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1. IEEE Team Training Programs Elevate Wireless Communication Skills

   

   The field of wireless communication is constantly evolving, and engineers need to be aware of the latest improvements and requirements. To address their needs, the IEEE Communications Society is offering two exclusive training programs for individuals and technical teams.

   The online Intensive Wireless Communications and Advanced Topics in Wireless course series are taught by experts in real time. Through lectures that include practical use cases and case studies, participants acquire knowledge that can be applied in the workplace. During the interactive, live courses, learners have the opportunity to engage directly with industry expert instructors and get answers to their questions in real time.

   Recordings of the courses are available to facilitate group discussions of the materials and deepen understanding of concepts. Copies of the instructors’ slides are shared with participants, providing an ongoing resource for future reference.

   The benefits of training as a team

   “A team taking the courses together can benefit from discussing examples from the lectures and the practice questions,” instructor Alan Bensky says. “Attendees can also help each other better understand more difficult topics.” Bensky, who has more than 30 years of industry experience, teaches the Intensive Wireless Communications series.

   Panteleimon Balis, an Advanced Topics in Wireless instructor, says taking the courses together as a team “fosters an aligned development of knowledge that enhances communication and collaboration within the team, leading to more effective problem-solving and decision-making.” Balis is a radio access network specialist who provides training on mobile and wireless communications technologies.

   “The collective development of skill sets enables the team to apply the assimilated knowledge to real-world projects, driving innovation and efficiency within the organization,” he says. “Ultimately, attending these courses as a team not only strengthens individual competencies but also reinforces team cohesion and performance, benefiting the organization as a whole.”

   Practical use cases to apply on the job

   The following topics are covered in the Intensive Wireless Communications course, which is scheduled to be held in September and October:

   • Fundamentals of wireless communication.
   • Network and service architecture.
   • Cellular networks.
   • Noncellular wireless systems.

   Several practical use cases are shared in the courses. Bensky notes, for example, that those working on Wi-Fi devices or network deployment likely will find the section on IEEE 802.11 especially useful because it covers the capabilities of the different amendments, particularly regarding data rate calculation and presentation of achievable rates.

   “Attending these courses as a team not only strengthens individual competencies but also reinforces team cohesion and performance, benefiting the organization as a whole.” —Panteleimon Balis

   The Advanced Topics in Wireless series, taught in October and November, includes these classes:

   • 5G RAN and Core Network: Architecture, Technology Enablers, and Implementation Aspects.
   • O-RAN: Disrupting the Radio Access Network through Openness and Innovation.
   • Machine Type Communications in 5G and Beyond.

   The inclusion of use cases, Balis says, brings significant value to the learning experience and helps with bridging the gap between theory and practice. In the O-RAN (open radio access network) module, for example, case studies analyze the pros and cons of early deployments in Japan and the United States.

   As noted by the IEEE Standards Association, the key concept of O-RAN is opening the protocols and interfaces among the various building blocks—radios, hardware, and software—in the RAN.

   The Advanced Topics in Wireless courses are scheduled to begin after the Intensive Wireless Communications series concludes.

   More details about courses are available online, where you can learn how to offer the series to your team.

2. High Schooler Brings IEEE Mobile Disaster-Relief Tech to Campus

   

   Unlike most people who encounter the IEEE-USA MOVE (Mobile Outreach VEhicle) emergency relief truck, Ananya Yanduru wasn’t a survivor of a natural disaster who needed to charge her cellphone or access the Internet. Instead, the 16-year-old got a guided tour of the truck on the grounds of her high school. She had requested MOVE visit Canyon Crest Academy, in San Diego, so she and her classmates could learn about the technology it houses.

   The vehicle is equipped with satellite Internet access and IP phone service. MOVE can charge up to 100 cellphones simultaneously. It also has a mobile television for tracking storms, as well as radios for communications. A generator and three solar panels on the roof power the technology.

   When it’s not deployed to help in disaster recovery, the vehicle stops at venues so its team can provide guided tours, educating people about ways technology helps during disasters.

   Yanduru spotted the truck in June 2023 when it was parked at the San Diego Convention Center. She was there to accompany her father, an IEEE senior member, to a conference.

   “I saw that the truck had traveled across the United States to help with hurricanes, be there for disaster relief, and work with the American Red Cross,” she says. “I thought that was a big deal.” MOVE’s volunteers often coordinate their disaster-relief efforts with the Red Cross.

   Tours were over for the day, but that didn’t stop her. She was so determined to explore the vehicle that as soon as she got home she went to the MOVE website and requested a visit to her school. It showed up a few weeks later.

   Yanduru was most interested in its communications system. She was impressed that the vehicle had its own Wi-Fi network, she says.

   “I really liked how the IEEE-USA MOVE truck is able to establish such a strong communication system in a disaster area,” she says. “The radio engineering communication part really clicked with me.”

   The vehicle was a big hit at her school, Yanduru says. More than 70 students and teachers toured it. Some of the students brought their family and friends.

   Qualcomm’s devices inspired an interest in engineering

   Yanduru is no stranger to engineering or technology. She comes from a family of engineers and is a member of her school’s radio engineering, coding, and 3D printing clubs.

   Her father, electrical engineer Naveen Yanduru, is vice president and general manager of Renesas Electronics, in San Diego. Her mother, electrical engineer Arunasree Parsi, has worked as a computer-aided design engineer for Qualcomm and other semiconductor companies. Parsi is now president and CEO of Kaleidochip, also in San Diego.

   “I really liked how the IEEE-USA MOVE truck is able to establish such a strong communication system in a disaster area.”

   Yanduru says her mother sparked her passion for technology. When the girl was a youngster, the two visited the Qualcomm Museum, which displays the company’s modems, chips, tracking systems, and other products.

   “I got interested in engineering from looking at those devices and seeing how engineering could be applied to so many different aspects of the world and used in so many fields,” she says.

   Her parents support her interest in engineering because “it’s something that we can talk about,” she says. “I always feel open to discussing technology with them because they have so much knowledge in the field.”

   Students and teachers from San Diego’s Canyon Crest Academy line up to tour the IEEE-USA MOVE truck during its stop at the high school.Ananya Yanduru

   Participating in ham radio, 3D printing, and coding clubs

   It’s no surprise Yanduru was interested in the MOVE’s communication system. She is a cofounder and copresident of her school’s radio engineering club, which has 10 members. It teaches students about topics they need to know to pass the amateur radio licensing test.

   Yanduru is a licensed amateur radio operator. Her call sign is K06BAM.

   “Getting a license sounds cool to a lot of high school students,” she says, “so as the founders, we thought the club would get more interest if we showed them an easy way to get their ham radio license.”

   Now that most members have a license, they decided to participate in other activities. They first chose NASA’s Radio JOVE. The citizen science project provides kits for building a simple radio telescope to conduct scientific analysis of planets, the Milky Way, and Earth-based radio emissions. The findings are then shared with radio observatories via the Internet.

   The club’s students plan to build their telescope during summer break, Yanduru says, adding that in the next school year they’ll conduct experiments about energy coming from Jupiter, then will send their results to NASA for analysis.

   Yanduru also helped establish the school’s 3D printing club. She teaches club members how to print. The six members also help teachers repair the printers.

   Another hobby of hers is writing code. She is secretary of the academy’s Girls Who Code club, which has about 20 members, not including the classmates they teach. The program aims to increase the number of women in the tech field by teaching coding.

   She is sharing the knowledge she gains from the club as a volunteer teaching assistant for the League of Amazing Programmers. The San Diego–based nonprofit after-school program trains students in grades 5 to 12 on Java and Python.

   “I really like being part of all the clubs,” she says, “because they use different aspects of engineering. For 3D, you really get to see the creative and the physical aspects. Radio is obviously more abstract. And coding is fun.”

   Yanduru is still a few years away from attending college, but she says she plans to pursue an engineering degree. Choosing which field is a dilemma, she says.

   “There’s a lot of things in electrical engineering and computer engineering that I find interesting,” she says. “I’ll definitely be studying something in one of those fields.”

3. Taenzer Fellowship for Disability-Engaged Journalism

   Open Call for Applications and Nominations:

   Do you know of a passionate disabled writer who is eager to explore the intersection of journalism, technology and disability? Do you aspire to shed a critical light on the impact of assistive technologies and mainstream technologies through a disabled lens? If so, we invite you to apply or nominate a deserving candidate for IEEE Spectrum’s Taenzer Fellowship for Disability-Engaged Technology Journalism.

   About the Fellowship:

   Our Fellowship for Disability-Engaged Journalism was created to resource new, early- and mid-career disabled journalists as they produce compelling narratives that spotlight the everyday and unique challenges and ideas that disabled people encounter with technology. Whether you’re an experienced journalist or an emerging writer, this fellowship offers a unique opportunity to develop your craft, while being supported with the accommodations you need to pursue stories. The Fellowship will run through the end of 2025.

   Benefits of the Fellowship:

   • Stipend: Fellows will receive a $2500one-timestipend to support their commitment to investigative reporting on disability-related tech topics.

   • Compensation: Ordinary professional freelance compensation will be provided by contract for the stories developed during the fellowship period, ensuring that fellows are recognized for their valuable contributions.

   • Coverage of Assistive Services: We understand the importance of accessibility in journalism. Therefore, as part of assignment contracts, the fellowship will cover expenses for assistive services required by fellows to pursue their stories. These services include but are not limited to American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters, mobility aids, and document conversion.

   • Schedule Flexibility: This fellowship will represent a part-time commitment, and as such can be maintained alongside other part-time work, freelance or gig work, and other schedule obligations. The requirement is that Taenzer Fellows have sufficient time to engage with the program through development workshops and report and write multiplenews stories and one feature-length article during the course of their 18-month fellowship period. The scheduling will be as flexible as possible.

   Eligibility Criteria:

   - Journalists at early- to mid-career stages, including freelancers, are encouraged to apply, or those interested in entering journalism. - Demonstrated interest or experience in writing about technology, disability rights, or related topics.

   - Capacity to commit to the fellowship’s duration and deliver high-quality journalistic work.

   How to Apply or nominate a candidate:

   To apply or to nominate a deserving candidate for this fellowship, please submit the following materials:

   1. A resume or curriculum vitae highlighting the candidates journalism experience and relevant achievements, or an email address where we can request a resume from nominees.

   2. A statement of interest (500 words maximum) outlining your motivation for nominating someone or applying, your/their experience or interest in disability-engaged journalism, and what areas of technology you/they are interested in examining.

   3. Three samples of the candidate’s published writing, preferably showcasing their ability to cover topics related to assistive technologies, disability rights, or technology through a disability lens. Self-published items, such as blog posts, or items written for limited circulation venues, such as an organizational newsletter will be considered.

   Submission Deadline: August 1st, 2024.

   Please send your application materials to cass.s@ieee.org with the subject line “Taenzer Fellowship Application.”

   Contact Information:

   For inquiries or further information, please contact Stephen Cass at cass.s@ieee.org or Margo Anderson at m.k.anderson@ieee.org.

   Join us in making a meaningful impact through storytelling that fosters understanding, empathy, and inclusivity in journalism. Nominate someone now for the IEEE SpectrumTaenzer Fellowship for Disability-Engaged Technology Journalism and be a catalyst for change in the technology media world today!

4. Shipt’s Algorithm Squeezed Gig Workers. They Fought Back

   

   In early 2020,gig workers for the app-based delivery company Shipt noticed something strange about their paychecks. The company, which had been acquired by Target in 2017 for US $550 million, offered same-day delivery from local stores. Those deliveries were made by Shipt workers, who shopped for the items and drove them to customers’ doorsteps. Business was booming at the start of the pandemic, as the COVID-19 lockdowns kept people in their homes, and yet workers found that their paychecks had become…unpredictable. They were doing the same work they’d always done, yet their paychecks were often less than they expected. And they didn’t know why.

   On Facebook and Reddit, workers compared notes. Previously, they’d known what to expect from their pay because Shipt had a formula: It gave workers a base pay of $5 per delivery plus 7.5 percent of the total amount of the customer’s order through the app. That formula allowed workers to look at order amounts and choose jobs that were worth their time. But Shipt had changed the payment rules without alerting workers. When the company finally issued a press release about the change, it revealed only that the new pay algorithm paid workers based on “effort,” which included factors like the order amount, the estimated amount of time required for shopping, and the mileage driven.

   The Shopper Transparency Tool used optical character recognition to parse workers’ screenshots and find the relevant information (A). The data from each worker was stored and analyzed (B), and workers could interact with the tool by sending various commands to learn more about their pay (C).Dana Calacci

   The company claimed this new approach was fairer to workers and that it better matched the pay to the labor required for an order. Many workers, however, just saw their paychecks dwindling. And since Shipt didn’t release detailed information about the algorithm, it was essentially a black box that the workers couldn’t see inside.

   The workers could have quietly accepted their fate, or sought employment elsewhere. Instead, they banded together, gathering data and forming partnerships with researchers and organizations to help them make sense of their pay data. I’m a data scientist; I was drawn into the campaign in the summer of 2020, and I proceeded to build an SMS-based tool—the Shopper Transparency Calculator—to collect and analyze the data. With the help of that tool, the organized workers and their supporters essentially audited the algorithm and found that it had given 40 percent of workers substantial pay cuts. The workers showed that it’s possible to fight back against the opaque authority of algorithms, creating transparency despite a corporation’s wishes.

   How We Built a Tool to Audit Shipt

   It started with a Shipt worker named Willy Solis, who noticed that many of his fellow workers were posting in the online forums about their unpredictable pay. He wanted to understand how the pay algorithm had changed, and he figured that the first step was documentation. At that time, every worker hired by Shipt was added to a Facebook group called the Shipt List, which was administered by the company. Solis posted messages there inviting people to join a different, worker-run Facebook group. Through that second group, he asked workers to send him screenshots showing their pay receipts from different months. He manually entered all the information into a spreadsheet, hoping that he’d see patterns and thinking that maybe he’d go to the media with the story. But he was getting thousands of screenshots, and it was taking a huge amount of time just to update the spreadsheet.

   The Shipt Calculator: Challenging Gig Economy Black-box Algorithms with Worker Pay Stubs youtu.be

   That’s when Solis contacted Coworker, a nonprofit organization that supports worker advocacy by helping with petitions, data analysis, and campaigns. Drew Ambrogi, then Coworker’s director of digital campaigns, introduced Solis to me. I was working on my Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab, but feeling somewhat disillusioned about it. That’s because my research had focused on gathering data from communities for analysis, but without any community involvement. I saw the Shipt case as a way to work with a community and help its members control and leverage their own data. I’d been reading about the experiences of delivery gig workers during the pandemic, who were suddenly considered essential workers but whose working conditions had only gotten worse. When Ambrogi told me that Solis had been collecting data about Shipt workers’ pay but didn’t know what to do with it, I saw a way to be useful.

