrated into its luxury vehicle brands. The new driving assistance software based on Mobileye's SuperVision and Chauffeur platforms includes automated overtaking on multilane highways, automatic stopping at red lights and stop signs, and intersection and roundabout support. Mobileye also will provide automated driving software for VW's commercial vehicles unit.
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Reuters; Christoph Steitz; Andrey Sychev (March 20, 2024)
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