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Kyle McGinley graduated from high school in 2018 and, like many teenagers, he was unsure what career he wanted to pursue. Recuperating from a sports injury led him to consider becoming a physical therapist for athletes. But he was skilled at repairing cars and fixing things around the house, so he thought about becoming an engineer, like his father.McGinley, who lives in Sellersville, Pa., took some classes at Montgomery County Community College in Blue Bell, while also working. During his years at the college, he took a variety of courses and was drawn to electrical engineering and computing, he sa

Artificial intelligence harbors an enormous energy appetite. Such constant cravings are evident in the hefty carbon footprint of the data centers behind the AI boom and the steady increase over time of carbon emissions from training frontier AI models.No wonder big tech companies are warming up to

Picture a highway with networked autonomous cars driving along it. On a serene, cloudless day, these cars need only exchange thimblefuls of data with one another. Now picture the same stretch in a sudden snow squall: The cars rapidly need to share vast amounts of essential new data about slippery roads, emergency braking, and changing conditions.These two very different scenarios involve vehicle networks with very different computational loads. Eavesdropping on network traffic using a ham radio, you wouldn’t hear much static on the line on a clear, calm day. On the other hand, sudden whiteout conditions on a wintry day would sound like a cacophony of sensor readings and network chatter.Normally this cacophony would mean two si

In late-stage testing of a distributed AI platform, engineers sometimes encounter a perplexing situation: every monitoring dashboard reads “healthy,” yet users report that the system’s decisions are slowly becoming wrong.Engineers are trained to recognize failure in familiar ways: a service crashes, a sensor stops responding, a constraint violation triggers a shutdown. Something breaks, and the system tells you. But a growing class of software failures looks very different. The system keeps running, logs appear normal, and monitoring dashboards stay green. Yet the system’s behavior quietly drifts away from what it was designed to do.This pattern is

While browsing our website a few weeks ago, I stumbled upon “How and When the Memory Chip Shortage Will End” by Senior Editor Samuel K. Moore. His analysis focuses on the current DRAM shortage caused by AI hyperscalers’ ravenous appetite for memory, a major constraint on the speed at which large language models run. Moore provides a clear explanation of the shortage, particularly for high bandwidth memory (HBM).As we and the rest of the tech media have documented, AI is a resource hog. AI electricity consumption could account for up to 12 percent of all U.S. power by 2028.

Building the next generation of robots for successful integration into our homes, offices, and factories is more than just solving the hardware and software problems – we also need to understand how they will be perceived and how they can work effectively with people in those spaces. aspect_ratio

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.ICRA 2026: 1–5 June 2026, VIENNARSS 2026: 13–17 July 2026, SYDNEYSummer School on Multi-Robot Systems: 29 July–4 August 2026, PRAGUEEnjoy today’s videos!

This year marks the 80th anniversary of ENIAC, the first general-purpose digital computer. The computer was built during World War II to speed up ballistics calculations, but its contributions to computing extend well beyond military applications. Two of ENIAC’s key architects—John W. Mauchly, its co-inventor, and Kathleen “Kay” McNulty, one of the six original programmers—married a few years after its completion and raised seven children together. Mauchly and McNulty’s grandchild Naomi Most

Abhishek Appaji has committed his career to bringing lifesaving technology to underresourced communities. The IEEE senior member weaves together artificial intelligence, biomedical engineering, deep learning, and neuroscience to make doctors’ jobs easier and to improve patient outcomes.“The intersection of these fields is where the most impactful breakthroughs in diagnostic precision occur,” says Appaji, an associate professor of medical electronics engineering at the B.M.S. College of Engineering, in Bengaluru, India.Abhishek AppajiEmployer B.M.S

It’s easy to assume that Robert Woo was defined by the accident that took away his ability to walk.Certainly, the day of his accident—14 December 2007—was a turning point. Woo, an architect working on the new Goldman Sachs headquarters in New York City, hadn’t attended his company’s holiday party the night before, and that morning he was the only one in the trailer that served as the construction-site office. He was bent over his laptop when, 30 floors above, a crane’s nylon sling gave way, sending about 6 tonnes of steel plummeting toward the trailer. The roof collapsed, folding Woo in half and smashing his