   

   

   Throughout the worker protests, Shipt said only that it had updated its pay algorithm to better match payments to the labor required for jobs; it wouldn’t provide detailed information about the new algorithm. Its corporate photographs present idealized versions of happy Shipt shoppers. Shipt

   Companies whose business models rely on gig workers have an interest in keeping their algorithms opaque. This “information asymmetry” helps companies better control their workforces—they set the terms without divulging details, and workers’ only choice is whether or not to accept those terms. The companies can, for example, vary pay structures from week to week, experimenting to find out, essentially, how little they can pay and still have workers accept the jobs. There’s no technical reason why these algorithms need to be black boxes; the real reason is to maintain the power structure.

   For Shipt workers, gathering data was a way to gain leverage. Solis had started a community-driven research project that was collecting good data, but in an inefficient way. I wanted to automate his data collection so he could do it faster and at a larger scale. At first, I thought we’d create a website where workers could upload their data. But Solis explained that we needed to build a system that workers could easily access with just their phones, and he argued that a system based on text messages would be the most reliable way to engage workers.

   Based on that input, I created a textbot: Any Shipt worker could send screenshots of their pay receipts to the textbot and get automated responses with information about their situation. I coded the textbot in simple Python script and ran it on my home server; we used a service called Twilio to send and receive the texts. The system used optical character recognition—the same technology that lets you search for a word in a PDF file—to parse the image of the screenshot and pull out the relevant information. It collected details about the worker’s pay from Shipt, any tip from the customer, and the time, date, and location of the job, and it put everything in a Google spreadsheet. The character-recognition system was fragile, because I’d coded it to look for specific pieces of information in certain places on the screenshot. A few months into the project, when Shipt did an update and the workers’ pay receipts suddenly looked different, we had to scramble to update our system.

   In addition to fair pay, workers also want transparency and agency.

   Each person who sent in screenshots had a unique ID tied to their phone number, but the only demographic information we collected was the worker’s metro area. From a research perspective, it would have been interesting to see if pay rates had any connection to other demographics, like age, race, or gender, but we wanted to assure workers of their anonymity, so they wouldn’t worry about Shipt firing them just because they had participated in the project. Sharing data about their work was technically against the company’s terms of service; astoundingly, workers—including gig workers who are classified as “independent contractors”— often don’t have rights to their own data.

   Once the system was ready, Solis and his allies spread the word via a mailing list and workers’ groups on Facebook and WhatsApp. They called the tool the Shopper Transparency Calculator and urged people to send in screenshots. Once an individual had sent in 10 screenshots, they would get a message with an initial analysis of their particular situation: The tool determined whether the person was getting paid under the new algorithm, and if so, it stated how much more or less money they’d have earned if Shipt hadn’t changed its pay system. A worker could also request information about how much of their income came from tips and how much other shoppers in their metro area were earning.

   How the Shipt Pay Algorithm Shortchanged Workers

   By October of 2020, we had received more than 5,600 screenshots from more than 200 workers, and we paused our data collection to crunch the numbers. We found that 40 percent of workers were earning less under the new algorithm, with half of those workers receiving a pay cut of 10 percent or greater. What’s more, looking at data from all geographic regions, we found that about one-third of workers were earning less than their state’s minimum wage.

   It wasn’t a clear case of wage theft, because 60 percent of workers were making about the same or slightly more under the new scheme. But we felt that it was important to shine a light on those 40 percent of workers who had gotten an unannounced pay cut through a black box transition.

   In addition to fair pay, workers also want transparency and agency. This project highlighted how much effort and infrastructure it took for Shipt workers to get that transparency: It took a motivated worker, a research project, a data scientist, and custom software to reveal basic information about these workers’ conditions. In a fairer world where workers have basic data rights and regulations require companies to disclose information about the AI systems they use in the workplace, this transparency would be available to workers by default.

   Our research didn’t determine how the new algorithm arrived at its payment amounts. But a July 2020 blog post from Shipt’s technical team talked about the data the company possessed about the size of the stores it worked with and their calculations for how long it would take a shopper to walk through the space. Our best guess was that Shipt’s new pay algorithm estimated the amount of time it would take for a worker to complete an order (including both time spent finding items in the store and driving time) and then tried to pay them $15 per hour. It seemed likely that the workers who received a pay cut took more time than the algorithm’s prediction.

   

   Shipt workers protested in front of the headquarters of Target (which owns Shipt) in October 2020. They demanded the company’s return to a pay algorithm that paid workers based on a simple and transparent formula. The SHIpT List

   Solis and his allies used the results to get media attention as they organized strikes, boycotts, and a protest at Shipt headquarters in Birmingham, Ala., and Target’s headquarters in Minneapolis. They asked for a meeting with Shipt executives, but they never got a direct response from the company. Its statements to the media were maddeningly vague, saying only that the new payment algorithm compensated workers based on the effort required for a job, and implying that workers had the upper hand because they could “choose whether or not they want to accept an order.”

   Did the protests and news coverage have an effect on worker conditions? We don’t know, and that’s disheartening. But our experiment served as an example for other gig workers who want to use data to organize, and it raised awareness about the downsides of algorithmic management. What’s needed is wholesale changes to platforms’ business models.

   An Algorithmically Managed Future?

   Since 2020, there have been a few hopeful steps forward. The European Union recently came to an agreement about a rule aimed at improving the conditions of gig workers. The so-called Platform Workers Directive is considerably watered down from the original proposal, but it does ban platforms from collecting certain types of data about workers, such as biometric data and data about their emotional state. It also gives workers the right to information about how the platform algorithms make decisions and to have automated decisions reviewed and explained, with the platforms paying for the independent reviews. While many worker-rights advocates wish the rule went further, it’s still a good example of regulation that reins in the platforms’ opacity and gives workers back some dignity and agency.

   Some debates over gig workers’ data rights have even made their way to courtrooms. For example, the Worker Info Exchange, in the United Kingdom, won a case against Uber in 2023 about its automated decisions to fire two drivers. The court ruled that the drivers had to be given information about the reasons for their dismissal so they could meaningfully challenge the robo-firings.

   In the United States, New York City passed the country’s first minimum-wage law for gig workers, and last year the law survived a legal challenge from DoorDash, Uber, and Grubhub. Before the new law, the city had determined that its 60,000 delivery workers were earning about $7 per hour on average; the law raised the rate to about $20 per hour. But the law does nothing about the power imbalance in gig work—it doesn’t improve workers’ ability to determine their working conditions, gain access to information, reject surveillance, or dispute decisions.

   Willy Solis spearheaded the effort to determine how Shipt had changed its pay algorithm by organizing his fellow Shipt workers to send in data about their pay—first directly to him, and later using a textbot.Willy Solis

   Elsewhere in the world, gig workers are coming together to imagine alternatives. Some delivery workers have started worker-owned services and have joined together in an international federation called CoopCycle. When workers own the platforms, they can decide what data they want to collect and how they want to use it. In Indonesia, couriers have created “base camps” where they can recharge their phones, exchange information, and wait for their next order; some have even set up informal emergency response services and insurance-like systems that help couriers who have road accidents.

   While the story of the Shipt workers’ revolt and audit doesn’t have a fairy-tale ending, I hope it’s still inspiring to other gig workers as well as shift workers whose hours are increasingly controlled by algorithms. Even if they want to know a little more about how the algorithms make their decisions, these workers often lack access to data and technical skills. But if they consider the questions they have about their working conditions, they may realize that they can collect useful data to answer those questions. And there are researchers and technologists who are interested in applying their technical skills to such projects.

   Gig workers aren’t the only people who should be paying attention to algorithmic management. As artificial intelligence creeps into more sectors of our economy, white-collar workers find themselves subject to automated tools that define their workdays and judge their performance.

   During the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions of professionals suddenly began working from home, some employers rolled out software that captured screenshots of their employees’ computers and algorithmically scored their productivity. It’s easy to imagine how the current boom in generative AI could build on these foundations: For example, large language models could digest every email and Slack message written by employees to provide managers with summaries of workers’ productivity, work habits, and emotions. These types of technologies not only pose harm to people’s dignity, autonomy, and job satisfaction, they also create information asymmetry that limits people’s ability to challenge or negotiate the terms of their work.

   We can’t let it come to that. The battles that gig workers are fighting are the leading front in the larger war for workplace rights, which will affect all of us. The time to define the terms of our relationship with algorithms is right now.

5. Get to Know the IEEE Board of Directors

   

   The IEEE Board of Directors shapes the future direction of IEEE and is committed to ensuring IEEE remains a strong and vibrant organization—serving the needs of its members and the engineering and technology community worldwide—while fulfilling the IEEE mission of advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.

   This article features IEEE Board of Directors members Deepak Mathur, Saifur Rahman, and Aylin Yener.

   IEEE Senior Member Deepak Mathur

   Vice President, Member and Geographic Activities

   Jaideep

   Mathur has nearly 40 years of professional experience in electronics and telecommunications at India’s premier public sector oil and gas company, engaged in the exploration and exploitation of hydrocarbons. During his tenure, most recently as chief general manager, he successfully led multidisciplinary teams through significant IT and communications projects. These include supervisory control and data acquisition, online and real-time monitoring systems, WiMax-based broadband wireless access systems, and GPS/GSM-based vehicle tracking systems. Mathur also has experience managing and working on high-tech oil well logging systems, which analyze the properties of the subsurface to explore the possibility of hydrocarbons.

   Mathur has served in many IEEE leadership roles at the region, section, council, and global levels. A member of the IEEE Industry Applications Society, the IEEE Signal Processing Society and the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology, he was the director of IEEE Region 10 (Asia and Pacific), a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology (2013–2015), and chair of the IEEE India Council (2015–2016). In his current role with IEEE Member and Geographic Activities, Mathur focuses on supporting IEEE members, as well as developing IEEE membership recruitment and retention strategies.

   Mathur is a member of IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu, the honor society. Throughout his IEEE journey, he has received several prestigious recognitions, including the Region 10 Outstanding Volunteer Award, the MGA Achievement Award, and the India Council Lifetime Achievement Award.

   Mathur is currently a professor of practice and a member of the academic council at Marwadi University, in Rajkot, India.

   IEEE Life Fellow Saifur Rahman

   2023 IEEE President

   Chelsea Seeber

   Rahman is the founding director of the Advanced Research Institute and the Center for Energy and the Global Environment at Virginia Tech, where he researches renewable energy, sensor integration, smart grids, and smart cities. His work promotes clean-tech solutions for climate sustainability, and his six-point solution to reduce carbon dioxide emissions in the electric power sector is being implemented in varying degrees in more than 100 countries.

   A prolific lecturer, Rahman has made more than 850 presentations at conferences and invited speaking engagements in more than 30 countries. His visionary and innovative leadership approaches and strategies have earned him global recognition. In 2020, he spoke at five different webinars in five countries on four continents in one day.

   As the 2023 IEEE president, his main priorities were to position the organization as a force for change and to make it more relevant to technology professionals worldwide. Rahman feels that IEEE, as the world’s largest organization of technical professionals, has both the opportunity and the responsibility to address the causes of, mitigate the impact of, and adapt to climate change. His forward-thinking strategies led to the creation of the IEEE Climate Change website and helped foster collaboration among technology and engineering professionals, policymakers, and other organizations to foster a dialogue on sustainable energy policies and practices. Previously, Rahman served as the vice president of IEEE Publication Services and Products (2006) and president of the IEEE Power & Energy Society (2018 and 2019).

   Rahman has published more than 160 journal papers with over 20,000 citations. He is the founding editor in chief of the IEEE Electrification Magazine and IEEE Transactions on Sustainable Energy. He has also received several IEEE recognitions, including the Power & Energy Society Service Award, PES Outstanding Power Engineering Educator Award, Technical Activities Board Hall of Honor, and IEEE Millennium Medal.

   IEEE Fellow Aylin Yener

   Director, Division IX

   Aylin Yener

   Yener, an endowed chair professor at The Ohio State University College of Engineering, aims to connect the universe and everyone and everything in it by designing systems that ensure secure and reliable information transfer in a sustainable manner. Her work in communications, information theory, and artificial intelligence covers a wide range of system design topics, from network optimization to security and privacy of information to robust and safe machine-learning algorithms in networked settings.

   Of particular interest to Yener is next-generation wireless communication and how to create an energy-neutral digital society. She also works to ensure digital connectivity for underserved populations and creating fair and private AI algorithms to aid human ingenuity.

   Yener has been an active IEEE volunteer for more than two decades, with experience in membership, finances, publications, conferences, and outreach. She has served as president of the IEEE Information Theory Society(2020) and is an active member of the IEEE Signal Processing, IEEE Communications, and IEEE Vehicular Technology societies. As director of Division IX, she advocates for deeper cooperation among societies by sharing best practices and facilitating the cross-pollination of ideas.

   Yener has been an IEEE distinguished lecturer and is currently the editor in chief of IEEE Transactions on Green Communications and Networking. She has delivered more than 60 technical keynotes and invited lectures in the past 10 years. Yener is committed to a broader educational impact, having cofounded the IEEE North American School of Information Theory, which offers graduate students and postdoctoral researchers the opportunity to learn from leading experts. Yener’s IEEE recognitions include the Marconi Prize Paper Award, Communication Theory Technical Achievement Award, and Women in Communications Engineering Outstanding Achievement Award. She is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the Science Academy of Turkey.

6. A Bosch Engineer Speeds Hybrid Race Cars to the Finish Line

   

   When it comes to motorsports, the need for speed isn’t only on the racetrack. Engineers who support race teams also need to work at a breakneck pace to fix problems, and that’s something Aakhilesh Singhania relishes.

   Singhania is a senior applications engineer at Bosch Engineering, in Novi, Mich. He develops and supports electronic control systems for hybrid race cars, which feature combustion engines and battery-powered electric motors.

   Aakhilesh Singhania

   Employer:

   Bosch Engineering

   Occupation:

   Senior applications engineer

   Education:

   Bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering, Manipal Institute of Technology, India; master’s degree in automotive engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

   His vehicles compete in two iconic endurance races: the Rolex 24 at Daytona in Daytona Beach, Fla., and the 24 Hours of Le Mans in France. He splits his time between refining the underlying technology and providing trackside support on competition day. Given the relentless pace of the racing calendar and the intense time pressure when cars are on the track, the job is high octane. But Singhania says he wouldn’t have it any other way.

   “I’ve done jobs where the work gets repetitive and mundane,” he says. “Here, I’m constantly challenged. Every second counts, and you have to be very quick at making decisions.”

   An Early Interest in Motorsports

   Growing up in Kolkata, India, Singhania picked up a fascination with automobiles from his father, a car enthusiast.

