Welcome to the April 16, 2025 edition of ACM TechNews, providing timely information for computer professionals three times a week.

HEADLINES AT A GLANCE

• U.S. Probes Chip, Electronics Imports
• China Accuses U.S. of 'Advanced' Cyberattacks
• Germany to Create 'Super–High-Tech Ministry'
• AI Can Help Manage Nuclear Reactors
• Advance in Brain Research Was Once Considered Impossible
• U.K. Injects Funding to Drive Quantum Growth
• Banks Limit Information Sharing with OCC After Hack
• AI-Boosted Cameras Help Blind People Navigate
• Nvidia to Mass-Produce AI Supercomputers in Texas
• AmigaOS for Commodore Computers Updated
• AI Not Ready to Replace Human Coders for Debugging
• Drone System Could Transform Ecology Research
• Quantum Computer Untangles the Mathematics of Knots

U.S. Probes Chip, Electronics Imports

The U.S. Commerce Department is conducting a national security investigation into imports of semiconductor technology and related downstream products. A Federal Register notice posted online Monday calls for public comments on the investigation. According to the notice, Commerce will investigate the “feasibility of increasing domestic semiconductors capacity” in order to reduce reliance on imports and whether additional trade measures, including tariffs, are “necessary to protect national security.”
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China Accuses U.S. of 'Advanced' Cyberattacks

China has accused the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) of launching "advanced" cyberattacks against it during the Asian Winter Games in February that targetted essential industries. China’s foreign ministry confirmed the attacks, which a local report that cited police in the northeastern city of Harbin said had "the intention of sabotaging China's critical information infrastructure, causing social disorder, and stealing important confidential information."
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Germany to Create 'Super–High-Tech Ministry'

Germany's incoming government will establish a "super-high-tech ministry" for research, technology, and aerospace. The plan calls for the current Ministry of Research and Education to be reformed as the new ministry for research, technology, and aerospace, with the education portfolio to be taken on by the current ministry for family, seniors, women, and youth. The new government’s scientific priorities include support for AI, quantum technologies, biotechnology, and microchip development and production.
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AI Can Help Manage Nuclear Reactors

An AI-based tool developed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory can help design nuclear reactors and assist operators in running nuclear power plants. The Parameter-Free Reasoning Operator for Automated Identification and Diagnosis (PRO-AID) tool leverages generative AI and large language models to handle real-time monitoring and diagnostics, informing and explaining any issues that arise to staff.
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Advance in Brain Research Was Once Considered Impossible

A team led by researchers at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Princeton University, and the Baylor College of Medicine mapped a cubic millimeter of a mouse brain and recorded its cellular activity. The researchers captured images of 28,000 slices of tissue, mapping 200,000 neurons and other brain cells and 523 million neural connections amounting to 1.6 petabytes of data. They trained models to identify cell outlines in each slice and to connect them into 3D shapes.
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U.K. Injects Funding to Drive Quantum Growth

The U.K. has earmarked £121 million (US$160 million) in funding over the next year for quantum computing to tackle fraud, prevent money laundering, and drive economic growth. The Department of Science, Innovation, and Technology said the funding is being made available to expand the use of the technology and secure the U.K.’s position as a world leader in the field.
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Banks Limit Information Sharing with OCC After Hack

JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Bank of New York Mellon Corp. are limiting the sharing of information with the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) over concerns of potential security risks to their computer networks. The lenders paused sharing information with the OCC following revelations that hackers had breached its email system to spy on more than 100 accounts over the course of more than a year.
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AI-Boosted Cameras Help Blind People Navigate

A system created by researchers in China can help visually impaired people navigate using AI to interpret footage from a camera mounted on a pair of glasses. A tiny computer processes images captured by the camera using machine-learning algorithms trained to detect the presence of objects; the system then produces a beep in the right or left ear to guide the wearer when an obstacle is detected. The researchers also created wearable patches that vibrate when an obstacle is nearby.
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Nvidia to Mass-Produce AI Supercomputers in Texas

Chipmaker Nvidia said on April 14 it will produce as much as $500 billion in AI infrastructure in the U.S. during the next four years through manufacturing partnerships. Nvidia's Blackwell AI chips are being produced at Taiwan Semiconductor plants in Phoenix, with chip packaging and testing services to be provided through partnerships with Amkor and Siliconware Precision Industries in Arizona. It also has partnered with Foxconn in Houston and Wistron in Dallas to build manufacturing plants for AI supercomputers.
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AmigaOS for Commodore Computers Updated

Hyperion Entertainment has released AmigaOS 3.2.3 for Commodore Computers with more than 50 fixes and enhancements for the classic Motorola 680x0-friendly operating system, which first launched in 1992. ReAction, the object-oriented widget toolkit engine, received several updates and is now the recommended toolkit for GUI programming under AmigaOS. In addition to updates to DiskDoctor and HDToolbox, the new release lets users define a custom menu with macros via TextEditor.
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AI Not Ready to Replace Human Coders for Debugging

A tool developed by Microsoft researchers tests and aims to improve software debugging by AI models. Available on GitHub, Debug-gym lets AI models attempt to debug existing code repositories using debugging tools not generally used by such models. According to the researchers, even the latest AI models rarely completed more than half of debugging tasks successfully. Claude 3.7 Sonnet had the highest average success rate (48.4%), followed by OpenAI's o1 (30.2%), and o3-mini (22.1%).
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Drone System Could Transform Ecology Research

An open source unmanned aerial system developed by researchers at The Ohio State University (OSU) was designed to automate and standardize the collection of animal behavioral data. The WildWing system can navigate challenging terrains quietly and perform complex tracking and positioning tasks, resulting in reliable and consistent data for training computer vision models. WildWing has captured around 37,000 images of endangered animals so far.
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Quantum Computer Untangles the Mathematics of Knots

Researchers at Quantinuum found that the U.K. company's H2-2 quantum computer is faster than classical computers at distinguishing between knots based on their topological properties. The researchers developed a quantum algorithm to calculate knot "invariants," numbers that describe particular types of knots, devised by mathematician Vaughan Jones and computer scientists Dorit Aharonov and Zeph Landau. They ran the algorithm on H2-2 to calculate Jones invariants for knots with up to 600 crossings (how the threads in a knot cross over each other).
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