This article is part of our exclusive career advice series in partnership with the IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society. As you begin your professional career freshly armed with an engineering degree, your initial roles and responsibilities are likely to revolve around the knowledge and competencies you learned at school. If you do well in your job, you’re apt to be promoted, gaining more responsibilities such as managing projects, interacting with other departments, making presentations to management, and meeting with customers. You probably also will gain a general understand ..read more

Connected vehicles offer a range of benefits, such as real-time data sharing, app-to-car connectivity, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), and critical safety features like location tracking, remote parking, and in-vehicle infotainment systems (IVIs). These advancements aim to enhance the overall driving and riding experience. However, it is crucial to acknowledge that equipping vehicles with smart features also exposes them to potential cyberattacks. These attacks can result in customer data leakage or even compromise critical safety functionalities. It’s expected to discover vulnera ..read more

The accelerating buildout of solar farms on Earth is already hitting speed bumps, including public pushback against the large tracts of land required and a ballooning backlog of requests for new transmission lines and grid connections. Energy experts have been warning that electricity is likely to get more expensive and less reliable unless renewable power that waxes and wanes under inconstant sunlight and wind is backed up by generators that can run whenever needed. To space enthusiasts, that raises an obvious question: Why not stick solar power plants where the sun always shines? Space-bas ..read more

Solar panels are built to last 25 years or more in all kinds of weather. Key to this longevity is a tight seal of the photovoltaic materials. Manufacturers achieve the seal by laminating a panel’s silicon cells with polymer sheets between glass panes. But the sticky polymer is hard to separate from the silicon cells at the end of a solar panel’s life, making recycling the materials more difficult. Researchers at the U.S. National Renewable Energy Lab (NREL) in Golden, Colorado say they’ve found a better way to seal solar modules. Using a femtosecond laser, the researchers welded together sol ..read more

Today Dresden, Germany–based startup SpiNNcloud Systems announced that its hybrid supercomputing platform, the SpiNNcloud Platform, is available for sale. The machine combines traditional AI accelerators with neuromorphic computing capabilities, using system-design strategies that draw inspiration from the human brain. Systems for purchase vary in size, but the largest commercially available machine can simulate 10 billion neurons, about one-tenth the number in the human brain. The announcement was made at the ISC High Performance conference in Hamburg, Germany. “We’re basically trying to br ..read more

A quick glance at the news headlines each morning might convey that the world is in crisis. Challenges include climate-change threats to human infrastructure and habitats; cyberwarfare by state and nonstate actors attacking energy sources and health care systems; and the global water crisis, which is compounded by the climate crisis. Perhaps the biggest challenge is the rapid advance of artificial intelligence and what it means for humanity. As people grapple with those and other issues, they typically look to policymakers and business leaders for answers. However, no true solutions can be d ..read more

The emergence of artificial general intelligence (AGI)—systems that can perform any task a human can—could be the most important event in human history, one that radically impacts all aspects of our collective lives. Yet AGI, which could emerge soon, remains an elusive and controversial concept. We lack a clear definition of what it is, we don’t know how we will detect it, and we don’t know how to deal with it if it finally emerges. What we do know, however, is that today’s approaches to studying AGI are not nearly rigorous enough. Within industry, where many of today’s AI breakthroughs are ..read more

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, LA ROCHE-SUR-YON, FRANCE ICRA 2024: 13–17 May 2024, YOKOHAMA, JAPAN RoboCup 2024: 17–22 July 2024, EINDHOVEN, NETHERLANDS Cybathlon 2024: 25–27 October 2024, ZURICH Enjoy today’s videos! In this work, we present LocoMan, a dexterous quadrupedal robot with a novel morphology to perform versatile manipulation in diverse ..read more

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 beats, including AI, climate change, and robotics, by signing up for one of our free newsletters. Just go to spectrum.ieee.org/newsletters to subscribe. And today our guest on the show is Suraj Bramhavar. Recently, Bramhavar left his job as a co-founder and CTO of Sync Computing to start a new chapter. The UK government has just founded the Advanced Research Invention Agency, or ARIA, modeled after the US’s ..read more

In 1912, Oskar von Miller, an electrical engineer and founder of the Deutsches Museum, had an idea: Could you project an artificial starry sky onto a dome, as a way of demonstrating astronomical principles to the public? It was such a novel concept that when von Miller approached the Carl Zeiss company in Jena, Germany, to manufacture such a projector, they initially rebuffed him. Eventually, they agreed, and under the guidance of lead engineer Walther Bauersfeld, Zeiss created something amazing. The use of models to show the movements of the planets and stars goes back centuries, starting w ..read more