   In 2010, when Singhania began his mechanical engineering studies at India’s Manipal Institute of Technology, he got involved in the Formula Student program, an international engineering competition that challenges teams of university students to design, build, and drive a small race car. The cars typically weigh less than 250 kilograms and can have an engine no larger than 710 cubic centimeters.

   “It really hooked me,” he says. “I devoted a lot of my spare time to the program, and the experience really motivated me to dive further into motorsports.”

   One incident in particular shaped Singhania’s career trajectory. In 2013, he was leading Manipal’s Formula Student team and was one of the drivers for a competition in Germany. When he tried to start the vehicle, smoke poured out of the battery, and the team had to pull out of the race.

   “I asked myself what I could have done differently,” he says. “It was my lack of knowledge of the electrical system of the car that was the problem.” So, he decided to get more experience and education.

   Learning About Automotive Electronics

   After graduating in 2014, Singhania began working on engine development for Indian car manufacturer Tata Motors in Pune. In 2016, determined to fill the gaps in his knowledge about automotive electronics, he left India to begin a master’s degree program in automotive engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

   He took courses in battery management, hybrid controls, and control-system theory, parlaying this background into an internship with Bosch in 2017. After graduation in 2018, he joined Bosch full-time as a calibration engineer, developing technology for hybrid and electric vehicles.

   Transitioning into motorsports required perseverance, Singhania says. He became friendly with the Bosch team that worked on electronics for race cars. Then in 2020 he got his big break.

   That year, the U.S.-based International Motor Sports Association and the France-based Automobile Club de l’Ouest created standardized rules to allow the same hybrid race cars to compete in both the Sportscar Championship in North America, host of the famous Daytona race, and the global World Endurance Championship, host of Le Mans.

   The Bosch motorsports team began preparing a proposal to provide the standardized hybrid system. Singhania, whose job already included creating simulations of how vehicles could be electrified, volunteered to help.

   “I’m constantly challenged. Every second counts, and you have to be very quick at making decisions.”

   The competition organizers selected Bosch as lead developer of the hybrid system that would be provided to all teams. Bosch engineers would also be required to test the hardware they supplied to each team to ensure none had an advantage.

   “The performance of all our parts in all the cars has to fall within 1 percent of each other,” Singhania says.

   After Bosch won the contract, Singhania officially became a motorsports calibration engineer, responsible for tweaking the software to fit the idiosyncrasies of each vehicle.

   In 2022 he stepped up to his current role: developing software for the hybrid control unit (HCU), which is essentially the brains of the vehicle. The HCU helps coordinate all of the different subsystems such as the engine, battery, and electric motor and is responsible for balancing power requirements among these different components to maximize performance and lifetime.

   Bosch’s engineers also designed software known as an equity model, which runs on the HCU. It is based on historical data collected from the operation of the hybrid systems’ various components, and controls their performance in real time to ensure all the teams’ hardware operates at the same level.

   In addition, Singhania creates simulations of the race cars, which are used to better understand how the different components interact and how altering their configuration would affect performance.

   Troubleshooting Problems on Race Day

   Technology development is only part of Singhania’s job. On race days, he works as a support engineer, helping troubleshoot problems with the hybrid system as they crop up. Singhania and his colleagues monitor each team’s hardware using computers on Bosch’s race-day trailer, a mobile nerve center hardwired to the organizers’ control center on the race track.

   “We are continuously looking at all the telemetry data coming from the hybrid system and analyzing [the system’s] health and performance,” he says.

   If the Bosch engineers spot an issue or a team notifies them of a problem, they rush to the pit stall to retrieve a USB stick from the vehicle, which contains detailed data to help them diagnose and fix the issue.

   After the race, the Bosch engineers analyze the telemetry data to identify ways to boost the standardized hybrid system’s performance for all the teams. In motorsports, where the difference between winning and losing can come down to fractions of a second, that kind of continual improvement is crucial.

   Customers “put lots of money into this program, and they are there to win,” Singhania says.

   Breaking Into Motorsports Engineering

   Many engineers dream about working in the fast-paced and exciting world of motorsports, but it’s not easy breaking in. The biggest lesson Singhania learned is that if you don’t ask, you don’t get invited.

   “Keep pursuing them because nobody’s going to come to you with an offer,” he says. “You have to keep talking to people and be ready when the opportunity presents itself.”

   Demonstrating that you have experience contributing to challenging projects is a big help. Many of the engineers Bosch hires have been involved in Formula Student or similar automotive-engineering programs, such as the EcoCAR EV Challenge, says Singhania.

   The job isn’t for everyone, though, he says. It’s demanding and requires a lot of travel and working on weekends during race season. But if you thrive under pressure and have a knack for problem solving, there are few more exciting careers.

   This article appears in the July 2024 print issue as “Aakhilesh Singhania.”

7. Tsunenobu Kimoto Leads the Charge in Power Devices

   

   Tsunenobu Kimoto, a professor of electronic science and engineering at Kyoto University, literally wrote the book on silicon carbide technology. Fundamentals of Silicon Carbide Technology, published in 2014, covers properties of SiC materials, processing technology, theory, and analysis of practical devices.

   Kimoto, whose silicon carbide research has led to better fabrication techniques, improved the quality of wafers and reduced their defects. His innovations, which made silicon carbide semiconductor devices more efficient and more reliable and thus helped make them commercially viable, have had a significant impact on modern technology.

   Tsunenobu Kimoto

   Employer

   Kyoto University

   Title

   Professor of electronic science and engineering

   Member grade

   Fellow

   Alma mater

   Kyoto University

   For his contributions to silicon carbide material and power devices, the IEEE Fellow was honored with this year’s IEEE Andrew S. Grove Award, sponsored by the IEEE Electron Devices Society.

   Silicon carbide’s humble beginnings

   Decades before a Tesla Model 3 rolled off the assembly line with an SiC inverter, a small cadre of researchers, including Kimoto, foresaw the promise of silicon carbide technology. In obscurity they studied it and refined the techniques for fabricating power transistors with characteristics superior to those of the silicon devices then in mainstream use.

   Today MOSFETs and other silicon carbide transistors greatly reduce on-state loss and switching losses in power-conversion systems, such as the inverters in an electric vehicle used to convert the battery’s direct current to the alternating current that drives the motor. Lower switching losses make the vehicles more efficient, reducing the size and weight of their power electronics and improving power-train performance. Silicon carbide–based chargers, which convert alternating current to direct current, provide similar improvements in efficiency.

   But those tools didn’t just appear. “We had to first develop basic techniques such as how to dope the material to make n-type and p-type semiconductor crystals,” Kimoto says. N-type crystals’ atomic structures are arranged so that electrons, with their negative charges, move freely through the material’s lattice. Conversely, the atomic arrangement of p-type crystals’ contains positively charged holes.

   Kimoto’s interest in silicon carbide began when he was working on his Ph.D. at Kyoto University in 1990.

   “At that time, few people were working on silicon carbide devices,” he says. “And for those who were, the main target for silicon carbide was blue LED.

   “There was hardly any interest in silicon carbide power devices, like MOSFETs and Schottky barrier diodes.”

   Kimoto began by studying how SiC might be used as the basis of a blue LED. But then he read B. Jayant Baliga’s 1989 paper “Power Semiconductor Device Figure of Merit for High-Frequency Applications” in IEEE Electron Device Letters, and he attended a presentation by Baliga, the 2014 IEEE Medal of Honor recipient, on the topic.

   “I was convinced that silicon carbide was very promising for power devices,” Kimoto says. “The problem was that we had no wafers and no substrate material,” without which it was impossible to fabricate the devices commercially.

   In order to get silicon carbide power devices, “researchers like myself had to develop basic technology such as how to dope the material to make p-type and n-type crystals,” he says. “There was also the matter of forming high-quality oxides on silicon carbide.” Silicon dioxide is used in a MOSFET to isolate the gate and prevent electrons from flowing into it.

   The first challenge Kimoto tackled was producing pure silicon carbide crystals. He decided to start with carborundum, a form of silicon carbide commonly used as an abrasive. Kimoto took some factory waste materials—small crystals of silicon carbide measuring roughly 5 millimeters by 8 mm­—and polished them.

   He found he had highly doped n-type crystals. But he realized having only highly doped n-type SiC would be of little use in power applications unless he also could produce lightly doped (high purity) n-type and p-type SiC.

   Connecting the two material types creates a depletion region straddling the junction where the n-type and p-type sides meet. In this region, the free, mobile charges are lost because of diffusion and recombination with their opposite charges, and an electric field is established that can be exploited to control the flow of charges across the boundary.

   “Silicon carbide is a family with many, many brothers.”

   By using an established technique, chemical vapor deposition, Kimoto was able to grow high-purity silicon carbide. The technique grows SiC as a layer on a substrate by introducing gasses into a reaction chamber.

   At the time, silicon carbide, gallium nitride, and zinc selenide were all contenders in the race to produce a practical blue LED. Silicon carbide, Kimoto says, had only one advantage: It was relatively easy to make a silicon carbide p-n junction. Creating p-n junctions was still difficult to do with the other two options.

   By the early 1990s, it was starting to become clear that SiC wasn’t going to win the blue-LED sweepstakes, however. The inescapable reality of the laws of physics trumped the SiC researchers’ belief that they could somehow overcome the material’s inherent properties. SiC has what is known as an indirect band gap structure, so when charge carriers are injected, the probability of the charges recombining and emitting photons is low, leading to poor efficiency as a light source.

   While the blue-LED quest was making headlines, many low-profile advances were being made using SiC for power devices. By 1993, a team led by Kimoto and Hiroyuki Matsunami demonstrated the first 1,100-volt silicon carbide Schottky diodes, which they described in a paper in IEEE Electron Device Letters. The diodes produced by the team and others yielded fast switching that was not possible with silicon diodes.

   “With silicon p-n diodes,” Kimoto says, “we need about a half microsecond for switching. But with a silicon carbide, it takes only 10 nanoseconds.”

   The ability to switch devices on and off rapidly makes power supplies and inverters more efficient because they waste less energy as heat. Higher efficiency and less heat also permit designs that are smaller and lighter. That’s a big deal for electric vehicles, where less weight means less energy consumption.

   Kimoto’s second breakthrough was identifying which form of the silicon carbide material would be most useful for electronics applications.

   “Silicon carbide is a family with many, many brothers,” Kimoto says, noting that more than 100 variants with different silicon-carbon atomic structures exist.

   The 6H-type silicon carbide was the default standard phase used by researchers targeting blue LEDs, but Kimoto discovered that the 4H-type has much better properties for power devices, including high electron mobility. Now all silicon carbide power devices and wafer products are made with the 4H-type.

   Silicon carbide power devices in electric vehicles can improve energy efficiency by about 10 percent compared with silicon, Kimoto says. In electric trains, he says, the power required to propel the cars can be cut by 30 percent compared with those using silicon-based power devices.

   Challenges remain, he acknowledges. Although silicon carbide power transistors are used in Teslas, other EVs, and electric trains, their performance is still far from ideal because of defects present at the silicon dioxide–SiC interface, he says. The interface defects lower the performance and reliability of MOS-based transistors, so Kimoto and others are working to reduce the defects.

   A career sparked by semiconductors

   When Kimoto was an only child growing up in Wakayama, Japan, near Osaka, his parents insisted he study medicine, and they expected him to live with them as an adult. His father was a garment factory worker; his mother was a homemaker. His move to Kyoto to study engineering “disappointed them on both counts,” he says.

   His interest in engineering was sparked, he recalls, when he was in junior high school, and Japan and the United States were competing for semiconductor industry supremacy.

   At Kyoto University, he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering, in 1986 and 1988. After graduating, he took a job at Sumitomo Electric Industries’ R&D center in Itami. He worked with silicon-based materials there but wasn’t satisfied with the center’s research opportunities.

   He returned to Kyoto University in 1990 to pursue his doctorate. While studying power electronics and high-temperature devices, he also gained an understanding of material defects, breakdown, mobility, and luminescence.

   “My experience working at the company was very valuable, but I didn’t want to go back to industry again,” he says. By the time he earned his doctorate in 1996, the university had hired him as a research associate.

   He has been there ever since, turning out innovations that have helped make silicon carbide an indispensable part of modern life.

   Growing the silicon carbide community at IEEE

   Kimoto joined IEEE in the late 1990s. An active volunteer, he has helped grow the worldwide silicon carbide community.

   He is an editor of IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, and he has served on program committees for conferences including the International Symposium on Power Semiconductor Devices and ICs and the IEEE Workshop on Wide Bandgap Power Devices and Applications.

   “Now when we hold a silicon carbide conference, more than 1,000 people gather,” he says. “At IEEE conferences like the International Electron Devices Meeting or ISPSD, we always see several well-attended sessions on silicon carbide power devices because more IEEE members pay attention to this field now.”

8. Honoring the Legacy of Chip Design Innovator Lynn Conway

   

   Lynn Conway, codeveloper of very-large-scale integration, died on 9 June at the age of 86. The VLSI process, which creates integrated circuits by combining thousands of transistors into a single chip, revolutionized microchip design.

   Conway, an IEEE Fellow, was transfeminine and was a transgender-rights activist who played a key role in updating the IEEE Code of Conduct to prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression.

   She shared her experiences on a blog to help others considering or beginning to transition their gender identity. She also mentored many trans people through their transitioning.

   “Lynn Conway’s example of engineering impact and personal courage has been a great source of inspiration for me and countless others,” Michael Wellman, a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, told the Michigan Engineering News website. Conway was a professor emerita at the university.

   The profile of Conway below is based on an interview The Institute conducted with her in December.

   Some engineers dream their pioneering technologies will one day earn them a spot in history books. But what happens when your contributions are overlooked because of your gender identity?

   If you’re like Lynn Conway—who faced that dilemma—you fight back.

   Conway helped develop very-large-scale integration: the process of creating integrated circuits by combining thousands of transistors into a single chip. VLSI chips are at the core of electronic devices used today. The technology provides processing power, memory, and other functionalities to smartphones, laptops, smartwatches, televisions, and household appliances.

   She and her research partner Carver Mead developed VLSI in the 1970s while she was working at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, in California. Mead was an engineering professor at CalTech at the time. For years, Conway’s role was overlooked partly because she was a woman, she asserts, and partly because she was transfeminine.

   Since coming out publicly in 1999, Conway has been fighting for her contributions to be recognized, and she’s succeeding. Over the years, the IEEE Fellow has been honored by a variety of organizations, most recently the National Inventors Hall of Fame, which inducted her last year almost 15 years after it recognized Mead.

   From budding physicist to electrical engineer

   Conway initially was interested in studying physics because of the role it played in World War II.

   “After the war ended, physicists became famous for blowing up the world in order to save it,” she says. “I was naive and saw physics as the source of all wisdom. I went off to MIT, not fully understanding the subject I chose to major in.”

   She took many electrical engineering courses because, she says, they allowed her to be creative. It was through those classes that she found her calling.

