Just being exposed to new things makes people ‘ready to learn’

Latent learning occurs without any explicit teaching

Peer-Reviewed Publication

OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

COLUMBUS, Ohio – Long before they enter a classroom, people learn to identify commonplace objects like a “dog” and a “chair” just by encountering them in everyday life, with no intent to learn about what they are.

 

A new study is one of the first to provide experimental evidence that people learn from incidental exposure to things that they know nothing about and aren’t even trying to understand.

 

Exposure to new objects makes humans “ready to learn,” said Vladimir Sloutsky, co-author of the study and professor of psychology at The Ohio State University.

 

“We often observe new things out in the real world without a goal of learning about them,” Sloutsky said.

 

“But we found that simply being exposed to them makes an impression in our mind and leads us to be ready to learn about them later.”

 

Sloutsky conducted the research with Layla Unger, a postdoctoral researcher in psychology at Ohio State and lead author of the study.  The study was published May 26, 2022 in the journal Psychological Science.

 

The study included five different experiments with 438 people, with all experiments showing similar results.

 

In the studies, participants first took part in an “exposure phase” in which they played a simple computer game while seeing colorful images of unfamiliar creatures. The game did not provide any information about these creatures, but for some participants, unbeknownst to them, the creatures actually belonged to two categories – Category A and Category B.

 

Similar to real-world creatures such as dogs and cats, Category A and Category B creatures had body parts that looked somewhat different, such as different-colored tails and hands. Control group participants were shown images of other unfamiliar creatures.

 

Later in the experiment, the participants went through “explicit learning,” a process in which they were taught that the creatures belonged to two categories (called “flurps” and “jalets”), and to identify the category membership of each creature.

 

The researchers measured how long it took participants to learn the difference between Category A and Category B in this explicit learning phase.

 

“We found that learning was substantially faster for those who were exposed to the two categories of creatures earlier on than it was in the control group participants,” Unger said.

 

“Participants who received early exposure to Category A and B creatures could become familiar with their different distributions of characteristics, such as that creatures with blue tails tended to have brown hands, and creatures with orange tails tended to have green hands.  Then when the explicit learning came, it was easier to attach a label to those distributions and form the categories.”

 

In another experiment in the study, the simple computer game that participants played in the exposure phase involved hearing sounds while seeing the images of the creatures. Participants simply hit a key whenever the same sound was played two times in a row.

 

“The images were randomly attached to the sounds, so they could not help participants learn the sounds,” Sloutsky said. “In fact, the participants could completely ignore the images and it would not affect how well they did.”

 

Still, participants who were shown the images of Category A and B creatures later learned the differences between them more quickly during the explicit learning phase than participants who were shown other unrelated images.

 

“It was pure exposure to the creatures that was helping them learn faster later on,” Sloutsky said.

 

But was it possible that they had already actually learned the difference between Category A and B creatures during the early exposure, without needing the explicit learning?

 

The answer is no, Unger said.

 

In some of the studies, the simple computer game in the exposure phase involved first seeing a creature in the center of the screen. Participants were then asked to hit one key if the creature jumped to the left side of the screen and a different key if it jumped to the right, as quickly as possible.

 

Participants were not told this, but one type of creature always jumped to the left and the other always jumped to the right. So if they learned the difference between the two creature categories, they could respond faster.

 

Results showed that participants did not respond faster, suggesting they didn’t learn the difference between Category A and Category B creatures in the exposure part of the experiment.

 

But they still learned the difference between them more quickly in the explicit learning part of the experiment than those participants who were exposed to images of other creatures during the earlier exposure phase.

 

“The exposure to the creatures left participants with some latent knowledge, but they weren’t ready to tell the difference between the two categories.  They had not learned yet, but they were ready to learn,” Unger said.

 

Sloutsky said this is one of few studies that has shown evidence of latent learning.

 

“It has been very difficult to diagnose when latent learning is occurring,” he said.  “But this research was able to differentiate between latent learning and what people learn during explicit teaching.”

