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When people want a clear-eyed take on the state of artificial intelligence and what it all means, they tend to turn to Melanie Mitchell, a computer scientist and a professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Her 2019 book, Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, helped define the modern conversation about what today’s AI systems can and can’t do.

The world’s first mass-produced ethanol car, the Fiat 147, motored onto Brazilian roads in 1979. The vehicle crowned decades of experimentation in the country with sugar-cane (and later, corn-based and second-generation sugar-cane waste) ethanol as a homegrown fuel. When Chinese automaker BYD introduced a plug-in hybrid designed for Brazil

CADmore Metal has introduced a fresh take on 3D printing metal components to the North American market known as cold metal fusion (CMF). John Carrington, the company’s CEO, claims CMF produces stronger 3D printed metal parts that are cheaper and faster to make. That includes titanium components, which have historically caused trouble for 3D printers.3D printing has used metals included aluminum, powdered steel, and nickel alloys

Daniela Rus has spent her career breaking barriers—scientific, social, and material—in her quest to build machines that amplify rather than replace human capability. She made robotics her life’s work, she says, because she understood it was a way to expand the possibilities of computing while enhancing human capabilities.“I like to think of robotics as a way to give people superpowers,” Rus says. “Machines can help us reach farther, think faster, and live fuller lives.”Daniela RusEmployer MITJob titleProfessor of electrical and computer engineering and computer science; director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligen

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 Taro and delivered to your inbox for free!A word that frequently comes up in career conversations is, unfortunately, “toxic.” The engineers I speak with will tell me that they’re dealing with a toxic manage

Learn how hardware-in-the-loop testing validates protection schemes, renewable integration, and HVDC systems before deployment. Download this introduction to real-time power system simulation.In this white paper, you’ll learn:Why phasor-domain simulation can’t capture transient phenomena in inverter-dominated gridsHow real-time EMT simulation enables closed-loop testing with actual hardwareKey components of a hardware-in-the-loop testbedApplications across renewable energy, HVDC systems, microgrids, and protection schemesReal-world examples from multi-terminal HVDC links to traveling wave protectionHow HIL testing reduces risk, accelerates commissioning, and validates multi-vendor interoperability

When the head of Nokia Bell Labs core research talks about “lessons learned” from 5G, he’s doing something rare in telecom: admitting a flagship technology didn’t quite work out as planned.That candor matters now, too, because Bell Labs core research president Peter Vetter says 6G’s success depends on getting infrastructure right the first time—something 5G didn’t fully do.By 2030, he says, 5G will have exh

Talking to Robert N. Charette can be pretty depressing. Charette, who has been writing about software failures for this magazine for the past 20 years, is a renowned risk analyst and systems expert who over the course of a 50-year career has seen more than his share of delusional thinking among IT professionals, government officials, and corporate executives, before, during, and after massive software failures.In 2005’s “Why Software Fails,” in IEEE Spectrum, a seminal article documenting the causes behind large-scale software failures, Charette noted, “The biggest tragedy is that soft

Innovation, expertise, and efficiency often take center stage in the engineering world. Yet engineering’s impact lies not only in technical advancement but also in its ability to serve the greater good. This foundational principle is behind IEEE’s public imperative initiatives which apply our efforts and expertise to support our mission to advance technology for humanity with a direct benefit to society. Serving society Public imperative activities and initiatives serve society by promoting understanding, impact for humans and our environment, and responsible use of science and technology. These initiatives encompass a wide range of efforts, including STEM outreach,

For the past decade, progress in artificial intelligence has been measured by scale: bigger models, larger datasets, and more compute. That approach delivered astonishing breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs); in just five years, AI has leapt from models like GPT-2, which could hardly mimic coherence, to systems like GPT-5 that can reason and engage in substantive dialogue. And now early prototypes of AI agents that can navigate codebases or browse the web point towards an entirely new fro