   She left MIT in 1957, then earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Columbia in 1962 and 1963. While at Columbia, she conducted an independent study under the guidance of Herb Schorr, an adjunct professor and a researcher at IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. The study involved installing a list-processing language on the IBM 1620 computer, “which was the most arcane machine to attempt to do that on,” she says laughing. “It was a cool language that Maurice Wilkes from Cambridge had developed to experiment with self-compiling compilers.”

   She must have made quite an impression on Schorr, she says, because after she earned her master’s degree, he recruited her to join him at the research center. While working on the advanced computing systems project there, she invented multiple-out-of-order dynamic instruction scheduling, a technique that allows a CPU to reorder instructions based on their availability and readiness instead of following the program order strictly.

   That work led to the creation of the superscalar CPU, which manages multiple instruction pipelines to execute several instructions concurrently.

   The company eventually transferred her to its offices in California’s Bay Area.

   Although her career was thriving, Conway was struggling with gender dysphoria, the distress people experience when their gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth. In 1967 she moved forward with gender-affirming care “to resolve the terrible existential situation I had faced since childhood,” she says.

   She notified IBM of her intention to transition, with the hope the company would allow her to do so quietly. Instead, IBM fired her, convinced that her transition would cause “extreme emotional distress in fellow employees,” she says. (In 2020 the company issued an apology for terminating her.)

   After completing her transition, at the end of 1968 Conway began her career anew as a contract programmer. By 1971 she was working as a computer architect at Memorex in Silicon Valley. She joined the company in what she calls “stealth mode.” No one other than close family members and friends knew she was transfeminine. Conway was afraid of discrimination and losing her job again, she says. Because of her decision to keep her transition a secret, she says, she could not claim credit for the techniques she had invented at IBM Research because they were credited to the name she had been assigned at birth, her “dead name.”

   She was recruited in 1975 to join Xerox PARC as a research fellow and manager of its VLSI system design group.

   It was there that she made history.

   Conway was recruited in 1975 to join Xerox PARC as a research fellow.Lynn Conway

   Starting the Mead and Conway Revolution

   Concerned with how Moore’s Law would affect the performance of microelectronics, the Advanced Research Project Agency (now known as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) created a coalition of companies and research universities, including PARC and CalTech, to improve microchip design. After Conway joined PARC’s VLSI system design group, she worked closely with Carver Mead on chip design. Mead, now an IEEE Life Fellow, is credited with coining the term Moore’s Law.

   Making chips at the time involved manually designing transistors and connecting them with circuits. The process was time-consuming and error-prone.

   “A whole bunch of different pieces of design were being done at different abstraction levels, including the basic architecture, the logic design, the circuit design, and the layout design—all by different people,” Conway said in a 2023 IEEE Annals of the History of Computinginterview. “And the various people in the different layers passed the design down in kind of a paternalistic top-down system. The people at any one layer may have no clue what the people at the other levels in that system are doing or what they know.”

   Conway and Mead decided the best way to address that communication problem was to use CAD tools to automate the process.

   The two also introduced the structured-design method of creating chips. It emphasized high-level abstraction and modular design techniques such as logic gates and modules—which made the process more efficient and scalable.

   Conway also created a simplified set of rules for chip design that enabled the integrated circuits to be numerically encoded, scaled, and reused as Moore’s Law advanced.

   The method was so radical, she says, that it needed help catching on. Conway and Mead wrote Introduction to VLSI Systems to take the new concepts straight to the next generation of engineers and programmers. The textbook included the basics of structured designs and how to validate and verify them. Before its publication in 1980, Conway tested how well it explained the method by teaching the first VLSI course in 1978 at MIT.

   The textbook was successful, becoming the foundational resource for teaching the technology. By 1983 it was being used by nearly 120 universities.

   Conway and Mead’s work resulted in what is known as the Mead and Conway Revolution, enabling faster, smaller, and more powerful devices to be developed.

   Throughout the 1980s, Conway and Mead were known as the dynamic duo that created VLSI. They received multiple joint awards including the Electronics magazine 1981 Award for Achievement, the University of Pennsylvania’s 1984 Pender Award, and the Franklin Institute’s 1985 Wetherill Medal.

   Conway left Xerox PARC in 1983 to join DARPA as assistant director for strategic computing. She led planning of the strategic computing initiative, an effort to expand the technology base for intelligent-weapons systems.

   Two years later she began her academic career at the University of Michigan as a professor of electrical engineering and computer science. She was the university’s associate dean of engineering and taught there until 1998, when she retired.

   Becoming an activist

   In 1999 Conway decided to come out as a transfeminine engineer, knowing that not only would her previous work be credited to her again, she says, but also that she could be a source of strength and inspiration for others like her.

   In the 2000s Conway’s honors began to dry up, while Mead continued to receive awards for VLSI, including a 2002 U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation.

   After publicly coming out, she spoke openly about her experience and lobbied to be credited for her work.

   Some organizations, including IEEE, began to recognize Conway. The IEEE Computer Society awarded her its 2009 Computer Pioneer Award. She received the 2015 IEEE/RSE Maxwell Medal, which honors contributions that had an exceptional impact on the development of electronics and electrical engineering.

9. This Engineer’s Solar Panels Are Breaking Efficiency Records

   

   When Yifeng Chen was a teenager in Shantou, China, in the early 2000s, he saw a TV program that amazed him. The show highlighted rooftop solar panels in Germany, explaining that the panels generated electricity to power the buildings and even earned the owners money by letting them sell extra energy back to the electricity company.

   Yifeng Chen

   Employer

   Trina Solar

   Title

   Assistant vice president of technology

   Member Grade

   Member

   Alma Maters

   Sun Yat-sen University, in Guangzhou, China, and Leibniz University Hannover, in Germany

   An incredulous Chen marveled at not only the technology but also the economics. A power authority would pay its customers?

   It sounded like magic: useful and valuable electricity extracted from simple sunlight. The wonder of it all has fueled his dreams ever since.

   In 2013 Chen earned a Ph.D. in photovoltaic sciences and technologies, and today he’s assistant vice president of technology at China’s Trina Solar, a Changzhou-based company that is one of the largest PV manufacturers in the world. He leads the company’s R&D group, whose efforts have set more than two dozen world records for solar power efficiency and output.

   For Chen’s contributions to the science and technology of photovoltaic energy conversion, the IEEE member received the 2023 IEEE Stuart R. Wenham Young Professional Award from the IEEE Electron Devices Society.

   “I was quite surprised and so grateful” to receive the Wenham Award, Chen says. “It’s a very high-level recognition, and there are so many deserving experts from around the world.”

   Trina Solar’s push for more efficient hardware

   Today’s commercial solar panels typically achieve about 20 percent efficiency: They can turn one-fifth of captured sunlight into electricity. Chen’s group is trying to make the panels more efficient.

   The group is focusing on optimizing solar cell designs, including the passivated emitter and rear cell (PERC), which is the industry standard for commodity solar panels.

   Invented in 1983, PERCs are used today in nearly 90 percent of solar panels on the market. They incorporate coatings on the front and back to capture sunlight more effectively and to avoid losing energy, both at the surfaces and as the sunlight travels through the cell. The coatings, known as passivation layers, are made from materials such as silicon nitride, silicon dioxide, and aluminum oxide. The layers keep negatively charged free electrons and positively charged electron holes apart, preventing them from combining at the surface of the solar cell and wasting energy.

   Chen and his team have developed several ways to boost the performance of PERC panels, hitting a record of 24.5 percent efficiency in 2022. One of the technologies is a multilayer antireflective coating that helps solar panels trap more light. They also created extremely fine metallization fingers—narrow lines on solar cells’ surfaces—to collect and transport the electric current and help capture more sunlight. And they developed an advanced method for laying the strips of conductive metal that run across the solar cell, known as bus bars.

   Experts predict the maximum efficiency of PERC technology will be reached soon, topping out at about 25 percent.

   IEEE Member Yifeng Chen displays an i-TOPCon solar module, which has a production efficiency of more than 23 percent and a power output of up to 720 watts.Trina Solar

   “So the question is: How do we get solar cells even more efficient?” Chen says.

   During the past few years he and his group have been working on tunnel oxide passivated contact (TOPCon) technology. A TOPCon cell uses a thin layer of “tunneling oxide” insulating material—typically silicon dioxide—which is applied to the solar cell’s surface. Similar to the passivation layers on PERC cells, the tunnel oxide stops free electrons and electron holes from combining and wasting energy.

   In 2022 Trina created a TOPCon-type panel with a record 25.5 percent efficiency, and two months ago the company announced it had achieved a record 740.6 watts for a mass-produced TOPCon solar module. The latter was the 26th record Trina set for solar power–related efficiencies and outputs.

   To achieve that record-breaking performance for their TOPCon panels, Chen and his team optimized the company’s manufacturing processes including laser-induced firing, in which a laser heats part of the solar cell and creates bonds between the metal contacts and the silicon wafer. The resulting connections are stronger and better aligned, enhancing efficiency.

   “We’re trying to keep improving things to trap just a little bit more sunlight,” Chen says. “Gaining 1 or 2 percent more efficiency is huge. These may sound like very tiny increases, but at scale these small improvements create a lot of value in terms of economics, sustainability, and value to society.”

   As the efficiency of solar cells rises and prices drop, Chen says, he expects solar power to continue to grow around the world. China currently leads the world in installed solar power capacity, accounting for about 40 percent of global capacity. The United States is a distant second, with 12 percent, according to a 2023 Rystad Energy report. The report predicts that China’s 500 gigawatts of solar capacity in 2023 is likely to exceed 1 terawatt by 2026.

   “I’m inspired by using science to create something useful for human beings, and then driven by the pursuit for excellence,” Chen says. “We can always learn something new to make that change, improve that piece of technology, and get just that little bit better.”

   Trained by solar-power pioneers

   Chen attended Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China, earning a bachelor’s degree in optics sciences and technologies in 2008. He stayed on to pursue a Ph.D. in photovoltaics sciences and technologies. His research was on high-efficiency solar cells made from wafer-based crystalline silicon. His adviser was Hui Shen, a leading PV professor and founder of the university’s Institute for Solar Energy Systems. Chen calls him “the first of three very important figures in my scientific career.”

   In 2011 Chen spent a year as a Ph.D. student at Leibniz University Hannover, in Germany. There he studied under Pietro P. Altermatt, the second influential figure in his career.

   Altermatt—a prominent silicon solar-cell expert who would later become principal scientist at Trina—advised Chen on his computational techniques for modeling and analyzing the behavior of 2D and 3D solar cells. The models play a key role in designing solar cells to optimize their output.

   “Gaining 1 or 2 percent more efficiency is huge. These may sound like very tiny increases, but at scale, these small improvements create a lot of value in terms of economics, sustainability, and value to society.”

   “Dr. Altermatt changed how I look at things,” Chen says. “In Germany, they really focus on device physics.”

   After completing his Ph.D., Chen became a technical assistant at Trina, where he met the third highly influential person in his career: Pierre Verlinden, a pioneering photovoltaic researcher who was the company’s chief scientist.

   At Trina, Chen quickly ascended through R&D roles. He has been the company’s assistant vice president of technology since 2023.

   IEEE’s “treasure” trove of research

   Chen joined IEEE as a student because he wanted to attend the IEEE Photovoltaic Specialists Conference, the longest-running event dedicated to photovoltaics, solar cells, and solar power.

   The membership was particularly beneficial during his Ph.D. studies, he says, because he used the IEEE Xplore Digital Library to access archival papers.

   “My work has certainly been inspired by papers I found via IEEE,” Chen says. “Plus, you end up clicking around and reading other work that isn’t related to your field but is so interesting.

   “The publication repository is a treasure. It’s eye-opening to see what’s going on inside and outside of your industry, with new discoveries happening all the time.”

10. Princeton Engineering Dean Hailed as IEEE Top Educator

    

    By all accounts, Andrea J. Goldsmith is successful. The wireless communications pioneer is Princeton’s dean of engineering and applied sciences. She has launched two prosperous startups. She has had a long career in academia, is a science advisor to the U.S. president, and sits on the boards of several major companies. So it’s surprising to learn that she almost dropped out in her first year of the engineering program at the University of California, Berkeley.

    “By the end of my first year, I really thought I didn’t belong in engineering, because I wasn’t doing well, and nobody thought I should be there,” acknowledges the IEEE Fellow. “During the summer break, I dusted myself off, cut down my hours from full time to part time at my job, and decided I wasn’t going to let anybody but me decide whether I should be an engineer or not.”

    Andrea J. Goldsmith

    Employer

    Princeton

    Title

    Dean of engineering and applied sciences

    Member Grade

    Fellow

    Alma Mater

    University of California, Berkeley

    Major Recognitions

    2024 IEEE Mulligan Education Medal

    2024 National Inventors Hall of Fame inductee

    2020 Marconi Prize

    2018 IEEE Eric E. Sumner Award

    Royal Academy of Engineering International Fellow

    National Academy of Engineering Member

    She kept that promise and earned a bachelor’s in engineering mathematics, then master’s and doctorate degrees in electrical engineering from UC Berkeley. She went on to teach engineering at Stanford for more than 20 years. Her development of foundational mathematical approaches for increasing the capacity, speed, and range of wireless systems—which is what her two startups are based on—have earned her financial rewards and several recognitions including the Marconi Prize, IEEE awards for communications technology, and induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

    But for all the honors Goldsmith has received, the one she says she cherishes most is the IEEE James H. Mulligan, Jr. Education Medal. She received this year’s Mulligan award “for educating, mentoring, and inspiring generations of students, and for authoring pioneering textbooks in advanced digital communications.” The award is sponsored by MathWorks and the IEEE Life Members Fund.

    “The greatest joy of being a professor is the young people who we work with—particularly my graduate students and postdocs. I believe all my success as an academic is due to them,” she says. “They are the ones who came with the ideas, and had the passion, grit, resilience, and creativity to partner with me in creating my entire research portfolio.

    “Mentoring young people means mentoring all of them, not just their professional dimensions,” she says. “To be recognized in the citation that I’ve inspired, mentored, and educated generations of students fills my heart with joy.”

    The importance of mentors

    Growing up in Los Angeles, Goldsmith was interested in European politics and history as well as culture and languages. In her senior year of high school, she decided to withdraw to travel around Europe, and she earned a high school equivalency diploma.

    Because she excelled in math and science in high school, her father—a mechanical engineering professor at UC Berkeley—suggested she consider majoring in engineering. When she returned to the states, she took her father’s advice and enrolled in UC Berkeley’s engineering program. She didn’t have all the prerequisites, so she had to take some basic math and physics courses. She also took classes in languages and philosophy.

    In addition to being a full-time student, Goldsmith worked a full-time job as a waitress to pay her own way through college because, she says, “I didn’t want my dad to influence what I was going to study because he was paying for it.”

