The stretchable battery is gaining momentum in the electronics industry, where it might one day serve as an energy storage medium in fitness trackers, wearable electronics, and even smart clothing. Researchers believe the concept will become more valuable in the next decade, as e … | Continue reading
The IEEE Jamaica Section is acting as a catalyst to engage and inspire the island nation’s next generation of engineering and technology professionals. The section held a first-of-its-kind workshop in January at the University of Technology in Kingston. The event attracted more t … | Continue reading
Stephen Cass: Hello and welcome to Fixing the Future, an IEEE Spectrum podcast where we look at concrete solutions to tough problems. I’m your host, Stephen Cass, a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. And before we start, I just want to tell you that you can get the latest coverage f … | Continue reading
A version of this post originally appeared on Tedium, Ernie Smith’s newsletter, which hunts for the end of the long tail. If you ask the average person what the company 3M does, odds are if they have a few gray hairs hanging out on their scalp, they might say that the company mak … | Continue reading
When we think about robotic manipulation, the default is usually to think about grippers—about robots using manipulators (like fingers or other end effectors) to interact with objects. For most humans, though, interacting with objects can be a lot more complicated, and we use wha … | Continue reading
Ours is a data-centric world. Many modern inventions and occupations rely on data. Artificial intelligence feasts on it. Machine learning identifies patterns within it. Internet of Things devices generate and transmit it. Genomics, bioinformatics, climate science, telecommunicati … | Continue reading
To call L. Ron Hubbard a prolific writer is an extreme understatement. From 1934 to 1940, he regularly penned 70,000 to 100,000 words per month of pulp fiction under 15 different pseudonyms published in various magazines. Not to be constrained by genre, he wrote zombie mysteries, … | 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: 17–21 April 20 … | Continue reading
The upper 10 kilometers of the Earth’s crust contains vast geothermal reserves, essentially awaiting human energy consumption to begin to tap into its unstinting power output—which itself yields no greenhouse gasses. And yet, geothermal sources currently produce only three-tenths … | Continue reading
At NVIDIA GTC last week, Boston Dynamics CTO Aaron Saunders gave a talk about deploying AI in real world robots—namely, how Spot is leveraging reinforcement learning to get better at locomotion (We spoke with Saunders last year about robots falling over). And Spot has gotten a lo … | Continue reading
Apple’s Vision Pro headset might just be the breakthrough product that the augmented-reality industry has been waiting for to catalyze the widespread adoption of AR technology, according to the IEEE’s AR Alliance. The new alliance’s goal is to foster and encourage the development … | Continue reading
To gain a better understanding of the brain, why not draw inspiration from it? At least, that’s what researchers at Brown University did, by building a wireless communications system that mimics the brain using an array of tiny silicon sensors, each the size of a grain of sand. T … | Continue reading
In 1997 the IBM Deep Blue supercomputer defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov. It was a groundbreaking demonstration of supercomputer technology and a first glimpse into how high-performance computing might one day overtake human-level intelligence. In the 10 years that fo … | Continue reading
All right, confession time. I don’t use my handheld ham radio for much more than eavesdropping on the subway dispatcher when my train rumbles to a mysterious halt in a dark tunnel. But even I couldn’t help but hear the buzz surrounding a new handheld, Quansheng’s UV-K5. It caught … | Continue reading
Times change, and so must benchmarks. Now that we’re firmly in the age of massive generative AI, it’s time to add two such behemoths, Llama 2 70B and Stable Diffusion XL, to MLPerf’s inferencing tests. Version 4.0 of the benchmark tests more than 8,500 results from 23 submitting … | Continue reading
Engineers are used to being experts in their field, but when Zach Rattner cofounded his artificial-intelligence startup, Yembo, he quickly realized he needed to get comfortable with being out of his depth. He found the transition from employee to business owner to be a steep lear … | Continue reading
In our last article, A How-To Guide on Acquiring AI Systems, we explained why the IEEE P3119 Standard for the Procurement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Automated Decision Systems (ADS) is needed. In this article, we give further details about the draft standard and the use … | Continue reading
As EV production and, with it, battery production accelerate over the next decade, so too will the demand for rigorous EV battery testing. But producing a battery that will stand up to the task of powering an electric vehicle for years under different weather conditions and unpre … | Continue reading
Starting a new engineering program at a university is no simple task. But that’s just what Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., is doing. By 2026, the university will offer an undergraduate engineering degree—but without creating an engineering department. Instead, Brandeis aim … | Continue reading
In the early 1980s, offices were noisy places, filled with the sound of metal striking inked ribbons to mark characters on paper. IBM Selectric typewriters clacked, daisy wheel printers clattered, and dot-matrix printers made loud ripping sounds. Today, those noises are gone. And … | Continue reading
This sponsored article is brought to you by Avnet and AMD. The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in image processing has brought about significant advancements in the exploration of space and our own Earth. In space applications, images are captured using various instruments, s … | Continue reading
Software may be eating the world, but it is also heating it. In December 2023, representatives from nearly 200 countries gathered in Dubai for COP28, the U.N.’s climate-change conference, to discuss the urgent need to lower emissions. Meanwhile, COP28’s website produced 3.69 gram … | 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. Eurobot Open 2024: 8–11 May 2024, L … | Continue reading
Smartphones have a scaling problem. Specifically, the radiofrequency (RF) filters that every phone—and every wireless device in general—uses to extract information from isolated wireless signals are too big, too flat, and too numerous. And without these filters, wireless communic … | Continue reading
