Jack Dongarra’s dream job growing up was to teach science at a public high school in Chicago. “I was pretty good in math and science, but I wasn’t a particularly good student,” Dongarra says, laughing. After he graduated high school, there was only one university he wanted to attend: Chicago State. That’s because, he says, […]
More than 150 public libraries throughout the central United States now lend out activity kits that let children explore just about any aspect of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The kids can check them out just like they would a book. The kits teach youngsters what engineers do, as well as how to code, build […]
According to the best measures we’ve got, a set of benchmarks called MLPerf, machine-learning systems can be trained nearly twice as quickly as they could last year. It’s a figure that outstrips Moore’s Law, but also one we’ve come to expect. Most of the gain is thanks to software and systems innovations, but this year […]
Many IEEE members credit a parent or a teacher for encouraging them to pursue an engineering career, but for Erol Gelenbe it was his next-door neighbor in his hometown of Ankara, Turkey. Egbert Adriaan Kreiken, a professor of astronomy at Ankara University, convinced the teenager that electronics engineering was going to be the “next big […]
It can often seem like an inevitability that humans will completely and utterly fail to keep our carbon emissions in check over the next decade, which is the most important step we can take to minimize the potentially disastrous impacts of climate change. As Gill Pratt wrote in a recent article he authored on Medium, […]
Recent reductions in loss of hollow-core fibers make them attractive for communication applications. Now a hollow-core fiber described in Nature Photonics on 30 May can transport a kilowatt of laser power up to a kilometer away. The development marks a big step for precision machining that requires high-power laser beams. Standard optical fibers—whether they’re being […]
Fires at recycling sorting facilities, ignited by combustible materials in the waste stream, can cause millions of dollars in damage, injuring workers and first responders and contaminating the air. Detecting the blazes early is key to preventing them from getting out of control. Startup MoviTHERM aims to do that. The company sells cloud-based fire-detection monitoring […]
Mayo Clinic researchers have developed an artificial-intelligence algorithm that can detect weak heart-pump functioning from a single-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) on the Apple Watch. Early results indicate that the ECG is as accurate as a medically ordered treadmill stress test but could be performed anywhere, the researchers say. The single-lead AI algorithm was adapted from an […]
The Big Picture features technology through the lens of photographers. Every month, IEEE Spectrum selects the most stunning technology images recently captured by photographers around the world. We choose images that reflect an important advance, or a trend, or that are just mesmerizing to look at. We feature all images on our site, and one […]
For many of us, the Internet is part of daily life. But that’s not the case for more than 3.5 billion people around the world who don’t have meaningful access to it, according to a Brookings Institution report, “Bridging the Global Digital Divide.” There are many reasons for the divide, including affordability, the lack of […]