    Her grades suffered from the stress of juggling school and work. In addition, being one of the few female students in the program, she says, she encountered a lot of implicit and explicit bias by her professors and classmates. Her sense of belonging also suffered, because there were no female faculty members and few women teaching assistants in the engineering program.

    “I don’t believe that engineering as a profession can achieve its full potential or can solve thewicked challenges facing society with technology if we don’t have diverse people who can contribute to those solutions.”

    “There was an attitude that if the women weren’t doing great then they should pick another major. Whereas if the guys weren’t doing great, that was fine,” she says. “It’s a societal message that if you don’t see women or diverse people in your program, you think ‘maybe it isn’t for me, maybe I don’t belong here.’ That’s reinforced by the implicit bias of the faculty and your peers.”

    This and her poor grades led her to consider dropping out of the engineering major. But during her sophomore year, she began to turn things around. She focused on the basics courses, learned better study habits, and cut back the hours at her job.

    “I realized that I could be an engineering major if that’s what I wanted. That was a big revelation,” she says. Plus, she admits, her political science classes were becoming boring compared with her engineering courses. She decided that anything she could do with a political science degree she could do with an engineering degree, but not vice versa, so she stuck with engineering.

    She credits two mentors for encouraging her to stay in the program. One was Elizabeth J. Strouse, Goldsmith’s linear algebra teaching assistant and the first woman she met at the school who was pursuing a STEM career. She became Goldsmith’s role model and friend. Strouse is now a math professor at the Institut de Matheématique at the University of Bordeaux, in France.

    The other was her undergraduate advisor, Aram J. Thomasian. The professor of statistics and electrical engineering advised Goldsmith to apply her mathematical knowledge to either communications or information theory.

    “Thomasian absolutely pegged an area that inspired me and also had really exciting practical applications,” she says. “That goes to show how early mentors can really make a difference in steering young people in the right direction.”

    After graduating in 1986 with a bachelor’s degree in engineering mathematics, Goldsmith spent a few years working in industry before returning to get her graduate degrees. She began her long academic career in 1994 as an assistant professor of engineering at Caltech. She joined Stanford’s electrical engineering faculty in 1999 and left for Princeton in 2020.

    

    Commercializing adaptive wireless communications

    While at Stanford, Goldsmith conducted groundbreaking research in wireless communications. She is credited with discovering adaptive modulation techniques, which allow network designers to align the speed at which data is sent with the speed a wireless channel can support while network conditions and channel quality fluctuate. Her techniques led to a reduction of network disruptions, laid the foundation for Internet of Things applications, and enabled faster Wi-Fi speeds. She has been granted 38 U.S. patents for her work.

    To commercialize her research, she helped found Quantenna Communications, in San Jose, Calif., in 2005 and served as its CTO. The startup’s technology enabled video to be distributed in the home over Wi-Fi at data rates of 600 megabits per second. The company went public in 2016 and was acquired by ON Semiconductor in 2019.

    IEEE: Where Luminaries Meet

    Goldsmith joined IEEE while a grad student at UC Berkeley because that was the only way she could get access to its journals, she says. Another benefit of being a member was the opportunity to network—which she discovered from attending her first conference, IEEE Globecom, in San Diego.

    “It was remarkable to me that as a graduate student and a nobody, I was meeting people whose work I had read,” she says. “I was just so in awe of what they had accomplished, and they were interested in my work as well.

    “It was very clear to me that being part of IEEE would allow me to interact with the luminaries in my field,” she says.

    That early view of IEEE has panned out well for her career, she says. She has published more than 150 papers, which are available to read in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

    Goldsmith has held several leadership positions. She is a past president of the IEEE Information Theory Society and the founding editor in chief of the IEEE Journal on Selected Areas of Information Theory.

    She volunteers, she says, because “I feel I should give back to a community that has supported and helped me with my own professional aspirations.

    “I feel particularly obligated to create the environment that will help the next generation as well. Investing my time as a volunteer has had such a big payoff in the impact we collectively have had on the profession.”

    In 2010, she helped found another communications company, Plume Design, in Palo Alto, Calif., where she also was CTO. Plume was first to develop adaptive Wi-Fi, a technology that uses machine learning to understand how your home’s bandwidth needs change during the day and adjusts to meet them.

    With both Quantenna and Plume, she could have left Stanford to become their long-term CTO, but decided not to because, she says, “I just love the research mission of universities in advancing the frontiers of knowledge and the broader service mission of universities to make the world a better place.

    “My heart is so much in the university; I can’t imagine ever leaving academia.”

    The importance of diversity in engineering

    Goldsmith has been an active IEEE volunteer for many years. One of her most important accomplishments, she says, was launching the IEEE Board of Directors Diversity and Inclusion Committee for which she is past chair.

    “We put in place a lot of programs and initiatives that mattered to a lot of people and that have literally changed the face of the IEEE,” she says.

    Even though several organizations and universities have recently disbanded their diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, DEI is important, she says.

    “As a society, we need to ensure that every person can achieve their full potential,” she says. “And as a profession, whether it’s engineering, law, medicine, or government, you need diverse ideas, perspectives, and experiences to thrive.

    “My work to enhance diversity and inclusion in the engineering profession has really been about excellence,” she says. “I don’t believe that engineering as a profession can achieve its full potential or can solve the wicked challenges facing society with technology if we don’t have diverse people who can contribute to those solutions.”

    She points out that she came into engineering with a diverse set of perspectives she gained from being a woman and traveling through Europe as a student.

    “If we have a very narrow definition of what excellence is or what merit is, we’re going to leave out a lot of very capable, strong people who can bring different ideas, out-of-box thinking, and other dimensions of excellence to the roles,” she says. “And that hurts our overarching goals.

    “When I think back to my first year of college, when DEI didn’t exist, I almost left the program,” she adds. “That would have been really sad for me, and maybe for the profession too if I wasn’t in engineering.”

    This article was updated on 5 June 2024.

11. Move Over, Tractor—the Farmer Wants a Crop-Spraying Drone

    

    Arthur Erickson discovered drones during his first year at college studying aerospace engineering. He immediately thought the sky was the limit for how the machines could be used, but it took years of hard work and some nimble decisions to turn that enthusiasm into a successful startup.

    Today, Erickson is the CEO of Houston-based Hylio, a company that builds crop-spraying drones for farmers. Launched in 2015, the company has its own factory and employs more than 40 people.

    Arthur Erickson

    Occupation:

    Aerospace engineer and founder, Hylio

    Location:

    Houston

    Education:

    Bachelor’s degree in aerospace, specializing in aeronautics, from the University of Texas at Austin

    Erickson founded Hylio with classmates while they were attending the University of Texas at Austin. They were eager to quit college and launch their business, which he admits was a little presumptuous.

    “We were like, ‘Screw all the school stuff—drones are the future,’” Erickson says. “I already thought I had all the requisite technical skills and had learned enough after six months of school, which obviously was arrogant.”

    His parents convinced him to finish college, but Erickson and the other cofounders spent all their spare time building a multipurpose drone from off-the-shelf components and parts they made using their university’s 3D printers and laser cutters.

    By the time he graduated in 2017 with a bachelor’s degree in aerospace, specializing in aeronautics, the group’s prototype was complete, and they began hunting for customers. The next three years were a wild ride of testing their drones in Costa Rica and other countries across Central America.

    A grocery delivery service

    A promotional video about the company that Erickson posted on Instagram led to the first customer, the now-defunct Costa Rican food and grocery delivery startup GoPato. The company wanted to use the drones to make deliveries in the capital, San José, but rather than purchase the machines, GoPato offered to pay for the founders’ meals and lodging and give them a percentage of delivery fees collected.

    For the next nine months, Hylio’s team spent their days sending their drones on deliveries and their nights troubleshooting problems in a makeshift workshop in their shared living room.

    “We had a lot of sleepless nights,” Erickson says. “It was a trial by fire, and we learned a lot.”

    One lesson was the need to build in redundant pieces of key hardware, particularly the GPS unit. “When you have a drone crash in the middle of a Costa Rican suburb, the importance of redundancy really hits home,” Erickson says.

    “Drones are great for just learning, iterating, crashing things, and then rebuilding them.”

    The small cut of delivery fees Hylio received wasn’t covering costs, Erickson says, so eventually the founders parted ways with GoPato. Meanwhile, they had been looking for new business opportunities in Costa Rica. They learned from local farmers that the terrain was too rugged for tractors, so most sprayed crops by hand. This was both grueling and hazardous because it brought the farmers into close proximity to the pesticides.

    The Hylio team realized its drones could do this type of work faster and more safely. They designed a spray system and made some software tweaks, and by 2018 the company began offering crop-spraying services, Erickson says. The company expanded its business to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, starting with just a pair of drones but eventually operating three spraying teams of four drones each.

    The work was tough, Erickson says, but the experience helped the team refine their technology, working out which sensors operated best in the alternately dusty and moist conditions found on farms. Even more important, by the end of 2019 they were finally turning a profit.

    Drones are cheaper than tractors

    In hindsight, agriculture was an obvious market, Erickson says, even in the United States, where spraying with herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers is typically done using large tractors. These tractors can cost up to half a million dollars to purchase and about US $7 a hectare to operate.

    A pair of Hylio’s drones cost a fifth of that, Erickson says, and operating them costs about a quarter of the price. The company’s drones also fly autonomously; an operator simply marks GPS waypoints on a map to program the drone where to spray and then sits back and lets it do the job. In this way, one person can oversee multiple drones working at once, covering more fields than a single tractor could.

    Arthur Erickson inspects the company’s largest spray drone, the AG-272. It can cover thousands of hectares per day.Hylio

    Convincing farmers to use drones instead of tractors was tough, Erickson says. Farmers tend to be conservative and are wary of technology companies that promise too much.

    “Farmers are used to people coming around every few years with some newfangled idea, like a laser that’s going to kill all their weeds or some miracle chemical,” he says.

    In 2020, Hylio opened a factory in Houston and started selling drones to American farmers. The first time Hylio exhibited its machines at an agricultural trade show, Erickson says, a customer purchased one on the spot.

    “It was pretty exciting,” he says. “It was a really good feeling to find out that our product was polished enough, and the pitch was attractive enough, to immediately get customers.”

    Today, selling farmers on the benefits of drones is a big part of Erickson’s job. But he’s still involved in product development, and his daily meetings with the sales team have become an invaluable source of customer feedback. “They inform a lot of the features that we add to the products,” he says.

    He’s currently leading development of a new type of drone—a scout—designed to quickly inspect fields for pest infestations or poor growth or to assess crop yields. But these days his job is more about managing his team of engineers than about doing hands-on engineering himself. “I’m more of a translator between the engineers and the market needs,” he says.

    Focus on users’ needs

    Erickson advises other founders of startups not to get too caught up in the excitement of building cutting-edge technology, because you can lose sight of what the user actually needs.

    “I’ve become a big proponent of not trying to outsmart the customers,” he says. “They tell us what their pain points are and what they want to see in the product. Don’t overengineer it. Always check with the end users that what you’re building is going to be useful.”

    Working with drones forces you to become a generalist, Erickson says. You need a basic understanding of structural mechanics and aerodynamics to build something airworthy. But you also need to be comfortable working with sensors, communications systems, and power electronics, not to mention the software used to control and navigate the vehicles.

    Erickson advises students who want to get into the field to take courses in mechatronics, which provide a good blend of mechanical and electrical engineering. Deep knowledge of the individual parts is generally not as important as understanding how to fit all the pieces together to create a system that works well as a whole.

    And if you’re a tinkerer like he is, Erickson says, there are few better ways to hone your engineering skills than building a drone. “It’s a cheap, fast way to get something up in the air,” he says. “They’re great for just learning, iterating, crashing things, and then rebuilding them.”

    This article appears in the June 2024 print issue as “Careers: Arthur Erickson.”

12. Credentialing Adds Value to Training Programs

    

    With careers in engineering and technology evolving so rapidly, a company’s commitment to upskilling its employees is imperative to their career growth. Maintaining the appropriate credentials—such as a certificate or digital badge that attests to successful completion of a specific set of learning objectives—can lead to increased job satisfaction, employee engagement, and higher salaries.

    For many engineers, completing a certain number of professional development hours and continuing-education units each year is required to maintain a professional engineering license.

    Many companies have found that offering training and credentialing opportunities helps them stay competitive in today’s job marketplace. The programs encourage promotion from within—which helps reduce turnover and costly recruiting expenses for organizations. Employees with a variety of credentials are more engaged in industry-related initiatives and are more likely to take on leadership roles than their noncredentialed counterparts. Technical training programs also give employees the opportunity to enhance their technical skills and demonstrate their willingness to learn new ones.

    One way to strengthen and elevate in-house technical training is through the IEEE Credentialing Program. A credential is an assurance of quality education obtained for employers and a source of pride for learners because they can share that their credentials have been verified by the world’s largest technical professional organization.

    In addition to supporting engineering professionals in achieving their career goals, the certificates and digital badges available through the program help companies enhance the credibility of their training events, conferences, and courses. Also, most countries accept IEEE certificates towards their domestic continuing-education requirements for engineers.

    Start earning your certificates and digital badges with these IEEE courses. Learn how your organization can offer credentials for your courses here.

    This article was updated from an earlier version on 20 May.

    This article appears in the June 2024 print issue.

13. This Member Gets a Charge from Promoting Sustainability

    

    Ever since she was an undergraduate student in Turkey, Simay Akar has been interested in renewable energy technology. As she progressed through her career after school, she chose not to develop the technology herself but to promote it. She has held marketing positions with major energy companies, and now she runs two startups.

    One of Akar’s companies develops and manufactures lithium-ion batteries and recycles them. The other consults with businesses to help them achieve their sustainability goals.

    Simay Akar

    Employer

    AK Energy Consulting

    Title

    CEO

    Member grade

    Senior member

    Alma mater

    Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey

    “I love the industry and the people in this business,” Akar says. “They are passionate about renewable energy and want their work to make a difference.”

    Akar, a senior member, has become an active IEEE volunteer as well, holding leadership positions. First she served as student branch coordinator, then as a student chapter coordinator, and then as a member of several administrative bodies including the IEEE Young Professionals committee.

    Akar received this year’s IEEE Theodore W. Hissey Outstanding Young Professional Award for her “leadership and inspiration of young professionals with significant contributions in the technical fields of photovoltaics and sustainable energy storage.” The award is sponsored by IEEE Young Professionals and the IEEE Photonics and Power & Energy societies.

    Akar says she’s honored to get the award because “Theodore W. Hissey’s commitment to supporting young professionals across all of IEEE’s vast fields is truly commendable.” Hissey, who died in 2023, was an IEEE Life Fellow and IEEE director emeritus who supported the IEEE Young Professionals community for years.