 

The study was funded by grants to Sloutsky from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

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JOURNAL

Psychological Science

DOI

10.1177/09567976211061470 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

People

ARTICLE TITLE

Ready to learn: Incidental exposure fosters category learning

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

26-May-2022

A cushy lab life has its evolutionary costs — when it comes to fish, that is

Laboratory zebrafish have lost physiological plasticity after five decades of domestication

Peer-Reviewed Publication

NORWEGIAN UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

 

IMAGE: FREDRIK JUTFELT, HEAD OF NTNU’S FISH ECOPHYSIOLOGY LAB, HAS STUDIED VARIOUS KINDS OF FISH, INCLUDING ZEBRAFISH. PHOTO: NTNU view more 

CREDIT: NTNU

Consider the humble zebrafish. They produce 200 embryos every 7 days, they’re cheap and easy to grow, and their young are small and transparent.  But their most important feature — at least if you are a researcher — is that they share a high degree of genetic, anatomical and physiological similarities to humans.

Ever since the Hungarian researcher George Streisinger pioneered the use of these tiny but important fish in 1972, scientists have found ways to use zebra fish to study everything from epilepsy to environmental pollutants. Researchers at the Kavli Institute of Systems Neuroscience even peer into the brains of genetically modified zebra fish to study the brain’s wiring system.

All those years of domestication — 150 generations of zebrafish, by one biologist’s count — led a team of researchers to realize they had a perfect evolutionary experiment. They wondered what had happened to laboratory zebrafish over all these generations, when it comes to a characteristic called plasticity.

“Plasticity allows organisms to adjust to different environments, for example to perform consistently across a wide range of temperatures,” said Rachael Morgan, who recently completed her PhD at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s Department of Biology. “But plasticity — this ability to adjust their physiology — could have a cost, in which case domesticated zebrafish, which have been raised in extremely stable conditions, should lose this plasticity over time.”

So the researchers conducted an experiment with wild and lab zebrafish to see if this was the case. Their findings have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science of the United States, PNAS.

CAPTION

The zebrafish (Danio rerio) has proved to be as invaluable a lab animal as the laboratory rat. Now it has given researchers another interesting piece of information about evolution.

CREDIT

Photo: Fredrik Jutfelt/NTNU

Stable lab temperatures reduce need to respond

Researchers generally rear their lab zebrafish at an optimal temperature of roughly 28C, which promotes healthy growth and the best fertility. Over time lab zebrafish have adapted to this, as well as to life in small aquaria with lots of other fish, dry food and handling by humans, the researchers observed in their paper.

So Morgan and her colleagues decided to compare how lab zebrafish would cope with different temperature regimes compared to wild zebrafish.

They took 300 juvenile lab zebrafish and 300 juvenile wild zebrafish and exposed them to one of 15 different temperatures for 35 days. The temperatures they selected (10-38C) were based on the range of temperatures that a wild zebrafish might be expected to experience.

After the 35-day acclimatization period both wild and lab fish were subjected to a range of tests, such as swimming activity, maximum swim speed, metabolism and growth rate, among other measures.

The results showed that across a range of measures, the lab fish had indeed lost their physiological plasticity, Morgan said.

“What we were exploring is whether there is a cost of plasticity, and if there is a cost then we would expect that plasticity would be selected against if there is no need to maintain it,” she said “And this is largely what we found. We also show that changes have occurred in many different traits and across different levels of the organism (from genetic to the whole organism) which is quite unique.”

CAPTION

Rachael Morgan is the first author of a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science about how lab zebrafish have lost their physiological plasticity over 5 decades of being raised in fish tanks instead of living in the wild.

CREDIT

Photo: Fredrik Jutfelt/NTNU

Adapting to the environments they live in

Fredrik Jutfelt, the senior author of the paper, said the study also shows how two populations have adapted to the environments they are in through evolution.

