IEEE Spectrum

I’m sitting in a Rivian R1S SUV as it drives itself down the leafy streets of Palo Alto, Calif. , through areas crowded with touchstones of tech history. At one point I pass the landmark HP Garage , the one-car workshop where Hewlett-Packard, and, arguably, Silicon Valley, was founded in 1939. I skirt Stanford University, where a team led by computer science professor Sebastian Thrun won a US $2 …

Plenty of people remain spooked by autonomous vehicles, or AVs. Some experts and policymakers have cautioned that AVs won’t necessarily make roads safer. When it comes to partial or full autonomy, the picture isn’t entirely clear, in part because there aren’t enough self-driving cars to make meaningful apples-to-apples comparisons. Yet mounting research suggests that self-driving cars crash signi…

Many researchers and students in Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda struggle to access and publish scientific and technical articles because of financial barriers including publishing fees and subscriptions to research libraries. To help, IEEE has made its Xplore Digital Library more accessible by offering discounts on subscriptions and lowering fees to publish articles. But the number of papers published…

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 optics, and pneumatic hoses supplying them endure severe mechanical stress. Torsional twist, rapid acceleration, and…

This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum ’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written i n partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! Asking someone to be your mentor is weird. Walking up to someone and asking, “Will you be my mentor?” has always seemed to me like the adult version…

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—is becoming an increasingly powerful differentiator. It is more than a statement of principle; it is a strategic advan…

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 Princeton Central Jersey Section activities. She got involved with the PCJS because of her mother, IEEE Senior Member Shubh…

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 Princeton Central Jersey Section activities. She got involved with the PCJS because of her mother, IEEE Senior Member Shubh…

One day in 1982, Joseph “Rod” Canion and two colleagues from Texas Instruments sat down at the House of Pies in Houston and used a napkin to sketch out what would become Compaq’s portable PC. In 1996, Felix Zandman, founder of Vishay Intertechnology, dined at Husker Steak House in Columbus, Neb., grabbed a napkin and drafted a design for a power metal strip resistor, which became crucial to power…

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 replicating their swaying in the wind for others to enjoy. At the time, he didn’t have the tools or the knowledge to create…

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 resolution of 4,096 by 20 pixels. Yup, that’s 4K by 20. The 3D-printed drum [top] is spun by a motor controlled by a driver boar…

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 research papers. A keynote address and thematic presentation sessions are planned as well. Student attendees can network wi…

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 the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 through the Vietnam War and on past the 1975 Helsinki Accords . The machine…

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 of the regular member. I assumed senior membership was reserved for people further along in their career than I was. …

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 technical skills they should learn. So amidst the uncertainty, advice for young professionals often turns to a common re…

About this Webinar Turn Yield Excursions into Faster, More Confident Root Cause Analysis When a yield issue emerges, the answer rarely lives in a single system. Critical clues are spread across metrology data, tool traces, chemical analysis, and facilities systems, while growing data volumes make traditional dashboards slow, fragmented, and difficult to act on. What You’ll Learn: Discover how a p…

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 could be the organization’s next big success. The idea clearly falls outside your department’s responsibilities, however, …

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 disabilities restore movement, translate thoughts, and navigate rough terrain had their work showcased at Regeneron’s Inte…

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 code, and testing the software. At the time, we were hoping for a 25 percent productivity boost from AI use over the c…

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 IEEE Life Fellow taught electrical engineering at Princeton for more than 50 years. From 1994 to 1997, he chaired th…