    “This award acknowledges the potential we hold to make a significant impact,” Akar says, “and it motivates me to keep pushing the boundaries in sustainable energy and inspire others to do the same.”

    A career in sustainable technology

    After graduating with a degree in the social impact of technology from Middle East Technical University, in Ankara, Turkey, Akar worked at several energy companies. Among them was Talesun Solar in Suzhou, China, where she was head of overseas marketing. She left to become the sales and marketing director for Eko Renewable Energy, in Istanbul.

    In 2020 she founded Innoses in Shanghai. The company makes batteries for electric vehicles and customizes them for commercial, residential, and off-grid renewable energy systems such as solar panels. Additionally, Innoses recycles lithium-ion batteries, which otherwise end up in landfills, leaching hazardous chemicals.

    “Recycling batteries helps cut down on pollution and greenhouse gas emissions,” Akar says. “That’s something we can all feel good about.”

    She says there are two main methods of recycling batteries: melting and shredding.

    Melting batteries is done by heating them until their parts separate. Valuable metals including cobalt and nickel are collected and cleaned to be reused in new batteries.

    A shredding machine with high-speed rotating blades cuts batteries into small pieces. The different components are separated and treated with solutions to break them down further. Lithium, copper, and other metals are collected and cleaned to be reused.

    The melting method tends to be better for collecting cobalt and nickel, while shredding is better for recovering lithium and copper, Akar says.

    “This happens because each method focuses on different parts of the battery, so some metals are easier to extract depending on how they are processed,” she says. The chosen method depends on factors such as the composition of the batteries, the efficiency of the recycling process, and the desired metals to be recovered.

    “There are a lot of environmental concerns related to battery usage,” Akar says. “But, if the right recycling process can be completed, batteries can also be sustainable. The right process could keep pollution and emissions low and protect the health of workers and surrounding communities.”

    Akar worked at several energy companies including Talesun Solar in Suzhou, China, which manufactures solar cells like the one she is holding.Simay Akar

    Helping businesses with sustainability

    After noticing many businesses were struggling to become more sustainable, in 2021 Akar founded AK Energy Consulting in Istanbul. Through discussions with company leaders, she found they “need guidance and support from someone who understands not only sustainable technology but also the best way renewable energy can help the planet,” she says.

    “My goal for the firm is simple: Be a force for change and create a future that’s sustainable and prosperous for everyone,” she says.

    Akar and her staff meet with business leaders to better understand their sustainability goals. They identify areas where companies can improve, assess the impact the recommended changes can have, and research the latest sustainable technology. Her consulting firm also helps businesses understand how to meet government compliance regulations.

    “By embracing sustainability, companies can create positive social, environmental, and economic impact while thriving in a rapidly changing world,” Akar says. “The best part of my job is seeing real change happen. Watching my clients switch to renewable energy, adopt eco-friendly practices, and hit their green goals is like a pat on the back.”

    Serving on IEEE boards and committees

    Akar has been a dedicated IEEE volunteer since joining the organization in 2007 as an undergraduate student and serving as chair of her school’s student branch. After graduating, she held other roles including Region 8 student branch coordinator, student chapter coordinator, and the region’s IEEE Women in Engineering committee chair.

    In her nearly 20 years as a volunteer, Akar has been a member of several IEEE boards and committees including the Young Professionals committee, the Technical Activities Board, and the Nominations and Appointments Committee for top-level positions.

    She is an active member of the IEEE Power & Energy Society and is a former IEEE PES liaison to the Women in Engineering committee. She is also a past vice chair of the society’s Women in Power group, which supports career advancement and education and provides networking opportunities.

    “My volunteering experiences have helped me gain a deep understanding of how IEEE operates,” she says. “I’ve accumulated invaluable knowledge, and the work I’ve done has been incredibly fulfilling.”

    As a member of the IEEE–Eta Kappa Nu honor society, Akar has mentored members of the next generation of technologists. She also served as a mentor in the IEEE Member and Geographic Activities Volunteer Leadership Training Program, which provides members with resources and an overview of IEEE, including its culture and mission. The program also offers participants training in management and leadership skills.

    Akar says her experiences as an IEEE member have helped shape her career. When she transitioned from working as a marketer to being an entrepreneur, she joined IEEE Entrepreneurship, eventually serving as its vice chair of products. She also was chair of the Region 10 entrepreneurship committee.

    “I had engineers I could talk to about emerging technologies and how to make a difference through Innoses,” she says. “I also received a lot of support from the group.”

    Akar says she is committed to IEEE’s mission of advancing technology for humanity. She currently chairs the IEEE Humanitarian Technology Board’s best practices and projects committee. She also is chair of the IEEE MOVE global committee. The mobile outreach vehicle program provides communities affected by natural disasters with power and Internet access.

    “Through my leadership,” Akar says, “I hope to contribute to the development of innovative solutions that improve the well-being of communities worldwide.”

14. Your Next Great AI Engineer Already Works for You

    

    The AI future has arrived. From tech and finance, to healthcare, retail, and manufacturing, nearly every industry today has begun to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into their technology platforms and business operations. The result is a surging talent demand for engineers who can design, implement, leverage, and manage AI systems.

    Over the next decade, the need for AI talent will only continue to grow. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics expects demand for AI engineers to increase by 23 percent by 2030 and demand for machine learning (ML) engineers, a subfield of AI, to grow by up to 22 percent.

    In the tech industry, this demand is in full swing. Job postings that call for skills in generative AI increased by an incredible 1,848 percent in 2023, a recent labor market analysis shows. The analysis also found that there were over 385,000 postings for AI roles in 2023.

    Figure 1: Growth of job postings requiring skills in generative AI, 2022-2023

    To capitalize on the transformative potential of AI, companies cannot simply hire new AI engineers: there just aren’t enough of them yet. To address the global shortage of AI engineering talent, you must upskill and reskill your existing engineers.

    Essential skills for AI and ML

    AI and its subfields, machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP), all involve training algorithms on large sets of data to produce models that can perform complex tasks. As a result, different types of AI engineering roles require many of the same core skills.

    CodeSignal’s Talent Science team and technical subject matter experts have conducted extensive skills mapping of AI engineering roles to define the skills required of these roles. These are the core skills they identified for two popular AI roles: ML engineering and NLP engineering.

    Machine learning (ML) engineering core skills

    

    Natural language processing (NLP) engineering core skills

    

    Developing AI skills on your teams

    A recent McKinsey report finds that upskilling and reskilling are core ways that organizations fill AI skills gaps on their teams. Alexander Sukharevsky, Senior Partner at McKinsey, explains in the report: “When it comes to sourcing AI talent, the most popular strategy among all respondents is reskilling existing employees. Nearly half of the companies we surveyed are doing so.”

    So: what is the best way to develop the AI skills you need within your existing teams? To answer that, we first need to dive deeper into how humans learn new skills.

    Components of effective skills development

    Most corporate learning programs today use the model of traditional classroom learning where one teacher, with one lesson, serves many learners. An employee starts by choosing a program, often with little guidance. Once they begin the course, lessons likely use videos to deliver instruction and are followed by quizzes to gauge their retention of the information.

    There are several problems with this model:

    • Decades of research show that the traditional, one-to-many model of learning is not the most effective way to learn. Educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom observed that students who learned through one-on-one tutoring outperformed their peers by two standard deviations; that is, they performed better than 98 percent of those who learned in traditional classroom environments. The superiority of one-on-one tutoring over classroom learning has been dubbed the 2-sigma problem in education (see Figure 2 below).

    • Multiple-choice quizzes provide a poor signal of employees’ skills—especially for specialized technical skills like AI and ML engineering. Quizzes also do not give learners the opportunity to apply what they’ve learned in a realistic context or in the flow of their work.

    • Without guidance grounded in their current skills, strengths, and goals—as well as their team’s needs—employees may choose courses or learning programs that are mismatched to their level of skill proficiency or goals.

    

    Developing your team members’ mastery of the AI and ML skills your team needs requires a learning program that delivers the following:

    • One-on-one tutoring.Today’s best-in-class technical learning programs use AI-powered assistants that are contextually aware and fully integrated with the learning environment to deliver personalized, one-on-one guidance and feedback to learners at scale.

    The use of AI to support their learning will come as no surprise to your developers and other technical employees: a recent survey shows that 81 percent of developers already use AI tools in their work—and of those, 76 percent use them to learn new knowledge and skills.

    • Practice-based learning.Decades of research show that people learn best with active practice, not passive intake of information. The learning program you use to level up your team’s skills in AI and ML should be practice-centered and make use of coding exercises that simulate real AI and ML engineering work.

    • Outcome-driven tools. Lastly, the best technical upskilling programs ensure employees actually build relevant skills (not just check a box) and apply what they learn on the job. Learning programs should also give managers visibility into their team members’ skill growth and mastery. Your platform should include benchmarking data, to allow you to compare your team’s skills to the larger population of technical talent, as well as integrations with your existing learning systems.

    Deep dive: Practice-based learning for AI skills

    Below is an example of an advanced practice exercise from the Introduction to Neural Networks with TensorFlow course in CodeSignal Develop.

    Example practice: Implementing layers in a neural network

    In this practice exercise, learners build their skills in designing neural network layers to improve the performance of the network. Learners implement their solution in a realistic IDE and built-in terminal in the right side of the screen, and interact with Cosmo, an AI-powered tutor and guide, in the panel on the left side of the screen.

    Practice description:Now that you have trained a model with additional epochs, let’s tweak the neural network’s architecture. Your task is to implement a second dense layer in the neural network to potentially improve its learning capabilities. Remember: Configuring layers effectively is crucial for the model’s performance!

    

    Conclusion

    The demand for AI and ML engineers is here, and will continue to grow over the coming years as AI technologies become critical to more and more organizations across all industries. Companies seeking to fill AI and ML skills gaps on their teams must invest in upskilling and reskilling their existing technical teams with crucial AI and ML skills.

    Learn more:

    • CodeSignal Develop
    • AI Theory and Coding - Learning path in CodeSignal Develop
    • Journey into Machine Learning with Sklearn and Tensorflow - Learning path in CodeSignal Develop

15. Management Versus Technical Track

    

    This article is part of our exclusive career advice series in partnership with theIEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society.

    As you begin your professional career freshly armed with an engineering degree, your initial roles and responsibilities are likely to revolve around the knowledge and competencies you learned at school. If you do well in your job, you’re apt to be promoted, gaining more responsibilities such as managing projects, interacting with other departments, making presentations to management, and meeting with customers. You probably also will gain a general understanding of how your company and the business world work.

    At some point in your career, you’re likely to be asked an important question: Are you interested in a management role?

    There is no right or wrong answer. Engineers have fulfilling, rewarding careers as individual contributors and as managers—and companies need both. You should decide your path based on your interests and ambitions as well as your strengths and shortcomings.

    However, the specific considerations involved aren’t always obvious. To help you, this article covers some of the differences between the two career paths, as well as factors that might influence you.

    The remarks are based on our personal experiences in corporate careers spanning decades in the managerial track and the technical track. Tariq worked at Honeywell; Gus at 3M. We have included advice from IEEE Technology and Engineering Management Society colleagues.

    Opting for either track isn’t a career-long commitment. Many engineers who go into management return to the technical track, in some cases of their own volition. And management opportunities can be adopted late in one’s career, again based on individual preferences or organizational needs.

    In either case, there tends to be a cost to switching tracks. While the decision of which track to take certainly isn’t irrevocable, it behooves engineers to understand the pros and cons involved.

    Differences between the two tracks

    Broadly, the managerial track is similar across all companies. It starts with supervising small groups, extends through middle-management layers, progresses up to leadership positions and, ultimately, the executive suite. Management backgrounds can vary, however. For example, although initial management levels in a technology organization generally require an engineering or science degree, some top leaders in a company might be more familiar with sales, marketing, or finance.

    It’s a different story for climbing the technical ladder. Beyond the first engineering-level positions, there is no standard model. In some cases individual contributors hit the career ceiling below the management levels. In others, formal roles exist that are equivalent to junior management positions in terms of pay scale and other aspects.

    “Engineers have fulfilling, rewarding careers as individual contributors and as managers—and companies need both.”

    Some organizations have a well-defined promotional system with multiple salary bands for technical staff, parallel to those for management positions. Senior technologists often have a title such as Fellow, staff scientist, or architect, with top-of-the-ladder positions including corporate Fellow, chief engineer/scientist, and enterprise architect.

    Organizational structures vary considerably among small companies—including startups, medium companies, and large corporations. Small businesses often don’t have formal or extensive technical tracks, but their lack of structure can make it easier to advance in responsibilities and qualifications while staying deeply technical.

    In more established companies, structures and processes tend to be well defined and set by policy.

    For those interested in the technical track, the robustness of a company’s technical ladder can be a factor in joining the company. Conversely, if you’re interested in the technical ladder and you’re working for a company that does not offer one, that might be a reason to look for opportunities elsewhere.

    Understanding the career paths a company offers is especially important for technologists.

    The requirements for success

    First and foremost, the track you lean toward should align with aspirations for your career—and your personal life.

    As you advance in the management path, you can drive business and organizational success through decisions you make and influence. You also will be expected to shape and nurture employees in your organization by providing feedback and guidance. You likely will have more control over resources—people as well as funding—and more opportunity for defining and executing strategy.

    The technical path has much going for it as well, especially if you are passionate about solving technical challenges and increasing your expertise in your area of specialization. You won’t be supervising large numbers of employees, but you will manage significant projects and programs that give you chances to propose and define such initiatives. You also likely will have more control of your time and not have to deal with the stress involved with being responsible for the performance of the people and groups reporting to you.

    The requirements for success in the two tracks offer contrasts as well. Technical expertise is an entry requirement for the technical track. It’s not just technical depth, however. As you advance, technical breadth is likely to become increasingly important and will need to be supplemented by an understanding of the business, including markets, customers, economics, and government regulations.

    Pure technical expertise will never be the sole performance criterion. Soft skills such as verbal and written communication, getting along with people, time management, and teamwork are crucial for managers and leaders.

    On the financial side, salaries and growth prospects generally will be higher on the managerial track. Executive tiers can include substantial bonuses and stock options. Salary growth is typically slower for senior technologists.

    Managerial and technical paths are not always mutually exclusive. It is, in fact, not uncommon for staff members who are on the technical ladder to supervise small teams. And some senior managers are able to maintain their technical expertise and earn recognition for it.

    We recommend you take time to consider which of the two tracks is more attractive—before you get asked to choose. If you’re early in your career, you don’t need to make this important decision now. You can keep your options open and discuss them with your peers, senior colleagues, and management. And you can contemplate and clarify what your objectives and preferences are. When the question does come up, you’ll be better prepared to answer it.