“Lab zebrafish adapted to the narrow temperature range they experience in the lab but have lost their ability to perform so well at temperatures higher or lower than they experience,” he said. “Wild fish experience a wide temperature range and are adapted for this as they can adjust their physiology using physiological plasticity to maintain function.”

The study is also a reminder that organisms like zebrafish, which have been adopted by researchers for a range of research topics and domesticated over the decades, are not exactly the same as their wild brethren, the researchers said.

“This study also illustrates how model organisms, such as lab zebrafish, may not be an accurate representation of their wild counterparts,” Jutfelt said. “It shows how rapidly changes, in this case loss of thermal plasticity, can occur in an organism.”

Reference: Reduced physiological plasticity in a fish adapted to stable temperatures. Rachael Morgan, Anna H. Andreassen, Eirik R. Åsheim, Mette H. Finnøen, Gunnar Dresler, Tore Brembu, Adrian Loh, Joanna J. Miest, and Fredrik Jutfelt. PNAS. May 26, 2022. 119 (22) e2201919119 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2201919119

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JOURNAL

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2201919119 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Animals

ARTICLE TITLE

Reduced physiological plasticity in a fish adapted to stable temperatures

ARTICLE PUBLICATION DATE

26-May-2022

Art meets 5G: Digital experiments held at art museums in Turin

A significant collaboration between public and private organisations: City of Turin, Ericsson, TIM, the Turin Museum Foundation and the Italian Institute of Technology, with the contribution of Atos and Samsung

Business Announcement

ISTITUTO ITALIANO DI TECNOLOGIA - IIT

 

VIDEO: IN THE FRAMEWORK OF EU-FUNDED PROJECT 5GTOURS, R1 HUMANOID ROBOT TESTED AT GAM (TURIN) ITS ABILITY TO NAVIGATE AND INTERACT WITH VISITORS AT THE 20TH-CENTURY COLLECTIONS, ACCOMPANYING THEM TO EXPLORE A SELECTION OF THE MUSEUM’S MOST REPRESENTATIVE WORKS, SUCH AS FELICE CASORATI’S “DAPHNE A PAVAROLO”. THE ROBOT HAS BEEN DESIGNED AND DEVELOPED BY IIT, WHILE THE 5G CONNECTION WAS SET UP BY TIM USING ERICSSON TECHNOLOGY. view more 

CREDIT: IIT-ISTITUTO ITALIANO DI TECNOLOGIA/GAM

27 May, Turin (Italy) – Robotics, 5G and art: during the month of May visitors to the Turin’s art museums, Turin Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art (GAM) and Turin City Museum of Ancient Art (Palazzo Madama), had the opportunity to be part of various experiments based on 5G-network technology. Interactive technologies and robots were the focus of an innovative enjoyment of the art collections, with a great appreciation from the public.

Visitors to the GAM and to Palazzo Madama were provided with a number of engaging interactive experiences made possible through a significant collaboration between public and private organisations, which have been working together for more than three years to experiment the potential of new 5G technology in the framework of the EU-funded project 5GTours (https://5gtours.eu/).

The demonstrations set up in Turin led to the creation of innovative applications in the tourism and culture sectors that can easily be replicated in any artistic or museum context.

In both venues, visitors had the opportunity to meet R1, the humanoid robot designed by the IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology) in Genova and created to operate in domestic and professional environments, whose autonomous and remote navigation system is well integrated with the bandwidth and latency offered by a 5G connection. R1, the robot - 1 metre 25 cm in height, weighing 50 kg, made 50% from plastic and 50% from carbon fibre and metal - is able to describe the works and answer questions regarding the artist or the period in history to which the work belongs. 5G connectivity is required in order to transmit the considerable quantity of data generated by the robot’s sensors and the algorithms that handle environmental perception, autonomous navigation and dialogue to external processing systems with extremely rapid response times.

