If you have an implanted medical device, have been hooked up to a machine in a hospital, or have accessed your electronic medical records, you might assume the infrastructure and data are secure and protected against hackers. That isn’t necessarily the case, though. Connected med … | Continue reading
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. RoboCup German Open: 12–16 March 20 … | Continue reading
Remote sensing—a category broad enough to include both personal medical monitors and space weather forecasting—is poised for a quantum upgrade, much like computing and cryptography before it. A new type of quantum sensor that promises both higher sensitivity and greater security … | Continue reading
Every time someone views a video on Facebook or Instagram, they engage with Amey Dharwadker’s work. The machine learning engineering manager at Facebook’s parent company, Meta, leads Facebook’s video recommendations quality ranking team. Dharwadker’s work focuses on improving the … | Continue reading
It was 8 May 1945, Victory in Europe Day. With the German military’s unconditional surrender, the European part of World War II came to an end. Alan Turing and his assistant Donald Bayley celebrated victory in their quiet English way, by taking a long walk together. They had been … | Continue reading
AI is changing everything in data centers: New AI-specific chips, new cooling techniques, and new storage drives. Now even the method for keeping time is starting to change, with an announcement from SiTime that the company has developed a new clock that is optimized for AI workl … | Continue reading
Imagine it’s the year 2040, and a 12-year-old kid with diabetes pops a piece of chewing gum into his mouth. A temporary tattoo on his forearm registers the uptick in sugar in his blood stream and sends that information to his phone. Data from this health-monitoring tattoo is also … | Continue reading
The 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge was a spectacular failure. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency had offered a US $1 million prize for the team that could design an autonomous ground vehicle capable of completing an off-road course through sometimes flat, sometimes winding … | Continue reading
William Ratcliff Former IEEE Region 3 director Life senior member, 80; died 20 June Ratcliff was the 2008–2009 director of IEEE Region 3 (Southeastern United States). An active IEEE volunteer, he led efforts to change the IEEE Regional Activities board to the IEEE Member and Geog … | Continue reading
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. RoboCup German Open: 12–16 March 20 … | Continue reading
Most people know that robots no longer sound like tinny trash cans. They sound like Siri, Alexa, and Gemini. They sound like the voices in labyrinthine customer support phone trees. And even those robot voices are being made obsolete by new AI-generated voices that can mimic ever … | Continue reading
Physical media fans need not panic yet—you’ll still be able to buy new Blu-Ray movies for your collection. But for those who like to save copies of their own data onto the discs, the remaining options just became more limited: Sony announced last week that it’s ending all product … | Continue reading
This sponsored article is brought to you by NYU Tandon School of Engineering. As the world grapples with the urgent need to transition to cleaner energy systems, a growing number of researchers are delving into the design and optimization of emerging technologies. At the forefron … | Continue reading
Wireless technology, such as cellphones, fitness trackers, and medical devices, has become ubiquitous. Before a wireless device is manufactured and sold, its technology is tested by compliance engineering laboratories to ensure it adheres to technical standards established by org … | Continue reading
Like many nerds, I have an interest in cryptography rooted in the wartime exploits of codebreaker and Ur-computer scientist Alan Turing. So I’ve followed with interest IEEE Spectrum’s reporting on the burgeoning field of postquantum cryptography. These techniques are designed to … | Continue reading
It says something about your career at a company that makes hundreds of trillions of transistors every day when your nickname is “Mr. Transistor.” That’s what colleagues often call Tahir Ghani, a senior fellow and the director of process pathfinding in Intel’s technology developm … | Continue reading
I first became aware of the looming transformer crisis in 2022, when IEEE Spectrum contributing editor Robert N. Charette was reporting on the infrastructure improvements required to make the transition to electrical vehicles possible. Modern power grids can’t run without transfo … | Continue reading
Engineers are great at solving problems that arise when creating new products. But deciding what new products to build is often just as big a challenge. That decision-making process is a task software engineer Johnny Ray Austin has found himself increasingly drawn to as his caree … | Continue reading
Arthur Winston, 2004 IEEE president, died on 27 December at the age of 94. Winston was an electrical engineering professor at two Boston-area universities: Northeastern and Tufts. He cofounded the latter’s Gordon Institute, a leadership-focused engineering school. Among the stude … | Continue reading
In a news conference on Tuesday, President Trump announced the Stargate Project, which he called “the largest AI infrastructure project, by far, in history.” With the CEOs of OpenAI, Oracle, and Softbank at his side, Trump said that these companies and other private sector partne … | Continue reading
Inavamsi Enaganti has long been a dreamer. He keeps ever-evolving lists of life goals, ticking them off as he achieves them, then adding more. One childhood dream has burned particularly brightly in his mind: Create a science-focused amusement park. Enaganti is now working on a v … | Continue reading
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. RoboCup German Open: 12–16 March 20 … | Continue reading
In the race to develop autonomous vehicle technology, some companies are steering away from robotaxis to explore a different avenue: driverless buses. With an anticipated shortage of qualified bus drivers looming and concerns growing about the relative inefficiency of robotaxis, … | Continue reading
Each January for more than a decade, the editors of IEEE Spectrum have delivered an issue that tries to predict the future. Specifically, we bring you a selection of important technology projects that we think will reach a significant milestone in the coming year. Sometimes we ge … | Continue reading
