Best of Last Year: The top Tech Explore articles of 2021

   The team of computer scientists at Rice University demonstrated a CPU algorithm that trains deep neural networks up to 15 times faster than the top GPU trainers. The AI software is also able to run on commodity processors. As part of their demonstration at this year's #MLSys conference, they noted that their efforts can reduce the cost of training, which they described as the real bottleneck in such systems.

   Also, internet users experienced the largest data breach in history last summer as various entities reported that 3.2 billion passwords had been leaked from multiple databases. Named RockYou2021, the breach numbers suggested that nearly everyone on the internet might have been impacted. Users around the world were advised to change their passwords as it was believed the leaked passwords were likely to be sold to hackers.

  And a team at #Cornel University wondered why Spotify still did not have a "dislike" button, considering that its business model revolved around keeping listeners listening. To find out, the group developed an algorithm that showed that listeners were 20 percent more likely to "like" a song if the algorithm used by the music platform was trained on 400,000 likes and dislikes, compared to an algorithm trained only on the number of likes.

   Also, many people around the world began to wonder this past year if the Metaverse is going to be the next big internet revolution. This came after Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company that makes the social media platform was changing its name to Meta. Other entities had also recently begun touting products as a means for allowing users to get in on the still evolving technology.

   And a team at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg found that a layer of three crystals produced a thousand times more power in solar cells, if the three materials were arranged periodically in a lattice. They proved their ideas by creating crystalline layers of barium #titanate, strontium #titanate and calcium #titanate which they alternately placed on top of one another to build a new kind of solar cell.

  Colin Johnson, an associate professor at the University of Nottingham, developed a deep-learning technique that could learn a so-called "fitness function" from a set of sample solutions to a problem. It could be used to solve a Rubik's cube and other problems step by step. In speaking with Tech #Xplore, Johnson noted that the Rubik's cube is a complex puzzle, but any of its huge number of combinations are at most 20 steps from a solution. 

     Last May, newly discovered Wi-Fi vulnerabilities called Frag attacks put all mobile devices at risk. The fragmentation and aggregation attacks allowed an attacker with the requisite skills and who was within radio range of a target to potentially exploit such flaws. Hackers could exploit programming vulnerabilities by adding frames into protected Wi-Fi networks.

   Also, a team working at the South China University of Technology developed a compound that might lead to sustainable, cost-effective, large-scale energy storage. Their work involved synthesizing a molecular compound that served as a low-cost electrolyte, thus enabling a stable flow battery that retained 99.98% of its capacity per cycle.