News by Subject Technology & Engineering

Mobile apps that work with Bluetooth devices have an inherent design flaw that makes them vulnerable to hacking, new research has found.

A global team of computer scientists, from Tsinghua and Beihang Universities in China, Harvard University in the US and IDC Herzliya in Israel, have developed "Write-A-Video", a new tool that generates videos from themed text. Using words and text editing, the tool automatically determines which scenes or shots are chosen from a repository to illustrate the desired storyline. The team is set to present their work at ACM SIGGRAPH Asia, held Nov. 17 to 20 in Brisbane, Australia.

Thermoelectric materials convert heat into electrical energy. The amount of energy that can be generated is measured by the so-called ZT value. The best thermoelectrics to date were measured at ZT values of around 2.5 to 2.8. Scientists at TU Wien have now developed a completely new material with a ZT value of 5 to 6. It is so effective that it could be used to provide energy for sensors or even small computer processors.

A Georgia Tech team developed an algorithm for simulating turbulence on Summit, the world's most powerful and smartest supercomputer. The team distributed the problem in such a way that the algorithm reached a performance of less than 15 seconds of wall-clock time per time step for more than 6 trillion grid points--a new world record surpassing the prior state of the art in the field for the size of the problem.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Dan Jacobson is currently working on numerous projects that form an integrated roadmap for the future of AI in plant breeding and bioenergy. The team's work was featured in Trends in Biotechnology in October. In this Q&A, Jacobson talks about his team's work on a genomic selection algorithm, his vision for the future of environmental genomics, and the space where simulation meets AI.

UMD researchers developed a tool called Geneva (short for Genetic Evasion), which automatically learns to circumvent censorship. Tested in China, India and Kazakhstan, Geneva found dozens of ways to circumvent censorship by exploiting gaps in censors' logic and finding bugs that the researchers say would have been virtually impossible to find manually. Geneva is being presented during a peer-reviewed talk at the Association for Computing Machinery's 26th Conference on Computer and Communications Security in London, November 14, 2019.

A new video game framework brings together two well-studied approaches to educational software in order to keep multiple players engrossed in the learning experience while fostering collaboration and problem solving. The framework is one of the first to integrate narrative-centered learning and collaborative learning techniques, laying the groundwork for future efforts in the field.