When AI researchers talk about the risks of advanced AI, they’re typically either talking about immediate risks, like algorithmic bias and misinformation, or existential risks, as in the danger that superintelligent AI will rise up and end the human species. Philosopher Jonathan … | Continue reading
For the second year in a row, top tech leaders selected artificial intelligence as the most important current technology. IEEE surveyed 350 CIOs, CTOs, IT directors, and other global technology leaders for its now-annual report, “The Impact of Technology in 2025 and Beyond: An IE … | Continue reading
Fiber-optic cables are creeping closer to processors in high-performance computers, replacing copper connections with glass. Technology companies hope to speed up AI and lower its energy cost by moving optical connections from outside the server onto the motherboard and then havi … | Continue reading
At the SC24 supercomputing conference held in November in Atlanta, Hafþór Júlíus Björnsson (the actor who played The Mountain in Game of Thrones), deadlifted a custom barbell weighed down by 453 kilograms (1000 pounds) of solid state drives. The data stored in those drives totale … | Continue reading
This sponsored article is brought to you by NYU Tandon School of Engineering. In a significant advancement for the field of drug delivery, researchers have developed a new technique that addresses a persistent challenge: scalable manufacturing of nanoparticles and microparticles. … | Continue reading
In the early 1970s, the Cold War had reached a particularly frigid moment, and U.S. military and intelligence officials had a problem. The Soviet Navy was becoming a global maritime threat—and the United States did not have a global ocean-surveillance capability. Adding to the al … | Continue reading
Shoppers probably don’t realize how large a role data science plays in retail. The discipline provides information about consumer habits to help predict demand for products. It’s also used to set prices, determine the number of items to be manufactured, and figure out more effici … | Continue reading
During the past 13 years, the IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) has awarded US $4.6 million in scholarships to undergraduate students in North America studying power engineering as part of its Scholarship Plus Initiative. PES has increased the scholarship amount this year to $10, … | Continue reading
During the past 13 years, the IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) has awarded US $4.6 million in scholarships to undergraduate students in North America studying power engineering as part of its Scholarship Plus Initiative. PES has increased the scholarship amount this year to $10, … | Continue reading
In the early 1990s, Toyota saw that environmental awareness and tighter emissions regulations would shape the future of the automotive industry. The company aimed to create an eco-friendly, efficient vehicle that would meet future standards. In 1997 Toyota introduced the Prius to … | Continue reading
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. RoboCup German Open: 12–16 March 20 … | Continue reading
We live in a world filled with computer viruses, and antivirus software is almost as old as the Internet itself: The first version of what would become McAfee antivirus came out in 1987—just four years after the Internet booted up. For many of us, antivirus software is an annoyan … | Continue reading
In 1942, the legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov introduced his Three Laws of Robotics in his short story “Runaround.” The laws were later popularized in his seminal story collection I, Robot. First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a … | Continue reading
This article is part of our exclusive career advice series in partnership with the IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society. When thinking about influencers, you might initially consider people with a large social media following who have the power to affect people with … | Continue reading
Humans make mistakes all the time. All of us do, every day, in tasks both new and routine. Some of our mistakes are minor and some are catastrophic. Mistakes can break trust with our friends, lose the confidence of our bosses, and sometimes be the difference between life and deat … | Continue reading
Analysts predict that demand for engineers will skyrocket during the next decade, and that the supply will fall substantially short. A Comptia report about the tech workforce estimates that there will be an additional 7.1 million tech jobs in the United States by 2034. Yet nearly … | Continue reading
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion. RoboCup German Open: 12–16 March 20 … | Continue reading
Back in the day, the defining characteristic of home-cleaning robots was that they’d randomly bounce around your floor as part of their cleaning process, because the technology required to localize and map an area hadn’t yet trickled down to the consumer space. That all changed i … | Continue reading
The IEEE Board of Directors has nominated IEEE Senior Members Jill I. Gostin and David Alan Koehler as candidates for 2026 IEEE president-elect. IEEE Life Fellow Manfred “Fred” J. Schindler is seeking to be a petition candidate. The winner of this year’s election will serve as IE … | Continue reading
Land mines have been around in one form or another for more than a thousand years. By now, you’d think a simple and safe way of locating and removing the devices would’ve been engineered. But that’s not the case. In fact, up until World War II, the most common method for finding … | Continue reading
Over the last year, Spectrum’s editors have noticed an emerging through line connecting several major stories: the centrality of technology to geopolitics. Last month, our cover story, done in partnership with Foreign Policy magazine, was on the future of submarine warfare. And l … | Continue reading
Automakers got one thing right: Electrified cars are the future. What they got wrong was assuming that all of those vehicles would run on battery power alone, with gasoline-electric hybrid technology bound for the technological scrap heap. Now the automaking giants are scrambling … | Continue reading
Aside from having four wheels, it’s hard to see what a US $30,000 Toyota Camry has in common with a $3 million Ferrari F80. But these market bookends are examples of an under-the-radar tech revolution. From budget transportation to hypercars, every category of internal-combustion … | Continue reading
Earlier this year, we reviewed the SwitchBot S10, a vacuuming and wet mopping robot that uses a water-integrated docking system to autonomously manage both clean and dirty water for you. It’s a pretty clever solution, and we appreciated that SwitchBot was willing to try something … | Continue reading