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
Since ChatGPT dropped in the fall of 2022, everyone and their donkey has tried their hand at prompt engineering—finding a clever way to phrase your query to a large-language model (LLM) or AI art or video generator to get the best results or side-step protections. The internet is … | Continue reading
Stephen Cass: Hi. I’m Stephen Cass, a senior editor at IEEE Spectrum. And welcome to Fixing The Future, our bi-weekly podcast that focuses on concrete solutions to hard problems. Before we start, I want to tell you that you can get the latest coverage from some of Spectrum‘s most … | Continue reading
You’ve seen this before: a truck-unloading robot that’s made up of a mobile base with an arm on it that drives up into the back of a trailer and then uses suction to grab stacked boxes and put them onto a conveyor belt. We’ve written about a couple of the companies doing this, an … | Continue reading
You’ve seen this before: a truck unloading robot that’s made up of a mobile base with an arm on it that drives up into the back of a trailer and then uses suction to grab stacked boxes and put them onto a conveyor belt. We’ve written about a couple of the companies doing this, an … | Continue reading
Many a technologist has been inspired by science fiction. Some have even built, or rebuilt, entire companies around an idea introduced in a story they read, as the founders of Second Life and Meta did, working from the metaverse as imagined by Neal Stephenson in his seminal 1992 … | Continue reading
In the past few months, we’ve seen a deepfake robocall of Joe Biden encouraging New Hampshire voters to “save your vote for the November election” and a fake endorsement of Donald Trump from Taylor Swift. It’s clear that 2024 will mark the first “AI election” in United States his … | Continue reading
Every time you use your voice to generate a message on a Samsung Galaxy mobile phone or activate a Google Home device, you’re using tools Chanwoo Kim helped develop. The former executive vice president of Samsung Research’s Global AI Centers specializes in end-to-end speech recog … | 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
If you ask longtime IEEE members why they have remained a member, you will get many different reasons. For me, IEEE is a community of technological professionals who help each other stay current, develop valuable professional skills, and work together to make the world a better p … | Continue reading
Diversity of thought in industrial design is crucial: If no one thinks to design a technology for multiple body types, people can get hurt. The invention of seatbelts is an oft-cited example of this phenomenon, as they were designed based on crash dummies that had traditionally m … | Continue reading
On 23 October 1916, an engineer named Henry E. Warren quietly revolutionized power transmission by installing an electric clock in the L Street generating station of Boston’s Edison Electric Illuminating Co. This master station clock kept a very particular type of time: It used a … | Continue reading
Today, Figure is announcing an astonishing US $675 million Series B raise, which values the company at an even more astonishing $2.6 billion. Figure is one of the companies working towards a multi or general purpose (depending on who you ask) bipedal or humanoid (depending on who … | Continue reading
Sometimes extreme procrastination works in your favor. Procrastination certainly played a role in this month’s Hands On, which was 20 years in the making. So, too, did family, and place, and what meaning might be found in bringing silent circuits to life. This then is a story tha … | Continue reading
Last week at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), researchers introduced several technologies to fight even the sneakiest hack attacks. Engineers invented a way to detect a hacker placing a probe on the circuit board to attempt to read digital traffic in a c … | Continue reading
Diesel cars are a popular choice for those looking to buy a used vehicle in Asia, Europe, and elsewhere. After all, diesel cars cost less to maintain, burn less fuel, and have a longer engine life. Although the pollutant emissions of a diesel engine are less than those of a gasol … | Continue reading
Wireless spectrum is always at a premium—if you’ve ever tried to connect to Wi-Fi in a crowded airport or stadium, you know the pain that comes from crowded spectrum use. That’s why the industry continues to tinker with ways to get the most out of available spectrum. The latest e … | Continue reading
Twenty homes scattered across Canada and the northern United States are keeping warm this winter using prototypes of the latest iteration in residential heating systems: cold climate heat pumps. Heat pumps aren’t common in homes at this latitude, because historically they haven’t … | Continue reading
CMOS, the silicon logic technology behind decades and decades of smaller transistors and faster computers, is entering a new phase. CMOS uses two types of transistors in pairs to limit a circuit’s power consumption. In this new phase, “CMOS 2.0,” that part’s not going to change, … | Continue reading
Working in an ice cream factory is a dream for anyone who enjoys the frozen dessert. For control systems engineer Patryk Borkowski, a job at the biggest ice cream company in the world is also a great way to put his automation expertise to use. Patryk Borkowski Employer: Unilever … | Continue reading
Computers have grown more and more powerful over the decades by pushing the limits of how small their electronics can get. But just how big can a computer get? Could we turn a planet into a computer, and if so, what would we do with it? In considering such questions, we go beyond … | 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
Jung Uck Seo, who served as 2003–2004 IEEE Region 10 director, died on 11 January at the age of 70. While working at Korea Telecom, the IEEE Life Fellow led the development of the TDX-1 digital telephone switching system. Later he worked to commercialize the code division multipl … | Continue reading
The United States is not building enough transmission lines to connect regional power networks. The deficit is driving up electricity prices, reducing grid reliability, and hobbling renewable energy deployment. At the heart of the problem are utility companies that refuse to purs … | Continue reading
Dina Genkina: Hi. I’m Dina Genkina for IEEE Spectrum‘s Fixing the Future. Before we start, I want to tell you that you can get the latest coverage from some of Spectrum’s most important beeps, including AI, Change, and Robotics, by signing up for one of our free newsletters. Just … | Continue reading
There are many constraints on the design of augmented reality systems. Not the least of which is that “you have to look presentable when you’re walking around,” Meta research scientist Tony Wu told engineers Tuesday at the IEEE International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC … | Continue reading
In an exclusive interview ahead of an invite-only event today in San Jose, Intel outlined new chip technologies it will offer its foundry customers by sharing a glimpse into its future data-center processors. The advances include more dense logic and a 16-fold increase in the con … | Continue reading
The annual IEEE STEM Summit in October brought together a record number of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics enthusiasts, who shared ideas and inspired each other to continue their work with school-age children.The event for preuniversity educators, IEEE volunteer … | Continue reading
How much thought do you give to where you keep your bits? Every day we produce more data, including emails, texts, photos, and social media posts. Though much of this content is forgettable, every day we implicitly decide not to get rid of that data. We keep it somewhere, be it i … | 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. Cybathlon Challenges: 02 February 2 … | Continue reading
Many college students participate in sports, listen to music, or play video games in their spare time, but IEEE Student Member Gerard Piccini prefers amateur radio, also known as ham radio. He’s been involved with the two-way radio communication, which uses designated frequencies … | Continue reading