At Palazzo Madama R1 humanoid robot led a guided tour of the Ceramics Room, while at GAM it was available to visitors of the twentieth-century collections, accompanying them to explore a selection of the museum’s most representative works. R1 robot explained and responded to questions about six relevant paintings: Felice Casorati’s “Daphne a Pavarolo”, Osvaldo Lucini’s “Uccello 2”, Marc Chagall’s “Dans mon pays”, Alberto Burri’s “Sacco”, Andy Warhol’s “Orange car crash” and Mario Merz’s “Che Fare?”.

Moreover, visitors - with the use of Meta Quest visors also connected to the 5G network - were required to solve a puzzle, putting the paintings in the Guards’ Room back into their frames. With these devices, the works in the hall, which in reality cannot be touched, can be handled and moved virtually. Lastly, the visitors involved had the opportunity to visit the underground spaces of Palazzo Madama with the mini-robot Double 3, which uses the 5G network to move reactively and precisely within the narrow spaces.

CAPTION

In the framework of EU-funded project 5GTours, R1 humanoid robot tested at GAM (Turin) its ability to navigate and interact with visitors at the 20th-century collections, accompanying them to explore a selection of the museum’s most representative works, such as Osvaldo Lucini’s “Uccello 2”. The robot has been designed and developed by IIT, while the 5G connection was set up by TIM using Ericsson technology.

CREDIT

IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia/GAM

At GAM a class of students from a local school were able to remotely connect and manoeuvre the mini-robot Double 3 located in the rooms of the twentieth-century collections at the GAM directly from their classroom. A treasure hunt held in the museum with the participants never leaving the school.

In the Educational Area, a group of youngsters had the opportunity of collaborating in the painting of a virtual work of art on a large technological wall, drawing inspiration from works by Nicola De Maria.

R1 humanoid robot explaining Andy Warhol’s work (VIDEO)

CAPTION

In the framework of EU-funded project 5GTours, R1 humanoid robot tested at GAM (Turin) its ability to navigate and interact with visitors at the 20th-century collections, accompanying them to explore a selection of the museum’s most representative works, such as Andy Warhol’s “Orange car crash”. The robot has been designed and developed by IIT, while the 5G connection was set up by TIM using Ericsson technology.

CREDIT

IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia/GAM

The 5G network solutions created at the GAM and at Palazzo Madama by TIM with Ericsson technology in collaboration with the City of Turin and the Turin Museum Foundation, guarantee constant high-speed transmission and extremely low latency. These solutions, which comply with 3GPP standard, are extremely flexible in terms of setting up and use. In the case of Palazzo Madama, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, tailor-made installations were designed, using apparatus and solutions that perfectly integrate with the museum spaces, while at the same time guaranteeing extremely high performance. At the GAM, the Radio Dot System has been implemented, a new 5G solution from Ericsson that is small enough to be held in the palm of a hand, and that provides network coverage and performance required for busy indoor areas. Thanks to these activities, Turin is ever increasingly playing a role as an open-air laboratory for urban innovation; since 2021 it has been the location of the “House of Emerging Technology - CTE NEXT”, a veritable centre for technology transfer via 5G and for emerging technologies coordinated by the Municipality of Turin and financed by the Ministry for Economic Development.

Through these solutions, Palazzo Madama and the GAM are now unique examples of technology in Italy and a rare example on a European level of museum buildings with full 5G coverage.

The experience was the result of the project financed by the European Union, 5G-TOURS “5G smarT mObility, media and e-health for toURists and citizenS”, the city of Turin - Department and Directorate of Innovation, in collaboration with the Department of Culture - Ericsson, TIM, the Turin Museum Foundation and the IIT-Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italian Institute of Technology) of Genova, with the contribution of the international partners Atos and Samsung. The 5G coverage within the two museums was set up by TIM using Ericsson technology, solutions that perfectly integrated with the areas within the two museums structures.

