Eileen Tanghal, cofounder of the venture capital firm Black Opal Ventures, didn’t set out to be a venture capitalist. The electrical engineer left her job at a semiconductor startup to pursue an MBA so she could better understand the business side of technology. During a summer break, she was chosen for an internship with a […]
When your job involves working on sensitive information, products and projects, how do you talk about it, not just at work, but also at conferences, when mentoring or recruiting, or at dinner and social events? “When information about what you are doing is privileged—classified—you can’t talk about it,” says Dennisa Thomas, senior surety systems engineer […]
With a rattle not unlike the sound of coffee beans being dumped into a grinder, Nate Saal pours a scoop of cocoa nibs into the top of the latest version of his chocolate making appliance. It takes up less than a square foot on the countertop, and fits easily under most cabinets. It wasn’t easy […]
Where are the AI jobs in the U.S.? The largest share, of course, is in the IT industry, with professional, scientific, and tech services coming in second place. But coming on strong are fields in which you might not expect to see large number of AI and machine learning professionals—agriculture, forestry, fishing, and hunting, according […]
The United States Congress is considering new legislation that could change the structure of the National Science Foundation (NSF), the agency responsible for funding much of the U.S.’s research. This could cause a major shift in how NSF allocates its research funding—and it’s a shift that could impact tech research. One chamber of Congress, the Senate, is currently […]
Engineers often find themselves in the role of turning ideas that used to be science fiction into reality. So it’s natural that some of them turn the flow of ideas in the other direction, and become authors of science fiction. One such engineer-turned-writer is Divya Srinivasan Breed, who writes her science fiction as S.B. Divya, […]
Sphero has just announced a new educational robot called indi, a not-at-all-spherical little four-wheel car-thing with a cute face, what appears to be a spoiler of questionable aerodynamic value, and a color sensor underneath. The infuriatingly noncapitalized indi can be programmed using tiles of different colors that call different functions that the robot executes as […]
The Computer History Museum has created a new award: the Patrick J. McGovern Tech for Humanity Luminary. And in April it named the first wininer—Sal Khan, whose founding of the free online Khan Academy kicked off a revolution in online education. Khan founded his namesake nonprofit in 2008; to date, the free online courses have reached 120 million […]
It’s still more lucrative to be a top manager of tech professionals than working directly in a tech field. But the gap is closing fast. According to the Dice 2021 Tech Salary Report, the average salaries of tech CEOs, CIOs, CTOs, and the like fell 1.7 percent between 2019 to $143,416,and 2020, while the next […]
Security technologist Bruce Schneier has a warning ““What you code affects the world now. Gone are the days when programmers could ignore the social context of what they code, when we could say, ‘The users will just figure it all out.’ Today, programs, apps, and algorithms affect society. Facebook’s choices influence democracy. How driverless cars […]