Welcome to the April 18, 2025 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• ACM Joins India’s ONOS Initiative with ACM Open Agreement
• U.S. Extends MITRE's Mandate
• Judge Rules Google an Online Advertising Monopoly
• New Chip Controls on China Set to Cost U.S. Companies Billions
• Robot Farmers Guided by Lasers
• The Most-Cited Papers of the 21st Century
• An AI Is Going to Art School
• Messageboard 4chan Hacked
• Israel Tops List of Countries with Highest Self-Reported AI Skills
• High-Schooler's AI Algorithm Detects Previously-Unknown Astronomical Objects
• AI Decodes Dolphin Speak
• First Quarter Sees Surge in PC Shipments
• Latest 2D Chip: 6,000 Transistors, 3 Atoms Thick

ACM Joins India’s ONOS Initiative with ACM Open Agreement

ACM has joined India’s One Nation One Subscription (ONOS) initiative through an agreement with the ACM Open program. The agreement provides government-funded higher education and research institutions in India with premium access to the ACM Digital Library, while enabling authors in participating institutions to publish research articles in ACM journals, ACM conference proceedings, and ICPS Proceedings. Said ACM Director of Publications Scott Delman, “We’ve long believed that computing research should be available to everyone, everywhere—and ONOS makes that vision a reality for one of the world’s most dynamic and fast-growing research communities."
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U.S. Extends MITRE's Mandate

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said Wednesday the U.S. has extended MITRE's funding to ensure no continuity issues occur with the critical Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program. The announcement follows a warning from MITRE Vice President Yosry Barsoum that government funding for the CVE programs had been set to expire Wednesday. MITRE maintains the CVE program with funding from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
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Judge Rules Google an Online Advertising Monopoly

A federal judge in Virginia has ruled that Google illegally built “monopoly power” with its Web advertising business, marking the U.S. government’s second major antitrust court victory over Google in less than a year. Thursday’s decision addresses the $31-billion portion of Google’s ad business that matches website publishers with advertisers.
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New Chip Controls on China Set to Cost U.S. Companies Billions

The Trump administration has expanded restrictions on exports of AI chips, causing billions of dollars in losses for U.S. chip companies. Nvidia said it will write off $5.5 billion in inventory after being informed it could not export its H20 chip, which had been designed in accordance with the Biden administration's export restrictions on China. AMD said it would have to write off $800 million of chips as a result of the new restrictions.
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Robot Farmers Guided by Lasers

A navigation system developed by researchers at Japan's Osaka Metropolitan University enables agricultural robots to travel between high-bed cultivation rows without installing special markers in fields or relying on GPS. The robot uses waypoint navigation to travel to predefined spots, then transitions to cultivation bed navigation when it nears crop rows. The robot maintains a specific distance and orientation to the crop bed using a laser scanner.
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The Most-Cited Papers of the 21st Century

A 2016 paper by Microsoft researchers about deep residual learning networks is the top-cited paper of the 21st century, according to an analysis by Nature's news team. The analysis ranked the 25 most-cited papers published in the 21st century by calculating the median rankings across five databases covering tens of millions of papers. ACM A.M. Turing laureate Geoffrey Hinton attributed the popularity of AI papers in citations to AI's relevance to numerous fields and its rapid progress, which has resulted in a large volume of papers.
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An AI Is Going to Art School

Students Chiara Kristler and Marcin Ratajczyk at Austria's University of Applied Arts Vienna developed an AI college student that applied and was accepted to their university. Called "Flynn," the AI is a combination of different commercially available and open source AI-powered tools, with a large language model to generate text outputs, a voice agent to determine its speech and tone, and an image-generation tool to produce its art assignments.
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Messageboard 4chan Hacked

Internet messageboard 4chan has been hacked, according to posts circulating online, some of which said that identifying details of the site's moderators have been made public. 4chan over the years has served as an incubator for viral memes and a range of subcultures, including Internet vigilante group Anonymous. The alleged hack first came to light when a defunct section of the site sprang back to life with the words "U GOT HACKED" emblazoned across the top.
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Israel Tops List of Countries with Highest Self-Reported AI Skills

Israel tops the list of countries with the highest concentration of AI talent in the world, according to the LinkedIn AI Talent Index. The index, based on member profile data collected from the professional networking site, showed that workers with AI-related skills make up 1.98% of the workforce in Israel. Coming in second in the ranking was Singapore at 1.64%, while Luxembourg, at 1.44%, ranked third. Estonia and Switzerland rounded out the top five.
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High-Schooler's AI Algorithm Detects Previously-Unknown Astronomical Objects

Matteo Paz, an 18-year-old high school student from Pasadena, CA, won first place in the 2025 Regeneron Science Talent Search for developing an AI algorithm that processed 200 billion data entries from a now-retired U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) telescope, identifying 1.5 million previously unknown potential celestial bodies. Working with California Institute of Technology's Davy Kirkpatrick, Paz created an AI model that analyzed raw data from the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer telescope to detect minuscule changes in infrared radiation.
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AI Decodes Dolphin Speak

A large language model developed by Google researchers, in collaboration with the Wild Dolphin Project (WDP), could help researchers communicate with dolphins. Based on Google's Gemma open AI models, the DolphinGemma communication model uses Google's SoundStream to tokenize dolphin vocalizations, feeding them into the model as they are recorded. Trained on WDP's acoustic archive of dolphin sounds and containing around 400 million parameters, DolphinGemma predicts the next token after being presented with a dolphin vocalization.
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First Quarter Sees Surge in PC Shipments

Global PC shipments surged during this year's first quarter, growing 4.8% on a year-over-year basis as vendors stockpiled inventory ahead of expected U.S. tariffs, according to a Gartner analysis. The spike was most pronounced in the U.S., which saw shipments grow 12.6% versus the first quarter of 2024. The U.S. accounted for over 25% of the estimated 59 million PC units shipped from January through March.
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Latest 2D Chip: 6,000 Transistors, 3 Atoms Thick

A microchip developed by researchers at China's Fudan University has 5,931 transistors made from the semiconductor molybdenum disulfide, each just three atoms thick, surpassing the previous largest 2D logic circuit comprised of 156 molybdenum disulfide transistors. Made using existing CMOS technologies and optimizing each process step using machine learning, the RV32-WUJI microchip has an RISC-V architecture that can execute standard 32-bit instructions and a complete standard cell library containing 25 types of logic units to perform basic functions.
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