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METHOD OF RESEARCH

Experimental study

A helping hand for robotic manipulator design

With modular components and an easy-to-use 3D interface, this interactive design pipeline enables anyone to create their own customized robotic hand.

Reports and Proceedings

MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY

 

IMAGE: MIT RESEARCHERS HAVE CREATED AN INTEGRATED DESIGN PIPELINE THAT ENABLES A USER WITH NO SPECIALIZED KNOWLEDGE TO QUICKLY CRAFT A CUSTOMIZED 3D-PRINTABLE ROBOTIC HAND. view more 

CREDIT: LARA ZLOKAPA

MIT researchers have created an interactive design pipeline that streamlines and simplifies the process of crafting a customized robotic hand with tactile sensors.

 

Typically, a robotics expert may spend months manually designing a custom manipulator, largely through trial-and-error. Each iteration could require new parts that must be designed and tested from scratch. By contrast, this new pipeline doesn’t require any manual assembly or specialized knowledge.

 

Akin to building with digital LEGOs, a designer uses the interface to construct a robotic manipulator from a set of modular components that are guaranteed to be manufacturable. The user can adjust the palm and fingers of the robotic hand, tailoring it to a specific task, and then easily integrate tactile sensors into the final design.

                                          

Once the design is finished, the software automatically generates 3D printing and machine knitting files for manufacturing the manipulator. Tactile sensors are incorporated through a knitted glove that fits snugly over the robotic hand. These sensors enable the manipulator to perform complex tasks, such as picking up delicate items or using tools.

 

“One of the most exciting things about this pipeline is that it makes design accessible to a general audience. Rather than spending months or years working on a design, and putting a lot of money into prototypes, you can have a working prototype in minutes,” says lead author Lara Zlokapa, who will graduate this spring with her master’s degree in mechanical engineering.

 

Joining Zlokapa on the paper are her advisors Pulkit Agrawal, professor in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), and Wojciech Matusik, professor of electrical engineering and computer science. Other co-authors include CSAIL graduate students Yiyue Luo and Jie Xu, mechanical engineer Michael Foshey, and Kui Wu, a senior research scientist at Tencent America. The research is being presented at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

 

Mulling over modularity

 

Before she began work on the pipeline, Zlokapa paused to consider the concept of modularity. She wanted to create enough components that users could mix and match with flexibility, but not so many that they were overwhelmed by choices.

 

She thought creatively about component functions, rather than shapes, and came up with about 15 parts that can combine to make trillions of unique manipulators.

 

The researchers then focused on building an intuitive interface in which the user mixes and matches components in a 3D design space. A set of production rules, known as graph grammar, controls how users can combine pieces based on the way each component, such as a joint or finger shaft, fits together.

 

“If we think of this as a LEGO kit where you have different building blocks you can put together, then the grammar might be something like ‘red blocks can only go on top of blue blocks’ and ‘blue blocks can’t go on top of green blocks.’ Graph grammar is what enables us to ensure that each and every design is valid, meaning it makes physical sense and you can manufacture it,” she explains.

 

Once the user has created the manipulator structure, they can deform components to customize it for a specific task. For instance, perhaps the manipulator needs fingers with slimmer tips to handle office scissors or curved fingers that can grasp bottles.

 

During this deformation stage, the software surrounds each component with a digital cage. Users stretch or bend components by dragging the corners of each cage. The system automatically constrains those movements to ensure the pieces still connect properly and the finished design remains manufacturable.

 

Fits like a glove

 

After customization, the user identifies locations for tactile sensors. These sensors are integrated into a knitted glove that fits securely around the 3D-printed robotic manipulator. The glove is comprised of two fabric layers, one that contains horizontal piezoelectric fibers and another with vertical fibers. Piezoelectric material produces an electric signal when squeezed. Tactile sensors are formed where the horizontal and vertical piezoelectric fibers intersect; they convert pressure stimuli into electric signals that can be measured.