Although recent findings have poured cold water on quantum computing hype, don’t count the technology out yet. On 4 March, Google and XPrize announced a US $5 million prize to anyone who comes up with use cases for quantum computers. If that sounds like an admission that use case … | Continue reading
Watching movies and TV series that use digital visual effects to create fantastical worlds lets people escape reality for a few hours. Thanks to advancements in computer-generated technology used to produce films and shows, those worlds are highly realistic. In many cases, it can … | Continue reading
While the Top500 list ranks the 500 biggest high-performance computers (HPCs) in the world, its cousin the Green500 re-ranks the same 500 supercomputers according to their energy efficiency. For the last three iterations of the list, Henri—a small supercomputer operated by the Fl … | Continue reading
China launched a spacecraft today that is planned to be the first act in a complex, multi-step campaign to achieve an unprecedented feat: Collecting samples from the far side of the moon and delivering the precious cargo to Earth. Queqiao-2 (“Magpie Bridge-2”), a communications r … | Continue reading
Stephen Cass: Hello and welcome to Fixing the Future, an IEEE Spectrum podcast where we look at concrete solutions to some big problems. I’m your host Stephen Cass, a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. And before we start, I just want to tell you that you can get the latest coverage … | Continue reading
This year is shaping up to be an active one for new and developing technologies that are expected to impact how engineers work in the areas of data privacy, IoT security, Wi-Fi 6, and more. It’s crucial, therefore, for engineers to stay informed, be proactive, and invest in their … | Continue reading
Nvidia’s ongoing GTC developer conference in San Jose is, unsurprisingly, almost entirely about AI this year. But in between the AI developments, Nvidia has also made a couple of significant robotics announcements. First, there’s Project GR00T (with each letter and number pronoun … | Continue reading
Today at Nvidia’s developer conference, GTC 2024, the company revealed its next GPU, the B200. The B200 is capable of delivering four times the training performance, up to 30 times the inference performance, and up to 25 times better energy efficiency, compared to its predecessor … | Continue reading
A startling change in medical ultrasound is working its way through hospitals and physicians’ offices. The long-standing, state-of-the-art ultrasound machine that’s pushed around on a cart, with cables and multiple probes dangling, is being wheeled aside permanently in favor of h … | Continue reading
The U.S. government recently backed down from enacting tough new measures that would have forced automakers to quadruple their sales of electric vehicles by 2030. Even if Washington hadn’t buckled to outside pressure, the U.S. ambitions for 2030 would not have been exceptional. T … | Continue reading
About a year ago, Zipline introduced Platform 2, an approach to precision urban drone delivery that combines a large hovering drone with a smaller package-delivery “Droid.” Lowered on a tether from the belly of its parent Zip drone, the Droid contains thrusters and sensors (plus … | Continue reading
Legendary MIT roboticist Daniela Rus has published a new book called The Heart and the Chip: Our Bright Future with Robots. “There is a robotics revolution underway,” Rus says in the book’s introduction, “one that is already causing massive changes in our society and in our lives … | Continue reading
In February, OpenAI announced the arrival of Sora, a stunning “text-to-video” tool. Simply enter a prompt, and Sora generates a realistic video within seconds. But it wasn’t immediately available to the public. Some of the delay is because OpenAI reportedly has a set of experts c … | Continue reading
Your weekly selection of awesome robot videos 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 … | Continue reading
As the world builds more and more electric cars and trucks—and electrifies other modes of transit—a race is underway to build the ideal, mean-and-green motor. The goal is a traction motor that’s at least as powerful, reliable, and lightweight as today’s industry standard rare-ear … | Continue reading
The FCC has once again rejected a Starlink plan to deploy thousands of internet satellites in very low earth orbits (VLEO) ranging from 340 to 360 kilometers. In an order published last week, the FCC wrote: “SpaceX may not deploy any satellites designed for operational altitudes … | Continue reading
Sunnyvale, Calif., AI supercomputer firm Cerebras says its next generation of waferscale AI chips can do double the performance of the previous generation while consuming the same amount of power. The Wafer Scale Engine 3 (WSE-3) contains 4 trillion transistors, a more than 50 pe … | Continue reading
For 19 months, the sociologist Benjamin Shestakofsky embedded himself in an early-stage tech startup to study its organization and culture. The company went on to become one of Silicon Valley’s “unicorns,” valued at over US $1 billion. This article is adapted from an excerpt of t … | Continue reading
Manga has grown in popularity in recent years among young adults. The Japanese comics and graphic novels dominated last year’s Circana BookScan graphic novels sales charts.The IEEE Women in Engineering group decided to use manga’s popularity with young people as a way to encourag … | Continue reading
When IEEE Spectrum first wrote about Covariant in 2020, it was a new-ish robotics startup looking to apply robotics to warehouse picking at scale through the magic of a single end-to-end neural network. At the time, Covariant was focused on this picking use case, because it repre … | Continue reading
On 1 May the IEEE Board of Directors is scheduled to announce the candidates to be placed on this year’s ballot for the annual election of officers—which begins on 15 August. The ballot includes IEEE president-elect candidates and other officer positions up for election. The Boar … | 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.HRI 2024: 11–15 March 2024, BOULDER, … | Continue reading
With the rapid proliferation of AI systems, public policymakers and industry leaders are calling for clearer guidance on governing the technology. The majority of U.S. IEEE members express that the current regulatory approach to managing artificial intelligence (AI) systems is in … | Continue reading
The government of India has approved a major investment in semiconductor and electronics production that will include the country’s first state-of-the-art semiconductor fab. It announced that three plants—one semiconductor fab and two packaging and test facilities—will break grou … | Continue reading