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The EPICS (Engineering Projects in Community Service) in IEEE initiative had a record year in 2025, funding 48 projects involving nearly 1,000 students from 17 countries. The IEEE Educational Activities program approved the most projects this year, distributing US $290,000 in funding and engaging more students than ever before in innovative, hands-on engineering systems.The program offers students opportunities to engage in service lea

For years, Gwen Shaffer has been leading Long Beach, Calif. residents on “data walks,” pointing out public Wi-Fi routers, security cameras, smart water meters, and parking kiosks. The goal, according to the professor of journalism and public relations at California State University, Long Beach, was to learn how residents

From the honey in your tea to the blood in your veins, materials all around you have a hidden talent. Some of these substances, when engineered in specific ways, can act as memristors—electrical components that can “remember” past states. Memristors are often used in chips that both perform computations and store data. They are devices that store data as particular levels of resistance. Today, they are constructed as a thin layer of titanium dioxide or similar dielectric material sandwiched between two metal electrodes. Applying enough voltage to the device causes tiny regions in the dielectric layer—where oxygen atoms are missing—to form filaments that bridge the electrodes or otherwise move

Early in Levi Unema’s career as an electrical engineer, he was presented with an unusual opportunity. While working on assembly lines at an automotive parts supplier in 2015, he got a surprise call from his high-school science teacher that set him off on an entirely new path: piloting underwater robots to explore the ocean’s deepest abysses.That call came from Harlan Kredit, a nationally renowned science teacher and board member of a Rhode Island-based nonprofit called the

The percentage of women working in science, technology, engineering, and math fields continues to remain stubbornly low. Women made up 28 percent of the STEM global workforce last year, according to the World Economic Forum.IEEE and many other organizations conduct outreach programs targeting preuniversity girls and college-age women, and studies show that one of the most powerful ways to encourage girls to consider a STEM career is by

Abby Stylianou built an app that asks its users to upload photos of hotel rooms they stay in when they travel. It may seem like a simple act, but the resulting database of hotel room images helps Stylianou and her colleagues assist victims of human trafficking.Traffickers often post photos of their victims in hotel rooms as online advertisements, evidence that can be used to find the victims and prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes. But to use this evidence, analysts must be able to determine where the photos were taken. That’s where TraffickCam

Anatomically, the human eye is like a sophisticated tentacle that reaches out from the brain, with the retina acting as the tentacle’s tip and touching everything the person sees. Evolution worked a wonder with this complex nervous structure.Now, contrast the eye’s anatomy to the engineering of the most widely used machine-vision systems today: a charge-coupled device (CCD) or a CMOS imaging chip, each of which consists of a grid of pixels. The eye is orders of magnitude more efficient than these flat-chipped computer-vision kits. Here’s why: For any scene it observes, a chip’s pixel grid is updated periodically—and in its entirety—over the course of receiving the light from the environ

When you get an MRI scan, the machine exploits a phenomenon called nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). Certain kinds of atomic nuclei—including those of the hydrogen atoms in a water molecule—can be made to oscillate in a magnetic field, and these oscillations can be detected with coils of wire. MRI scanners employ intense magnetic fields that create resonances at tens to hundreds of megahertz. However, another NMR-based instrument involves much lower-frequency oscillations: a proton-precession magn

Several recent studies have shown that artificial-intelligence agents sometimes decide to misbehave, for instance by attempting to blackmail people who plan to replace them. But such behavior often occurs in contrived scenarios. Now, a new study presents PropensityBench, a benchmark that measures an agentic model’s choices to use harmful tools in order to complete assigned tasks. It finds that somewhat realistic pressures (such as looming deadlines) dramatically increase rates of misbehavior.“Th

IEEE celebrated a monumental achievement last month: The organization’s membership reached half a million innovators, engineers, technologists, and scientists worldwide.“This is more than a number; it is a profound testament to the enduring power and relevance of our global community,” says Antonio Luque, vice president of IEEE Member and Geographic Activities. “The 500,000-member milestone is a powerful endorsement of IEEE’s legacy and serves as a critical launchpad for solving the future’s complex ch