 

“We used gloves because they are easy to install, easy to replace, and easy to take off if we need to repair anything inside them,” Zlokapa explains.

 

Plus, with gloves, the user can cover the entire hand with tactile sensors, rather than embedding them in the palm or fingers, as is the case with other robotic manipulators (if they have tactile sensors at all).

 

With the design interface complete, the researchers produced custom manipulators for four complex tasks: picking up an egg, cutting paper with scissors, pouring water from a bottle, and screwing in a wing nut. The wing nut manipulator, for instance, had one lengthened and offset finger, which prevented the finger from colliding with the nut as it turned. That successful design required only two iterations.

 

The egg-grabbing manipulator never broke or dropped the egg during testing, and the paper-cutting manipulator could use a wider range of scissors than any existing robotic hand they could find in the literature.

 

But as they tested the manipulators, the researchers found that the sensors create a lot of noise due to the uneven weave of the knitted fibers, which hampers their accuracy. They are now working on more reliable sensors that could improve manipulator performance.

 

The researchers also want to explore the use of additional automation. Since the graph grammar rules are written in a way that a computer can understand, algorithms could search the design space to determine optimal configurations for a task-specific robotic hand. With autonomous manufacturing, the entire prototyping process could be done without human intervention, Zlokapa says.

 

“Now that we have a way for a computer to explore this design space, we can work on answering the question of, ‘Is the human hand the optimal shape for doing everyday tasks?’ Maybe there is a better shape? Or maybe we want more or fewer fingers, or fingers pointing in different directions? This research doesn’t fully answer that question, but it is a step in that direction,” she says.

 

This work was supported, in part, by the Toyota Research Institute, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and an Amazon Robotics Research Award.

 

###

 

Written by Adam Zewe, MIT News Office

 

 

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ARTICLE TITLE

An integrated design pipeline for tactile sensing robotic manipulators

From baristas to inspectors: Singapore's robot workforce plugs labour gaps


By Travis Teo

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - After struggling to find staff during the pandemic, businesses in Singapore have increasingly turned to deploying robots to help carry out a range of tasks, from surveying construction sites to scanning library bookshelves.

The city-state relies on foreign workers, but their number fell by 235,700 between December 2019 and September 2021, according to the manpower ministry, which notes how COVID-19 curbs have sped up "the pace of technology adoption and automation" by companies.


© Reuters/TRAVIS TEORobot barista "Ella", designed by Crown Digital, makes a coffee autonomously after receiving orders, in Singapore

At a Singapore construction site, a four-legged robot called "Spot", built by U.S. company Boston Dynamics, scans sections of mud and gravel to check on work progress, with data fed back to construction company Gammon's control room.


© Reuters/TRAVIS TEOA view of a book-scanning robot used by Singapore's National Library Board, to scan and report misplaced books, in Singapore

Gammon's general manager, Michael O'Connell, said using Spot required only one human employee instead of the two previously needed to do the job manually.

"Replacing the need for manpower on-site with autonomous solutions is gaining real traction," said O'Connell, who believes industry labour shortages made worse by the pandemic are here to stay.


© Reuters/TRAVIS TEOA view of a mosquito-trapping robot used by LHN group, which runs the Coliwoo hotel chain, inside a hotel in Singapore

Meanwhile, Singapore's National Library has introduced two shelf-reading robots that can scan labels on 100,000 books, or about 30 percent of its collection, per day.


© Reuters/TRAVIS TEOA view of a mosquito-trapping robot used by LHN group, which runs the Coliwoo hotel chain, inside a hotel in Singapore

"Staff need not read the call numbers one by one on the shelf, and this reduces the routine and labour-intensive aspects," said Lee Yee Fuang, assistant director at the National Library Board.

Singapore has 605 robots installed per 10,000 employees in the manufacturing industry, the second-highest number globally, after South Korea's 932, according to a 2021 report by the International Federation of Robotics.

Robots are also being used for customer-facing tasks, with more than 30 metro stations set to have robots making coffee for commuters.

