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Nearly 750 million people face hunger today, according to the U.N. World Food Program. And by 2050, global demand for food is expected to increase by 50 percent from 2010 levels, the World Resources Institute says.A smart agriculture special-issue report recently released by the IEEE Smart Agri-Food Initiative says meeting the demand will require technology to e

A half century ago, a scrappy crew at the University of Massachusetts Amherst erected a wind turbine on Orchard Hill, the highest point on campus. It was a frugal production, cobbled together from the rear axle of a Ford truck, a donated generator and microcontroller, a steam pipe, and various handcrafted steel and fiberglass parts, including its 4.5-meter blades.The team of UMass engineering grad students, faculty advisors, and one precocious undergrad built it to prove that wind energy could keep rural homes toasty in New England’s frigid winters, as a way of trimming U.S. oil dependence—a natio

Yen-Ling Kuo always wanted to understand how things worked. When she was growing up in Taiwan, reading the story of Michael Faraday in elementary school piqued her curiosity about the natural world. During that time, she was introduced to Logo, a computer program with a turtle cursor to help children learn basic coding through hands-on experimentation.It was Kuo’s introduction to programming logic.Yen-Ling KuoEmployerUniversity of V

“Space computing, the final frontier, has arrived,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang declared at the Nvidia GTC conference in March.Indeed, the idea of data centers in orbit has gone from science fiction to a serious spending category. Elon Musk’s SpaceX has acquired xAI (also Musk’s) and is

An examination of how socially assistive wellness robots could support the seven dimensions of senior wellness, and how a framework can measure their autonomy.What Attendees will LearnWhy the senior care crisis exceeds incremental automation. Demographic pressure, workforce shortages, and a daily wellness-programming gap all strain traditional care models.What defines a wellness robot as a category. The seven ICAA wellness dimensions and eight properties separate these robots from companion and medical devices.How autonomy can be measured with CRAS. This six-level scale, modeled on the SAEJ3016 driving standard, evaluates four care dimensions.What maps the road to full autonomy. The paper examines technical capab

The EPICS (Engineering Projects in Community Service) in IEEE program, administered by IEEE Educational Activities, has launched the Excellent EPICS in IEEE Contributor Awards. The recognitions honor the program’s outstanding students and faculty volunteers in Excellent Team Leader and Excellent Faculty Advisor categories.The awards recognize individuals whose leadership, mentorship, and commitment have meaningfully advanced the impact of

A man raises his phone as police move into a crowd. The video is shaky, loud, immediate. Within minutes, it is online. Within hours, it is everywhere. This is how accountability works now. Something happens, someone records it, and that footage can show what really happened, sometimes contradicting official accounts. It can empower citizens and create consequences for officials.But the footage’s life cycle does not end there.In recent months, civil liberties groups have warned that adding facial recognition to consumer smart glasses

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!Small Startup, Mid-Size Company, or Fortune 100? The Pros and ConsEarly in my career, I walked into a shared office space on my first day as a full stack software developer and sat down between the CTO and the CEO to get onboarded. There were four of us in total. Befo

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!Job Hopping as an Engineer: The Pros and ConsI’ve changed jobs more times than I ever imagined I would. In the past 12 years, I’ve worked at seven different organizations. Some of those moves were forced by layoffs. Others were deliberate bets on my own trajectory

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!The CS Degree Isn’t Dead. The Entry-Level Pipeline IsThere is no shortage of people telling recent engineering graduates that their degree was a mistake and that AI is coming for their jobs before they even land one. I respectfully disagree.I have be