This article is brought to you by Tsubaki KabelSchlepp.In modern automated manufacturing, six-axis articulated robots perform high-speed, multidirectional maneuvers under demanding operational cycles. However, as robot arms swivel, rotate, and extend, the electrical cables, fiber … | Continue reading
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free!Asking someone to be your mentor … | Continue reading
In the 1960s NASA began developing a system of reusable space shuttles to make its work more efficient and to reduce costs. The shuttles could launch like rockets, maneuver in Earth’s orbit, and land like airplanes. They also could carry large satellites to and from orbit.Like ot … | Continue reading
A little over a decade ago, I led the controls design for a first-of-its-kind full digital control system for a U.S. nuclear plant. It was, on paper, a beautiful machine—engineered to run itself the way a modern airliner does, with operators watching over a system that rarely nee … | Continue reading
Across IEEE, our strength lies not only in the excellence of our individual communities but also in our ability to bring them together around shared problems that demand interdisciplinary solutions. Our mission as a public charity—to advance technology for the benefit of humanity … | Continue reading
For many high school students, summer vacation is a time to unplug. For Ruchira Shree, a rising sophomore at West Windsor–Plainsboro High School South, in New Jersey, the break allows her to ramp up her extracurricular pursuits.Much of her time is spent assisting with IEEE Prince … | Continue reading
For many high school students, summer vacation is a time to unplug. For Ruchira Shree, a rising sophomore at West Windsor–Plainsboro High School South, in New Jersey, the break allows her to ramp up her extracurricular pursuits.Much of her time is spent assisting with IEEE Prince … | Continue reading
This story was originally published by Tech Policy Press.The European Union’s push for technological sovereignty faces an uncomfortable contradiction.As the EU rolls out AI factories, gigafactories, and new data centers, it is creating a surge in demand for the advanced semicondu … | Continue reading
In a display case on the lower level of the Faraday Museum at the Royal Institution in London, there’s an unassuming stack of gray metal discs and blotting paper. It’s not at all obvious that this humble object is the starting point of today’s multibillion-dollar global battery i … | Continue reading
While walking to school as a child, Jernej Barbič would marvel at how beautiful his home was. He was born and raised in a picturesque village in northwestern Slovenia (formerly Yugoslavia), located in the European Alps. Surrounded by alpine and beech trees, Barbic dreamed of repl … | Continue reading
I never intended to join the cutting edge of electromechanical television. I just wanted to make a nice clock. But sometimes you have to go where the engineering takes you, and in my case it took me to the Scanwheel, a pocket-size wide-screen electromechanical TV with a resolutio … | Continue reading
The IEEE–Eta Kappa Nu (IEEE-HKN) honor society is preparing to host the Innovating the Future event on 6 November.The inaugural one-day, in-person event is designed to provide a forum for IEEE and IEEE-HKN undergraduate and graduate student authors to present their original resea … | Continue reading
The biggest threat to any crewed expedition to Mars is time. NASA’s shortest blueprint for sending people to the Red Planet and back requires spending 620 days in space and 30 days on Mars. Even setting aside the compounding challenges of building life-support systems that can op … | Continue reading
At the height of the Cold War, one very specialized computer was so secret that the world didn’t know it existed. It ran its jobs up to 200 times as fast as any other computer of its time. It was the U.S. National Security Agency’s main cryptographic processor in operation from t … | Continue reading
This article is brought to you by Ollobot.From about 2017, individuals began to truly connect with the initial wave of companion robots. These devices had personality, moved around, joked, and answered when you spoke to them. Most early companion robots, however, were still limit … | Continue reading
For most of my career, my IEEE membership sat quietly in the background—a line on my résumé, a discount code for a conference registration, and access to the IEEE Xplore digital library, which I underutilized. I didn’t think much about the grade of membership available above that … | Continue reading
The AI boom has disrupted the way engineers work, introducing new tools to learn, raising expectations for what teams can achieve in a workday, and making it harder to get hired in the first place. This makes it difficult to advise students on which specific coding languages or t … | Continue reading
This article is brought to you by Emerson.I’ve spent much of my career as an engineer, including years in the semiconductor industry. And one lesson has stayed with me through every major technology shift: innovation always creates new complexity.In semiconductors, we have seen t … | Continue reading
How do I touch youacross the ocean,across cold depthswhere light travels through glass.Not copper—fibers. Optical. Through liquid glass, through flickering lightthat carries you in fragments. Light broken into pulses. You say: it’s easier this way. What are we missing like this? … | Continue reading
Balaji Ingole rarely saw televisions while growing up in Udgir, India. No one in the small Maharashtra village had computers or phones. Only one household owned a television, and neighbors often gathered there to watch shows together.Ingole never even saw a computer growing up. I … | Continue reading
This article is part of our exclusive career advice series in partnership with the IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society.Imagine this: You have a strong idea for a new product for your company. Your coworkers encourage you to move forward because they believe it coul … | Continue reading
About 16 percent of the global population—more than 1 billion people—live with some form of disability, according to the World Health Organization. Many of the disabilities affect independence and mobility.Three high school students working on inventions to help people with disab … | Continue reading
The impact of AI on software development has been both profound and ever-evolving. Last year, I wrote about AMD’s plans to use AI not just for generating new lines of code, but also for other steps in the software development lifecycle (SDLC), such as triaging problems, debugging … | Continue reading
Bede Liu, a digital signal processing pioneer, died on 7 May. He was 91.Liu was widely regarded as one of the founders of modern digital signal processing, a field that applies mathematical algorithms to analyze, modify, and transmit signals including sound, images, and video.The … | Continue reading