Keith Tan, chief executive of Crown Digital, which created the barista robot, said it was helping solve the "biggest pain-point" in food and beverage - finding staff - while also creating well-paid positions to help automate the sector.


© Reuters/TRAVIS TEOA view of a cleaning robot used by LHN group, which runs the Coliwoo hotel chain, inside a hotel in Singapore

However, some people trying the service still yearned for human interaction.

"We always want to have some kind of human touch," said commuter Ashish Kumar, while sipping on a robot-brewed drink.

(Editing by Ed Davies and Bradley Perrett)


© Reuters/TRAVIS TEORobot dog, made by Hyundai-owned Boston Dynamics, is used by the Gammon Construction Ltd to make a scan of a construction site for supervisors to check work progress, on Sentosa Island


© Reuters/TRAVIS TEORobot dog, made by Hyundai-owned Boston Dynamics, is used by the Gammon Construction Ltd to run autonomous survey of their worksite, on Sentosa Island

Forecast of food cyber attacks

Agriculture tech use opens possibility of digital havoc

Peer-Reviewed Publication

FLINDERS UNIVERSITY

Wide-ranging use of smart technologies is raising global agricultural production but international researchers warn this digital-age phenomenon could reap a crop of another kind – cybersecurity attacks.

Complex IT and math modelling at King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia, Aix-Marseille University, France and Flinders University in South Australia, has highlighted the risks in a new article in the open access journal Sensors.

“Smart sensors and systems are used to monitor crops, plants, the environment, water, soil moisture, and diseases,” says lead author Professor Abel Alahmadi from King Abdulaziz University.

“The transformation to digital agriculture would improve the quality and quantity of food for the ever-increasing human population, which is forecast to reach 10.9 billion by 2100.”

This progress in production, genetic modification for drought-resistant crops, and other technologies is prone to cyber-attack – particularly if the ag-tech sector doesn’t take adequate precautions like other corporate or defence sectors, researchers warn.

Flinders University researcher Dr Saeed Rehman says the rise of internet connectivity and smart low-power devices has facilitated the shift of many labour-intensive food production jobs into the digital domain – including modern techniques for accurate irrigation, soil and crop monitoring using drone surveillance.

“However, we should not overlook security threats and vulnerabilities to digital agriculture, in particular possible side-channel attacks specific to ag-tech applications,” says Dr Rehman, an expert in cybersecurity and networking.

“Digital agriculture is not immune to cyber-attack, as seen by interference to a US watering system, a meatpacking firm, wool broker software and an Australian beverage company.”

“Extraction of cryptographic or sensitive information from the operation of physical hardware is termed side-channel attack,” adds Flinders co-author Professor David Glynn.

“These attacks could be easily carried out with physical access to devices, which the cybersecurity community has not explicitly investigated.”

The researchers recommend investment into precautions and awareness about the vulnerabilities of digital agriculture to cyber-attack, with an eye on the potential serious effects on the general population in terms of food supply, labour and flow-on costs.

The article, Cyber-Security Threats and Side-Channel Attacks for Digital Agriculture (2022) by Adel N Alahmadi , Saeed Ur Rehman, Husain S Alhazmi, David G Glynn, Hatoon Shoaib and Patrick Solé (Aix-Marseille University, France) has been published in Sensors DOI: 10.3390/s22093520

Acknowledgement: The research received funding from the Saudi Ministry of Education, furthering Saudi Vision 2030.  

 

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JOURNAL

Sensors

DOI

10.3390/s22093520 

METHOD OF RESEARCH

Computational simulation/modeling

SUBJECT OF RESEARCH

Not applicable

ARTICLE TITLE

Cyber-Security Threats and Side-Channel Attacks for Digital Agriculture

Easy, flexible access to produce, resources boosts healthy eating for central Texas kids

Peer-Reviewed Publication

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

Austin, TX— What children eat affects their lifelong health. But influencing their habits can be difficult, especially for underserved families with fewer resources. However, providing caregivers easy access to produce and flexible resources can lead to improvements in kids’ diets in a short time, according to a new study from researchers at Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin.

