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Dina Genkina: Hi, I’m Dina Genkina for IEEE Spectrum‘s Fixing the Future. Before we start, I want to tell you that you can get the latest coverage from some of Spectrum‘s most important beats, including AI, climate change, and robotics, by signing up for one of our free newsletters. Just go to spectrum.ieee.org/newsletters to subscribe. And today our guest on the show is Suraj Bramhavar. Recently, Bramhavar left his job as a co-founder and CTO of Sync Computing to start a new chapter. The UK government has just founded the

In 1912, Oskar von Miller, an electrical engineer and founder of the Deutsches Museum, had an idea: Could you project an artificial starry sky onto a dome, as a way of demonstrating astronomical principles to the public?It was such a novel concept that when von Miller approached the Carl Zeiss company in Jena, Germany, to manufacture such a projector, they initially rebuffed him. Eventually, they agreed, and under the guidance of lead engineer

The shift toward the electrification of vehicles and the expansion of the electrical grid for renewable energy integration has led to a considerable increase in the demand for power electronics devices and modernized cable systems — applications that will help ensure a consistent and long-term electricity supply. Simulation is used to drive the design of new power electronics devices (such as solar power and wind turbine systems), which are required to operate efficiently for varying levels of power production and power consumption (in the case of electric vehicles). A multiphysics modeling and simulation approach plays a critical role in meeting design goals and reducing the overall production time.The COMSOL Multiphysics® software offers a wide range of capabilities for the modeling of energy transmission and power electronics, including quasistatic and time

When Marianne Smith was teaching computer science in 2016 at Flathead Valley Community College, in Kalispell, Mont., the adjunct professor noticed the female students in her class were severely outnumbered, she says.Smith says she believed the disparity was because girls were not being introduced to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in elementary and middle school.Code Girls United Founded 2018 Headquarters Kalispell, Mont. Employees 10

One of the biggest challenges for robotics right now is practical autonomous operation in unstructured environments. That is, doing useful stuff in places your robot hasn’t been before and where things may not be as familiar as your robot might like. Robots thrive on predictability, which has put some irksome restrictions on where and how they can be successfully deployed.But over the past few years, this has started to change, thanks in large part to a couple of pivotal robotics challenges put on by DARPA. The DARPA Subterranean Challenge ran from 2018 to 2021, putting mobile robots through a series of unstructured und

At TSMC’s North American Technology Symposium on Wednesday, the company detailed both its semiconductor technology and chip-packaging technology road maps. While the former is key to keeping the traditional part of Moore’s Law going, the latter could accelerate a trend toward processors made from more and more silicon, leading quickly to systems the size of a full silicon wafer. Such a system, Tesla’s next generation Dojo training tile is already in production, TSMC says. And in 2027 the foundry plans to offer technology for more complex wafer-scale systems than Tesla’s that could deliver 40 times as much computing power as today’s system

Digital Chinese-language keyboards that are vulnerable to spying and eavesdropping have been used by 1 billion smartphone users, according to a new report. The widespread threats these leaky systems reveal could also present a concerning new kind of exploit for cyberattacks, whether the device uses a Chinese-language keyboard, an English keyboard, or any other. Last year, the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab released a study of a proprietary Chinese keyboard system owned by the Shenzhen-based tech giant Tencent. Citizen Lab’s

Making breakthroughs in artificial intelligence these days requires huge amounts of computing power. In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that by the end of this year, the company will have installed 350,000 Nvidia GPUs—the specialized computer chips used to train AI models—to power its AI research. As a data-center network engineer with Meta’s network infrastructure tea

I hate the eye strain that often comes with peering through a telescope at the night sky—I’d rather let a camera capture the scene. But I’m too frugal to sink thousands of dollars into high-quality astrophotography gear. The Goldilocks solution for me is something that goes by the name of electronically assisted astronomy, or EAA.EAA occupies a middle ground in amateur astronomy: more involved than gazing through binoculars or a telescope, but not as complicated as using specialized cameras, expensive telescopes, and motorized tracking mounts. I set about explori

Editor’s note: This article is adapted from the author’s book War Virtually: The Quest to Automate Conflict, Militarize Data, and Predict the Future (University of California Press, published in paperback April 2024). The blistering late-afternoon wind ripped across Camp Taji, a sprawling U.S. military base just north of Baghdad. In a desolate corner of the outpost, where the feared Iraqi Republican Guard had once manufactured mustard gas, nerve agents, and other