Rahul Rao | Engineering Recruiting

January 28, 2022

How the Hall Effect Still Reverberates

by Rahul Rao in Engineering, Engineering News

Of the many physicists who didn’t win a Nobel Prize, Edwin Herbert Hall is among a select group for whom the failure seems a particular injustice. On 28 October 1879, the 23-year-old Hall made a discovery that still reverberates today (and which would eventually lead to Nobel Prizes for four other people). Working in a […]

September 24, 2021

Will Fukushima’s Water Dump Set a Risky Precedent?

by Rahul Rao in Engineering, Engineering News

Since the Japanese earthquake and tsunami in March 2011, groundwater has been trickling through the damaged facilities at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, filtering through the melted cores and fuel rods and becoming irradiated with a whole medley of radioisotopes. Japanese authorities have been pumping that water into a vast array of tanks on-site: […]

September 24, 2021

Deep Learning’s Diminishing Returns

by Rahul Rao in Engineering, Engineering News

Deep learning is now being used to translate between languages, predict how proteins fold, analyze medical scans, and play games as complex as Go, to name just a few applications of a technique that is now becoming pervasive. Success in those and other realms has brought this machine-learning technique from obscurity in the early 2000s […]

September 24, 2021

AMD’s Lisa Su Breaks Through the Silicon Ceiling

by Rahul Rao in Engineering, Engineering News

When Lisa Su became CEO of Advanced Micro Devices in 2014, the company was on the brink of bankruptcy. Since then, AMD’s stock has soared—from less than US $2 per share to more than $110. The company is now a leader in high-performance computing. Su received accolades for spearheading AMD’s turnaround, appearing on the Barron’s […]

September 24, 2021

Video Friday: DARPA Subterranean Challenge Final

by Rahul Rao in Engineering, Engineering News

This week we have a special DARPA SubT edition of Video Friday, both because the SubT Final is happening this week and is amazing, and also because (if I’m being honest) the SubT Final is happening this week and is amazing and I’ve spent all week covering it mostly in a cave with zero access […]

September 24, 2021

Benchmark Shows AIs Are Getting Speedier

by Rahul Rao in Engineering, Engineering News

This week, AI industry group MLCommons released a new set of results for AI performance. The new list, MLPerf Version 1.1, follows the first official set of benchmarks by five months and includes more than 1800 results from 20 organizations, with 350 measurements of energy efficiency. The majority of systems improved by between 5-30 percent […]

August 26, 2021

80×30: U.S. Clean Energy Standard Accelerates Transition to Renewables

by Rahul Rao in Engineering, Engineering News

Joe Biden may have called for 100% clean power in the United States by 2035, but he didn’t set a clear path to get there. Now, there’s a tantalizing trailhead. Outlined in Democrats’ proposed budget is a national “clean energy standard.” This clean energy standard, or CES, would set up a tangible program that pushes […]

August 26, 2021

Nauka's Troubled Flight—Before It Tumbled the ISS

by Rahul Rao in Engineering, Engineering News

This is a guest post. The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not represent positions of IEEE Spectrum or the IEEE. Any hopes that the space agencies in Houston and Moscow had for tamping down public concerns over the International Space Station’s recent tumble in orbit were lost last week […]

August 26, 2021

Next-Gen Chips Will Be Powered From Below

by Rahul Rao in Engineering, Engineering News

For a time, each new processor churned out more waste heat than the last. Had these chips kept on the trajectory they were following in the early 2000s, they would soon have packed about 6,400 watts onto each square centimeter—the power flux on the surface of the sun. Things never got that bad because engineers […]

July 19, 2021

Tomorrow's Hydropower Begins With Retrofitting Today's Dams

by Rahul Rao in Energy, Engineering, Engineering News

With wind and solar prices dropping, it can be easy to forget that two-thirds of the globe’s renewable energy comes from hydropower. But hydro’s future is muddled with ghostly costs—and sometimes dubious environmental consequences. Most dams weren’t, in fact, actually built for hydropower. They help stop floods and supply farms and families with water, but […]

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