16. IEEE’s Honor Society Expands to More Countries

    

    The IEEE–Eta Kappa Nu honor society for engineers celebrates its 120th anniversary this year. Founded in October 1904, IEEE-HKN recognizes academic experience as well as excellence in scholarship, leadership, and service. Inductees are chosen based on their technical, scientific, and leadership achievements. There are now more than 270 IEEE-HKN chapters at universities around the world.

    The society has changed significantly over the years. Global expansion resulted from the merger of North America–based HKN with IEEE in 2010. There are now 30 chapters outside the United States, including ones recently established at universities in Ecuador, Hungary, and India.

    IEEE-HKN has more than 200,000 members around the world. Since the merger, more than 37,000 people have been inducted. Membership now extends beyond just students. Among them are 23 former IEEE presidents as well as a who’s who of engineering leaders and technology pioneers including GM Chief Executive Mary Barra, Google founding CEO Larry Page, and Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su. Last year more than 100 professional members were added to the rolls.

    “If you want to make sure that you’re on the forefront of engineering leadership, you should definitely consider joining IEEE-HKN.” —Joseph Greene

    In 1950 HKN established the category of eminent member to honor those whose contributions significantly benefited society. There now are 150 such members. They include the fathers of the Internet and IEEE Medal of Honor recipients Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn; former astronaut Sandra Magnus; andHenry Samueli, a Broadcom founder.

    IEEE-HKN is celebrating its anniversary on 28 October, Founders Day, the date the society was established. A variety of activities are scheduled for the day at chapters and other locations around the world, says Nancy Ostin, the society’s director.

    New chapters in Ecuador, Hungary, and India

    Several chapters have been established in recent months. The Nu Eta chapter at the Sri Sairam Engineering College, in Chennai, India, was founded in September, becoming the fourth chapter in the country. In October the Nu Theta chapter debuted at Purdue University Northwest in Hammond, Ind.

    Students from the IEEE-HKN Lambda Chi chapter at Hampton University in Virginia celebrate their induction with a cake.IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu

    So far this year, chapters were formed at the Escuela Superior Politécnica del Litoral, in Guayaquil, Ecuador; Hampton University in Virginia; Óbuda University, in Budapest; and Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico in San Juan, the second chapter in the territory. Hampton is a historically Black research university.

    A focus on career development

    IEEE-HKN’s benefits have expanded over time. The society now focuses more on helping its members with career development. Career-related services on the society’s website include a job board and a resource center that aids with writing résumés and cover letters, as well as interview tips and career coaching services.

    2024 IEEE-HKN president Ryan Bales [center] with members of the Nu Iota chapter at Óbuda University in Budapest.IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu

    There’s also the HKN Career Conversations podcast, hosted by society alumni. Topics they’ve covered include ethics, workplace conflicts, imposter syndrome, and cultivating creativity.

    The honor society also holds networking events including its annual international leadership conferences, where student leaders from across the world collaborate on how they can benefit the organization and their communities.

    Mentorship and networking opportunities

    IEEE-HKN’s mentoring program connects recent graduates with alumni. IEEE professionals are paired with graduate students based on technical interest, desired mentoring area, and personality.

    Alumnus Joseph Greene, a Ph.D. candidate in computational imaging at Boston University, joined the school’s Kappa Sigma chapter in 2014 and continues to mentor graduate students and help organize events to engage alumni. Greene has held several leadership positions with the chapter, including president, vice president, and student governor on the IEEE-HKN board.

    He created a professional-to-student mentoring program for the chapter. It partners people from industry and academia with students to build working relationships and to provide career, technical, and personal advice. Since the program launched in 2022, Greene says, more than 40 people have participated.

    “What I found most rewarding about having a mentor is they offer a much broader perspective than just your collegiate needs,” he said in the interview with The Institute.

    Another program Greene launched is the IEEE-HKN GradLab YouTube podcast, which he says covers “everything about grad school that they don’t teach you in a classroom.”

    “If you want to make sure that you’re on the forefront of engineering leadership, you should definitely consider joining IEEE-HKN,” Greene said in the interview. “The organization, staff, and volunteers are dedicated toward making sure you have the opportunity, resources, and network to thrive and succeed.”

    If you were ever inducted into IEEE-HKN, your membership never expires, Ostin notes. Check your IEEE membership record. The honor society’s name should appear there but if it does not, complete the alumni reconnect form.

17. An Engineer Who Keeps Meta’s AI infrastructure Humming

    

    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 team, Susana Contrerais playing a leading role in this unprecedented technology rollout. Her job is about “bringing designs to life,” she says. Contrera and her colleagues take high-level plans for the company’s AI infrastructure and turn those blueprints into reality by working out how to wire, power, cool, and house the GPUs in the company’s data centers.

    Susana Contrera

    Employer:

    Meta

    Occupation:

    Data-center network engineer

    Education:

    Bachelor’s degree in telecommunications engineering, Andrés Bello Catholic University in Caracas, Venezuela

    Contrera, who now works remotely from Florida, has been at Meta since 2013, spending most of that time helping to build the computer systems that support its social media networks, including Facebook and Instagram. But she says that AI infrastructure has become a growing priority, particularly in the past two years, and represents an entirely new challenge. Not only is Meta building some of the world’s first AI supercomputers, it is racing against other companies like Google and OpenAI to be the first to make breakthroughs.

    “We are sitting right at the forefront of the technology,” Contrera says. “It’s super challenging, but it’s also super interesting, because you see all these people pushing the boundaries of what we thought we could do.”

    Cisco Certification Opened Doors

    Growing up in Caracas, Venezuela, Contrera says her first introduction to technology came from playing video games with her older brother. But she decided to pursue a career in engineering because of her parents, who were small-business owners.

    “They were always telling me how technology was going to be a game changer in the future, and how a career in engineering could open many doors,” she says.

    She enrolled at Andrés Bello Catholic University in Caracas in 2001 to study telecommunications engineering. In her final year, she signed up for the training and certification program to become a Cisco Certified Network Associate. The program covered topics such as the fundamentals of networking and security, IP services, and automation and programmability.

    The certificate opened the door to her first job in 2006—managing the computer network of a business-process outsourcing company, Atento, in Caracas.

    “Getting your hands dirty can give you a lot of perspective.”

    “It was a very large enterprise network that had just the right amount of complexity for a very small team,” she says. “That gave me a lot of freedom to put my knowledge into practice.”

    At the time, Venezuela was going through a period of political unrest. Contrera says she didn’t see a future for herself in the country, so she decided to leave for Europe.

    She enrolled in a master’s degree program in project management in 2009 at Spain’s Pontifical University of Salamanca, continuing to collect additional certifications through Cisco in her free time. In 2010, partway through the program, she left for a job as a support engineer at the Madrid-based law firm Ecija, which provides legal advice to technology, media, and telecommunications companies. Following that with a stint as a network engineer at Amazon’s facility in Dublin from 2011 to 2013, she then joined Meta and “the rest is history,” she says.

    Starting From the Edge Network

    Contrera first joined Meta as a network deployment engineer, helping build the company’s “edge” network. In this type of network design, user requests go out to small edge servers dotted around the world instead of to Meta’s main data centers. Edge systems can deal with requests faster and reduce the load on the company’s main computers.

    After several years traveling around Europe setting up this infrastructure, she took a managerial position in 2016. But after a couple of years she decided to return to a hands-on role at the company.

    “I missed the satisfaction that you get when you’re part of a project, and you can clearly see the impact of solving a complex technical problem,” she says.

    Because of the rapid growth of Meta’s services, her work primarily involved scaling up the capacity of its data centers as quickly as possible and boosting the efficiency with which data flowed through the network. But the work she is doing today to build out Meta’s AI infrastructure presents very different challenges, she says.

    Designing Data Centers for AI

    Training Meta’s largest AI models involves coordinating computation over large numbers of GPUs split into clusters. These clusters are often housed in different facilities, often in distant cities. It’s crucial that messages passing back and forth have very low latency and are lossless—in other words, they move fast and don’t drop any information.

    Building data centers that can meet these requirements first involves Meta’s network engineering team deciding what kind of hardware should be used and how it needs to be connected.

    “They have to think about how those clusters look from a logical perspective,” Contrera says.

    Then Contrera and other members of the network infrastructure team take this plan and figure out how to fit it into Meta’s existing data centers. They consider how much space the hardware needs, how much power and cooling it will require, and how to adapt the communications systems to support the additional data traffic it will generate. Crucially, this AI hardware sits in the same facilities as the rest of Meta’s computing hardware, so the engineers have to make sure it doesn’t take resources away from other important services.

    “We help translate these ideas into the real world,” Contrera says. “And we have to make sure they fit not only today, but they also make sense for the long-term plans of how we are scaling our infrastructure.”

    Working on a Transformative Technology

    Planning for the future is particularly challenging when it comes to AI, Contrera says, because the field is moving so quickly.

    “It’s not like there is a road map of how AI is going to look in the next five years,” she says. “So we sometimes have to adapt quickly to changes.”

    With today’s heated competition among companies to be the first to make AI advances, there is a lot of pressure to get the AI computing infrastructure up and running. This makes the work much more demanding, she says, but it’s also energizing to see the entire company rallying around this goal.

    While she sometimes gets lost in the day-to-day of the job, she loves working on a potentially transformative technology. “It’s pretty exciting to see the possibilities and to know that we are a tiny piece of that big puzzle,” she says.

    Hands-on Data Center Experience

    For those interested in becoming a network engineer, Contrera says the certification programs run by companies like Cisco are useful. But she says it’s also important not to focus just on simply ticking boxes or rushing through courses just to earn credentials. “Take your time to understand the topics because that’s where the value is,” she says.

    It’s good to get some experience working in data centers on infrastructure deployment, she says, because “getting your hands dirty can give you a lot of perspective.” And increasingly, coding can be another useful skill to develop to complement more traditional network engineering capabilities.

    Mainly, she says, just “enjoy the ride” because networking can be a truly fascinating topic once you delve in. “There’s this orchestra of protocols and different technologies playing together and interacting,” she says. “I think that’s beautiful.”

18. Get to Know the IEEE Board of Directors

    

    The IEEE Board of Directors shapes the future direction of IEEE and is committed to ensuring IEEE remains a strong and vibrant organization—serving the needs of its members and the engineering and technology community worldwide—while fulfilling the IEEE mission of advancing technology for the benefit of humanity.

    This article features IEEE Board of Directors members Sergio Benedetto, Jenifer Castillo, and Fred Schindler.

    IEEE Life Fellow Sergio Benedetto

    Vice President, Publication Services and Products

    Sergio Bregni

    Benedetto is a professor emeritus at Politecnico di Torino, in Turin, Italy. His research in digital communications has contributed to the theory of error-correcting codes, which yield performance close to the Shannon theory limits and, according to Benedetto, explain “the astonishing performance” of turbo codes. Benedetto has collaborated with the European Space Agency and the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory to design codes that are now standard for satellite communications.

    As an active member of the IEEE Communications Society and in positions he has held related to IEEE publications for more than 20 years, Benedetto has seen IEEE’s most invaluable asset at work—great scientists in the IEEE field of interests willing to serve their community as volunteers.

    Benedetto has been active in digital communications for more than 40 years. He has coauthored five books and more than 250 papers. His publications have received more than 20,000 citations. He is an IEEE Life Fellow and a member of the Academy of Science of Turin. He has received numerous international awards throughout his career, including the 2008 IEEE Communications Society Edwin Howard Armstrong Award.

    IEEE Senior Member Jenifer Castillo

    Director, Region 9: Latin America

    Lufthansa Technik

    Castillo is a sales and key account manager in Puerto Rico for a leading maintenance, repair, and overhaul services provider in the aviation industry. In her role, she heads projects, including negotiating and executing contracts, and considers customers’ needs while prioritizing aviation industry safety. Or, as Castillo likes to say, she “plays with planes on the beautiful island of Puerto Rico.”

    A member of the IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Societyand IEEE Industrial Electronics Society, Castillo has been an active IEEE volunteer for many years. She was the first Latina to chair the IEEE Women in Engineering committee, bringing a different perspective to the organization. During her 2021-2022 term, she introduced several benefits, including two awards and an international scholarship, while nurturing a global volunteer network supporting women’s advancement in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields.

    Castillo helped found IEEE MOVE Puerto Rico, which is a portable version of the IEEE-USA MOVE program that provides communities affected by natural disasters with power and Internet access in areas. The disaster response during hurricane Maria, supported by the IEEE Foundation, was the turning point for the local sections to promote this initiative that enabled volunteers to support the Red Cross’ response and recovery efforts.

    Castillo has been a member of the IEEE Industry Engagement Committee and chair of the IEEE Puerto Rico and Caribbean Section. In 2020, she was recognized with the IEEE Member and Geographic Activities Achievement Award for “sustained and outstanding achievements in promoting students, IEEE Young Professionals, and IEEE WIE membership development in Latin America and the Caribbean.” She was honored with the IEEE Region 9 Oscar C. Fernández Outstanding Volunteer Award in 2020.

    IEEE Life Fellow Manfred “Fred” Schindler

    Vice President, Technical Activities

    Lyle Photos

    Schindler has spent his career in industry working on RF, microwave, and millimeter-wave semiconductors. He has led the development of advanced RF semiconductor products for commercial and defense applications. “Taking a technology from the lab and seeing it through to high-volume production is rewarding,” he says, “especially knowing that virtually everyone carries a device using the technologies we developed.”

    A member of the IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society (IEEE MTT-S), Schindler served as its president in 2003. He also has served as chair of both the IEEE Conferences Committee and the IEEE International Microwave Conference. As vice president of Technical Activities, he is working to overcome structural barriers among established communities to ensure IEEE’s future stability and success.

    Schindler holds 11 patents and has published more than 40 technical articles. He founded the IEEE Radio and Wireless Symposium, and has contributed a column on microwave business to IEEE Microwave Magazine since 2011. He received the 2018 IEEE MTT-S Distinguished Service Award for his efforts benefiting the society and the microwave profession.

19. What Software Engineers Need to Know About AI Jobs

    

    AI hiring has been growing at least slightly in most regions around the world, with Hong Kong leading the pack; however, AI careers are losing ground compared with the overall job market, according to the 2024 AI Index Report. This annual effort by Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) draws from a host of data to understand the state of the AI industry today.

    Stanford’s AI Index looks at the performance of AI models, investment, research, and regulations. But tucked within the 385 pages of the 2024 Index are several insights into AI career trends, based on data from LinkedIn and Lightcast, a labor-market analytics firm.

    Here’s a quick look at that analysis, in four charts.

    Overall hiring is up—a little

    But don’t get too excited—as a share of overall labor demand, AI jobs are slipping

    Python is still the best skill to have

    Machine learning loses luster

20. Enhance Your Tech and Business Skills During IEEE Education Week

    

    No matter where professionals are in their tech career—whether just starting out or well established—it’s never a bad time for them to reassess their skills to ensure they are aligned with market needs.