The randomized clinical trial, published today in JAMA Network Open, was led by Dell Med’s Factor Health initiative and funded by a grant from the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation. The team set out to assess what impact providing caregivers with four weeks of free tastings of produce and grocery gift cards would have on their ability to adjust their children’s diets.

“We know that people in general, including kids, do not consume the daily recommended amount of fruits and veggies,” said Maninder “Mini” Kahlon, Ph.D., director and founder of Factor Health. “We wanted to see if we could support caregivers in improving their child’s diet through easy access to fresh produce as well as flexible resources they could use as they wanted, based on their priorities.”   

The two-group randomized clinical trial was conducted from May to July 2021. Researchers began by offering food and grocery store gift cards to caregivers enrolled in an existing curbside program managed by the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Austin Area (BGCAA). Every week for four weeks, caregivers were given 10-pound boxes of fruits and vegetables at BGCAA sites and $10 gift cards for the grocery store H-E-B.

“These families were already part of our ‘Club on the Go’ program, which was launched in response to the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Jenn Barnes, director of club operations at BGCAA. “Integrating the food box and gift card delivery into their regular site visit eliminated the burden and inconvenience of making an additional trip to pick them up.”

At four- and eight-week intervals, researchers assessed child and caregiver diets using the Texas School Physical Activity and Nutrition (Texas SPAN) tool, which was developed by the Michael & Susan Dell Center for Healthy Living. They observed that, on average, children ate healthier foods two additional times per day, compared with the control group, and healthy eating behaviors continued after the program ended.

“Our research team saw an increase in kids’ consumption of produce—and importantly, that healthy eating continued during the four-week follow-up period after the program,” said Kahlon, who is also an associate professor of population health at Dell Med. “This is especially notable given that caregivers were not required to use their gift cards to buy healthy food.”

Caregivers were given an additional $10 gift card during the last three weeks of the program if they completed short reinforcement surveys that reminded them of the healthy eating goal of the program. They were also given a one-time choice of a $25 food preparation tool, including a kids’ kitchen set, a food blender, knives and spice kits.

“In total, caregivers received an average of $42 in H-E-B gift cards and 27 pounds of produce over four weeks,” said Deanna Hoelscher, Ph.D., co-investigator on the Factor Health team, dean of the UTHealth School of Public Health Austin Campus, and director of the Michael & Susan Dell Center for Healthy Living. “We also provided support with each produce box, including bilingual, culturally relevant recipes customized to the box’s contents and helpful advice, like how to store produce.”

Improving Health Outside of Clinics and Hospitals

“In the context of social determinants of health, there are seemingly endless opportunities for our health system to get creative and address what our team at Dell Med calls the healthscape, or health in the landscape of people’s lives,” Kahlon said. That’s where programs such as Factor Health come in — by bringing together community-based organizations, health care payers and investors in new ways to rethink the path to better health, particularly for vulnerable populations, she said. 

The Christensen Institute profiled Factor Health as an innovative business model in its white paper on the social drivers of health, released earlier this week.

Factor Health, which is funded by the Houston-based Episcopal Health Foundation, is preparing for a launch of a larger study with BGCAA involving elementary-aged children in Central Texas that incorporates learnings from this clinical trial. Factor Health works with health care payers such as Medicaid managed care organizations to make the health and business case to sustain effective social programs by paying for results that matter.

“We found that we did not have to constrain caregivers to healthy purchases for them to make healthy choices for their children, with quite rapid results,” said Kahlon. “As we move ahead, we’re excited to see how much more we can improve children’s diets with longer-term programs that provide resources for caregivers to experiment and craft their own strategies that work in the context of their lives.”

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JOURNAL

JAMA Network Open