IEEE Spectrum

This article is brought to you by Qualcomm Technologies.For many consumers, much of the promise and appeal of AI is personal. Consumers are looking past generic tools and want to know how these technologies will help them in their daily lives. These trends coincide with the advent of new classes of wearable devices that, in addition to being able to leverage powerful frontier models, feature built-in intelligence that understand the context of a user. Where are they? What are they seeing and hea

Modern engineering projects increasingly combine human judgment with machine capability. An engineer can define a problem, then ask an artificial intelligence tool to search relevant research and technical standards, generate design options, test them in simulation, and compare the results. The engineer can then bring the results to specialists who understand the parts AI cannot judge on its own, such as whether a design can be built safely, whether it makes sense in a particular setting, or how

In the cockpit of Beta Technologies’ Alia CX300, pilot Chris Caputo steers onto Runway 33 at Patrick Leahy Burlington International Airport in Vermont. Cleared for takeoff, he releases the brakes and nudges the throttle forward.At the back of the aircraft, the five-blade pusher propeller snaps awake, and the Alia bolts forward. There’s no shriek of a turbofan spooling up, no shudder of a piston engine, and no wait for thrust. Just the low hum of an electric motor and a shove of instant accelerat

This article is brought to you by VicOne.A mobile robot slows for someone in a hallway. A collaborative arm eases its movement as a worker approaches. A humanoid pauses to let a person pass. Each response depends on information about the robot or its surroundings: a distance reading, a position estimate, or a stop signal.But what happens when one of those inputs is wrong, and the robot still responds exactly as designed? The mobile robot reads the hallway as clear while someone is still there. T

Science has a spam problem. And the spam filter is getting clogged up.According to all reports, academic publishing is drowning in what has come to be called AI slop: low-quality, mass-produced content generated with AI. By 2025, an estimated 57 percent of all published academic articles exhibited detectable evidence of large language model (LLM) influence, a massive jump from 12 percent in 2023. What’s more, over 12 percent of Nature Communications reviews were found to be completely AI-generat

IEEE recently released the IEEE Xplore AI Research Suite, built on the full text of millions of peer-reviewed publications in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library. The library offers full-text access to IEEE standards, journals, magazines, conference proceedings, and more.Researchers who use the AI suite to search the digital library receive answers grounded in verified scientific results, ensuring a high level of accuracy and trust.The suite is available as an optional subscription upgrade to all IE

Like many a nerd, I have a certain fascination with locks. This originates in reading the memoir Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman as a teenager, in which Richard Feynman recounts picking locks and cracking combinations while at his day job working on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. I currently have a couple of locksport pick sets and training locks that I purchased at hacker conferences over the years (although I’m still terrible at it), and I delight in the YouTube exploits of folks like

I step into the warm moist airamong the columns of the pines,their net of twigs and rootscomplex as any lines of code.The trees purify and anchor.Their branches balance my restlessness.Their calling is to be present,mine to develop apps. Our tasksverge toward a common logic:living filaments of root, of interface.

Many engineers are more comfortable working behind the scenes developing technology than speaking to consumers about products. But Preethi Ashwath has learned to take center stage, talking about the “hearable” and wearable devices she has had a hand in developing as an analog integrated circuit designer in the consumer electronics division at Analog Devices of Wilmington, Mass.The IEEE member is one of the few women who work in the specialized field, where about 11 percent are female, according

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!If you’re an engineer, you may feel like your skills aren’t commanding the premium they once did. Many engineers have faced layoffs or restructuring. But even for those of us who still have jobs, something corrosive is happening. You may have heard som

When San Antonio–based software engineer Nikhil Jathar first went to Washington, D.C., to advocate for federal support for technology education and research funding, he was in awe of the opportunity. It was spring of 2025, not long after Jathar settled in the United States from India, when he got an invitation to join the annual Congressional Visits Day organized by IEEE-USA.“My first reaction was, ‘Wow, I get to visit Congress,’ ” says Jathar, CTO of AvanSaber, a business software company he co

IEEE Life Fellow Manfred “Fred” J. Schindler has been elected as the 2027 IEEE president-elect. He will begin serving as president on 1 January 2028.Schindler, who was nominated by the IEEE Board of Directors, received 16,421 votes in the election. Senior Member David Alan Koehler received 13,874 votes.Schindler’s Top 3 Goals as President-ElectStrengthen IEEE’s connection with industry by coordinating events across geography, industry, and technology to revitalize professional activities, especi

Ellia Lebleu is a founding member of the WikiProject AI Cleanup, a volunteer effort launched in 2023 to find and remove AI-generated material from Wikipedia that breaks the website’s guidelines. When the cleanup began, AI writing was often betrayed by conspicuous clichés. Today, the project’s volunteers are developing tools to detect subtler forms of machine-generated content and debating AI’s role in the world’s most widely used encyclopedia. When did you realize Wikipedia had a problem with AI

Advancing technology for the benefit of humanity isn’t just the tagline for IEEE’s mission as a public charity. It’s something that the organization’s more than 500,000 members strive to do all the time. IEEE’s recently released 2025 Social Impact Report showcases a variety of programs volunteers worked on to increase public awareness of technology’s impact on society, many of which The Institute covered.Here is a selection of the programs from the report, with links to our related articles: Sha

Agility Robotics, the company I cofounded out of my robotics lab at Oregon State University in 2015, has just launched Digit 5. It’s designed to be the first humanoid robot that can safely and economically do useful work at scale, allowing us to bring tens of thousands of humanoid workers into the real world. Engineered to lift 23-kilogram bins onto high shelves and with a battery that can run for 90 minutes on a 9-minute charge, Digit 5’s goal is to handle heavy warehouse tasks shift after shif

This white paper explains how edge AI and physical AI help cities move beyond passive monitoring. It shows how urban infrastructure can sense, reason, and act on real-time conditions across public safety, mobility, and infrastructure management.What you will learn about: How the shift from smart cities to cognitive cities depends on infrastructure that reasons and acts, rather than infrastructure that only monitors.Why edge AI supports low-latency decisions, keeps sensitive data within city boun

This article was originally published by Canary Media.America’s energy supply crunch is driving a surge of federal and private investment in new electricity generation — from polluting gas turbines to cleaner developments like solar farms and geothermal plants. But gigawatts of power are already available for the taking across the U.S. economy in the form of wasted energy from an unexpected source: motors. Some 50 million electric motors drive the fans, pumps, and compressors found in virtually

More and more city governments are using advanced technologies to improve livability for their residents. Municipalities use data from smartphones and sensors for traffic enforcement, traffic control, and waste management. They also have implemented artificial intelligence and deep learning programs.Dubai, Paris, and Coral Gables, Fla., are among the cities that have invested heavily in programs to become smarter.But along with the conveniences that come with a smart city transition, there have

This article is brought to you by COMSOL.These days, no one blinks an eye at two-day, one-day, and even same-day package deliveries. Despite the plethora of localized fulfillment and distribution centers that have cropped up to meet the demand, delivery trucks still need to make considerably long drives, often over highways. To reduce fuel and maintenance costs as well as carbon emissions, companies are investing in electric trucks for their delivery fleets. While turning to electric trucks is a

One of the singular features of Baotou, an industrial city of 2 million people in Inner Mongolia, is a 10-square-kilometer (4-square-mile) lake that is among the most polluted in the world. The artificial lake, referred to by the name of the dam associated with it, Weikuang Dam (or Baogang Tailings Dam), has for decades collected the effluent from minerals processing for China’s globally dominant iron, steel, and rare-earths industries.Built in the late 1950s, the lake contains a highly toxic st