Bede Liu, a digital signal processing pioneer, died on 7 May. He was 91.Liu was widely regarded as one of the founders of modern digital signal processing, a field that applies mathematical algorithms to analyze, modify, and transmit signals including sound, images, and video.The … | Continue reading
If you haven’t already seen a job listing for a “product engineer,” you probably will soon. The job everyone’s suddenly hiring for, this role is like a cross between a product manager and an engineer (as the name suggests). And it’s a hiring trend worth paying attention to.Compan … | Continue reading
In collaboration with the Kingdom of Bhutan government, IEEE recently introduced its Engineering Education, Research, and Innovation Summit.Held on 9 and 10 June in Paro, in the eastern Himalayas, the event was designed to help Bhutan navigate its digital transformation by focusi … | Continue reading
In a tranquil Boston suburb, on the far edge of a horse farm, where pasture gives way to woods, a crane lowers an enormous electrode into a borehole. The electrode, a half-meter-long cylinder with copper-tipped arms to ensure good contact with the borehole walls, descends—deeper, … | Continue reading
The transition from a purely technical expert or individual contributor position to a broader leadership role is one of the most challenging phases in a STEM career. It requires moving away from relying solely on technical excellence toward mastering systems thinking, adaptive le … | Continue reading
The history of networking is full of tools that repurposed solutions to very different kinds of problems first. Wi-Fi’s origins trace back in part to a team of Australian radio astronomers trying to detect signals from evaporating black holes. But the data processing tools they’d … | Continue reading
Today’s U.S. electrical grid, among the largest, most complex systems ever built, is operating at its limit. The combination of rapid industrial growth, more frequent extreme weather, and a record surge in electricity use has pushed the grid to its breaking point, according to th … | Continue reading
Most hospitals and health care providers use electronic health records instead of paper charts to note patient vaccinations, diagnoses, and procedures. AthenaOne, Epic, and Oracle Health are some of the systems employed around the world. Many patients can access their electronic … | Continue reading
This article is brought to you by COMSOL.In pursuit of improved range, greater reliability, and faster charging, electric vehicles are driving the demand for high-voltage electronics. Other applications driving this demand include wind farms, data centers, and server farms, to na … | Continue reading
A German engineer wanted a cheaper cigarette. The popular crooner Bing Crosby wanted a vacation. Satisfying both desires inadvertently led to the invention of the laugh track. Along the way there were Nazis, spoils of war, and more than one accidental encounter. Tying together th … | Continue reading
When I started at Spectrum 25 years ago, a senior editor suggested that I find a “rabbi,” by which he meant someone who could mentor me in how EEs approach problems and evaluate potential solutions. I didn’t find one right away. Then in 2005 we decided to do a special report, foc … | Continue reading
Given a rising number of publishing misconduct allegations, IEEE in 2022 created the Publishing Ethics Team as a centralized department to assist in handling claims. The group also works to increase the organization’s visibility in the broader publishing ethics area and helps IEE … | Continue reading
If you’re wondering what dark matter is, you’re not alone. Astronomers don’t know. But they’ve determined that this invisible material must be far more abundant than the stars and nebulas that they can see. They’ve surmised as much from observing the gravitational effects of all … | Continue reading
In February 2024, a young man lay somewhere on the frozen shore of James Bay, Canada, surrounded by snow and darkness, succumbing to hypothermia. When he failed to get home on time, his frantic mother sent a Facebook message to Elizabeth Kataquapit, then chief of the indigenous c … | Continue reading
This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free!Scroll through LinkedIn right no … | Continue reading
Artificial intelligence is reshaping the skills employers expect from new graduates. In response, universities are scrambling to launch new courses, research centers, and industry partnerships that prepare students for today’s workforce. But building a cutting-edge AI curriculum … | Continue reading
Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming part of everyday infrastructure–in some places. It helps write emails and software code, filters job applications, powers recommendation systems, and is increasingly being integrated into education, healthcare, finance, and public admin … | Continue reading
In shaping her career, Peru native Mariana Costa has asked herself a question: What can I do to make life better for women in Latin America?The answer she landed on was training them for tech jobs.Mariana CostaEmployer LaboratoriaTitle Co-founder and presidentAlma Maters London S … | Continue reading
Physicists have been trying to measure the fundamental gravitational constant for well over two centuries. The current accepted value of big G, as it’s known, is 6.67430 × 10-11 cubic meters per kilogram per square second. It also has an uncertainty of ±0.00015 × 10-11 m3/(kg s2) … | Continue reading
Already, I’ve almost forgotten rain;I know I will never know that again.I move forward with the powers you gave meto live up to my name, Curiosity.This is a land without leaves, fronds, or spines.If there are plants, they are small and supine,dust hidden, like light here, filtere … | Continue reading
Unlike many budding engineers, K.J. Ray Liu wasn’t inspired to enter the field by tinkering with electronics or following in the footsteps of a family member. Growing up in Taichung, Taiwan, he answered his government’s call for students to become electrical engineers to help man … | Continue reading
One summer day in 1941, a British radio operator was monitoring German military frequencies and heard something unexpected in her headphones. A later report called it “strange new music.” Sounding unlike the familiar Morse dit-dit-dah of enciphered messages sent over the German E … | Continue reading
Major benchmarks measure what AI can do. None measure whether it does what you mean: the distance between what you ask an AI to do, and the unspoken assumptions about how you want the AI to do it. We propose a new metric: the Genie coefficient.There’s often a gap between one pers … | Continue reading
Roughly half the world’s population is female, but the STEM fields don’t reflect that. The 2024 U.N. Global Education Monitoring Report on gender found that about 35 percent of STEM college graduates were women. The proportion hasn’t increased much in more than a decade.When it c … | Continue reading