    As the professional home for engineers and technical professionals, IEEE offers a wealth of career-development resources. To showcase them, from 14 to 20 April the organization is holding its annual Education Week. The event highlights the array of educational opportunities, webinars, online courses, activities, and scholarships provided by IEEE’s organizational units, societies, and councils around the globe.

    Individuals can participate in IEEE Education Week by exploring dozens of live and virtual events. Here are a few highlights:

    • IEEE: Educating for the Future. Tom Coughlin, IEEE’s president and CEO, kicks off the week on 15 April with a keynote presentation at noon EDT. Coughlin’s priorities include retaining younger members, engaging industry, developing workforce programs, and focusing on the future of education.
    • Investing in Your Future: The Importance of Continuing Education for Engineers. At 11 a.m. on 18 April, learn about the IEEE Professional Development Suite of specialized business and leadership training programs.
    • Essential Business Skills for Engineers: Bridging the Gap Between Business and Engineering. Join IEEE and representatives from the Rutgers Business School to learn how engineers and technical professionals can grow their career through management training. This event—to be held at 10 a.m. on 16 April Singapore Standard Time and 10 p.m EDT on 17 April—is primarily for engineering professionals in the Asia Pacific region. Attendees will be introduced to the IEEE | Rutgers Online Mini-MBA Program for Engineers program.
    • Add Value and Attendees to Your Events With IEEE Credentialing. Learn about the benefits of IEEE digital certificates and badges at noon EDT on 17 April. The session covers how to find events that offer professional development hours and continuing education units.
    • IEEE–Eta Kappa Nu 2024 TechX.The honor society’s three-day virtual event, 17 to 19 April, addresses opportunities and challenges presented by new technology, along with Q&A sessions with experts. TechX includes a virtual job fair and networking events.
    • What You Should Know About the IEEE Learning Network. At noon EDT on 16 April, learn how the platform can help you advance your career with eLearning courses on that cover emerging technologies.
    • Best Practices for Service Learning From Past EPICS in IEEE Project Leaders. Leah Jamieson, the 2007 IEEE president, is set to lead a panel discussion on the IEEE Engineering Projects in Community Service program at 9:30 a.m. on 16 April. Jamieson, who helped found EPICS at Purdue University, and other project leaders will share their experiences.
    • TryEngineering and Keysight: Inspiring the Engineers of Tomorrow. IEEE and Keysight Technologies, a manufacturer of electronics test and measurement equipment and software, recently partnered to develop lesson plans on electronics and the power of simulations. Learn more about the program at 10:30 a.m. on 17 April.
    • Global Semiconductors: IEEE Resources and Communities for Those Working in the Semiconductor Industry.This session, at 1 p.m. on 18 April, can explain which IEEE groups offer educational materials for semiconductor engineers.

    Offers and discounts

    The Education Week website lists special offers and discounts. The IEEE Learning Network, for example, is offering some of its most popular courses for US $10 each. They cover artificial intelligence standards, configuration management, the Internet of Things, smart cities, and more. You can use the code ILNIEW24 until 30 April.

    Be sure to complete the IEEE Education Week quiz by noon EDT on 20 April for a chance to earn an IEEE Education Week 2024 digital badge, which can be displayed on social media.

    To learn more about IEEE Education Week, watchthis video or follow the event on Facebook or X.

21. A Novel IEEE Workshop Showcases Jamaica’s Engineering Community

    

    The IEEE Jamaica Section is acting as a catalyst to engage and inspire the island nation’s next generation of engineering and technology professionals. The section held a first-of-its-kind workshop in January at the University of Technology in Kingston. The event attracted more than 200 participants.

    Students and members met with IEEE leaders, government officials, university professors, and industry executives. Through the power of storytelling and the strength of IEEE’s mission, the One IEEE event connected participants to each other and to IEEE by showcasing the vibrant engineering community in Jamaica. Participants explored engineering and technology careers, academic pathways, and how IEEE can support them at different stages of their journey.

    Students from several local schools and universities participated in the event.Bonanza Producciones

    Section Chair Christopher Udeagha and IEEE Region 3 Director Eric Grigorian initiated the event, hosted by the university’s president, IEEE Member Kevin Brown. IEEE Senior Member Fawzi Behmann and staff from the IEEE Communications Society promoted the workshop to section and society chapter members.

    Marie Hunter, IEEE managing director and the event design lead, and David Stankiewicz, event design and production manager for IEEE Conferences, Events, and Experiences, partnered with the section and region to design the workshop.

    Preparing students for the future

    Sophia Muirhead, IEEE executive director and chief operating officer, kicked off the event. During her keynote address, she stressed that the path to achieving professional success is paved with continuous learning, collaboration, and the pursuit of innovation.

    IEEE Executive Director and Chief Operating Officer Sophia Muirhead.Bonanza Producciones

    Having enough engineers and retaining graduates is critical for Jamaica’s continued technological development, Brown said. He discussed the importance of getting young people interested in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics and preparing them to enter degree programs in the four fields. Brown also discussed the need to “support and build out Jamaica’s STEM higher education institutions.”

    Jamaica’s Minister of Education and Youth Fayval Williams.Bonanza Producciones

    Students require knowledge and skills to compete in a rapidly evolving global workforce. IEEE Member Fayval Williams, Jamaica’s minister of education and youth, discussed the need to start preparing students for future jobs that will require them to collaborate with others, be innovative, and offer solutions. She said the country plans to launch STEM schools that integrate science, technology, engineering, and math subjects because “that’s where the magic happens.”

    One way IEEE can help is through its TryEngineering program, which offers resources for students and teachers.

    Ways to engage engineering students

    From agriculture to security, there are many career paths available to robotics graduates, said Lindon Falconer, an IEEE senior member. Falconer, a deputy dean at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica, shared information about the theoretical and practical knowledge, coursework, and extracurricular activities that can prepare students for robotics careers.

    IEEE Senior Member Lindon Falconer (4th from right) with some of the students from the University of the West Indies IEEE student branch who won trophies at the robotics competitions held at IEEE SoutheastCon.Bonanza Producciones

    Contests are one way to get students interested in the field, he said. Over the years, the university’s IEEE student branch successfully participated in IEEE SoutheastCon competitions to gain hands-on technical experience. The students have fared well, placing third in the hardware competition in 2016 and 2018, winning the 2017 student paper competition, and garnering third place in the 2019 open hardware contest.

    “The path to achieving professional success is paved with continuous learning, collaboration, and the pursuit of innovation.”—Sophia Muirhead, IEEE executive director and chief operating officer.

    Team Robotics Jamaica spoke about its road to success in taking the gold in the Engineering Documentation category at last year’s FIRST Global Challenge, held in October in Singapore. The team credited IEEE Member Donovan Wilson, president of the Union of Jamaican Alumni Associations (USA), for assisting with the win.

    To give students a glimpse into real-world robotics applications, organizers brought in IEEE Member Michelle Jillian Johnson, an associate professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the University of Pennsylvania. Johnson, who is from Jamaica, discussed how she decided to develop therapies and assistive robotics for individuals with disabilities after her grandmother had a stroke.

    Many careers are full of twists and turns. Terence Martinez, executive director of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, shared how his winding career path led him from childhood aspirations of becoming a doctor to working in industry and then to his current role at IEEE.

    Readying students for the workplace

    If students have never met an engineer, imagining themselves on an engineering path can be challenging. They often don’t know what kind of jobs are possible with an engineering degree or what a career in a field such as telecommunications involves. Speakers from Digicel, Flow Jamaica, Microsoft’s Azure for Operators, and Symptai Consulting answered students’ questions.

    IEEE Member Juleen Gentles.Bonanza Producciones

    How can students channel their talents and personal interests into satisfying and impactful careers? When addressing such questions, IEEE Member Juleen Gentles shared how her family’s farming legacy, her passion for health and wellness, and her engineering background led her to a career developing technologies for the agriculture and medical fields.

    Leadership and critical thinking are skills built to last a career. IEEE Region 1 Director Bala Prasanna emphasized that honing networking, communications, and conflict resolution skills can help students stay resilient.

    Nancy Ostin, director of the IEEE–Eta Kappa Nu honor society, spoke about how becoming an HKN member can help a student acquire leadership skills.

    Technology shifts, evolving industries, and changing jobs can alter career paths. Nevertheless, Grigorian said, students, working engineers, and even retirees can rely on IEEE as their “professional home.” He discussed how joining the organization offers invaluable mentorship and educational opportunities at every level.

    The importance of volunteering

    Many members are interested in giving back to their community. IEEE can help them find volunteer opportunities tailored to their interests and schedules.

    One such resource is EPICS in IEEE. The service-learning’s program manager, Ashley Moran, explained how Engineering Projects In Community Service enables volunteers worldwide to use their technical skills to improve their community.

    From left: IEEE Region 3 Director Eric Grigorian, IEEE Region 1 Director Bala Prasanna, EPICS in IEEE Program Manager Ashley Moran, and IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu Director Nancy Ostin discuss their programs.Bonanza Producciones

    Prasanna discussed how volunteers can get involved with the IEEE MOVE initiative, which provides communications and power solutions to first responders and victims of natural disasters.

    IEEE conferences are great places to exchange ideas and learn about the latest innovations, and volunteers who help run them can pick up valuable leadership skills. Fred Schindler, vice president of IEEE Technical Activities, shared his personal journey to find his “home at IEEE.” He said volunteering with the IEEE MTT-S International Microwave Symposium helped him build his professional network, hone his financial and management skills, and learn to be more adaptable.

    To close out the workshop, Todd Johnson, an IEEE member and principal director of energy at Jamaica’s Ministry of Science, Energy, Telecommunications, and Transport, painted an inspiring picture of the country’s vision to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.

    “Reaching this vision,” Johnson said, “is going to require all of us working together to harness the immense potential and innovative spirit of our people—which we see in this room here today.”

    He called on participants to use the workshop as a “springboard to unleash your creativity, your ingenuity, and your passion for building a better tomorrow.”

22. Stuart Parkin Revolutionized Disk Drive Storage

    

    Ours is a data-centric world. Many modern inventions and occupations rely on data. Artificial intelligence feasts on it. Machine learning identifies patterns within it. Internet of Things devices generate and transmit it. Genomics, bioinformatics, climate science, telecommunications, finance, health care and so many more fields depend on it.

    For massive datasets to be of use, they must be stored somehow. More than 70 percent of the world’s data is kept in arrays of magnetic disk drives—all of which use so-called spintronic technologies developed by Stuart Parkin.

    Stuart Parkin

    EmployerMax Planck Institute for Microstructure Physics in Halle, Germany

    TitleDirector

    MemberGrade Fellow

    Alma Mater Trinity College Cambridge, in England

    The director of the Max Planck Institute for Microstructure Physics, in Halle, Germany, Parkin is the most recent recipient of the Draper Prize for Engineering, which is considered to be the highest U.S. award for the discipline.

    Short for spin transport electronics, spintronics harnesses both the electron’s intrinsic magnetic property—its spin—and its electric charge to improve electronic devices. Spintronics can make them more energy-efficient, faster to access data, or capable of storing huge amounts of information.

    Traditionally, the field of electronics has relied merely on manipulating the electron’s charge. Spintronics, however, also leverages electrons’ “natural” magnetic moment.

    Through the Draper Prize, the U.S. National Academy of Engineering honors an engineer whose accomplishment has “significantly impacted society by improving the quality of life, providing the ability to live freely and comfortably, and/or permitting access to information.”

    “It’s always a great honor and surprise to receive an award, as there are many fantastic scientists who could have been given the prize,” says Parkin, an IEEE Fellow and NAE member. “This one is particularly special, as there’s an incredible series of past winners whose major contributions to technologies have made the world a better place. To be included with those wonderful scientists is amazing.”

    Superconductors and magnetic disk drives

    Parkin holds a Humboldt professorship at Martin Luther University, also in Halle.

    He invented spintronic technologies at IBM, where he worked for 32 years. Most of that time was spent at the company’s famed Almaden research laboratory, in San Jose, Calif. IBM built the lab three years after hiring Parkin.

    When he began in 1982, he says, IBM employed about 10,000 people who worked on magnetic disk drives for storage. His assignment was a dream job, he says: Conduct exploratory research that could help make the company’s storage technology better.

    He was at the right place at the right time, he says: “Just the year before some new organic metals had been discovered that, under pressure, became superconducting at relatively low temperatures.

    “It was great fun and the beginning of something quite new.”

    He collaborated with physicists and chemists at IBM who ultimately discovered a family of organic superconductors in 1983. The work progressed for the next few years, but after that, Parkin says, IBM decided it no longer needed to keep a few dozen people working on just organic metals.

    His supervisors assigned him to lead a group researching magnetism for more efficient data storage. He was already familiar with magnetism, the focus of his physics Ph.D. thesis.

    Parkin immersed himself in all things magnetoelectronics, consulting with experts from around the world and attending conferences. He was fascinated by work in magnetic multilayers, which are materials made of thin films with alternating magnetic and nonmagnetic layers.

    Research at the time showed the materials had “interesting properties that could make it possible to store far more data, far more efficiently,” Parkin says.

    A two-year wait for a molecular beam epitaxy machine

    Parkin decided the IBM team needed more advanced film deposition techniques to build magnetic multilayer structures. He asked management to purchase a US $1.25 million molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) machine, which could make precision fabrication of thin films.

    The managers approved his request, but it took two years for the machine to be delivered. It was scheduled to be housed in a dream lab Parkin had designed within a new research center that sat atop a hill a few kilometers from the Almaden location.

    “The machine was all set up, and the lab was about to open, when suddenly a manager turned to me and said, ‘Oh, no, you don’t know anything about thin films. We’re going to hire an expert.’ Someone from Westinghouse came in, and suddenly it was his lab; not mine,” Parkin recalls.

    Parkin says he was undeterred, but he was also without the pricey MBE machine. So he raided an equipment storage room filled with machinery IBM no longer used. Using an ultrahigh vacuum chamber, an ion pump, and a special flange—along with magnetron sputtering, an antiquated vacuum deposition method—he managed to build his own film deposition system. He could pump out 20 different multilayered structures daily to run experiments on thin films and materials.

    “I could make a lot of different films by myself, immediately test hypotheses, and make lots of discoveries,” he says. “In retrospect, losing the lab was a good thing. The MBE system was extremely time-consuming to use, and my outmoded sputtering system was faster and more effective.”

    Ultimately, he developed three distinct spintronic technologies. One of them—a method to achieve very high levels of the tunneling magnetoresistance phenomenon in materials at room temperature—unlocked a massive increase in digital data storage capabilities.

    “When you discover something new, you have novel insights into how the world works.”

    When IBM shifted from hardware to software, Parkin became a consulting professor at Stanford, where he met his wife, Claudia Felser, a German chemist and materials engineer. Felser soon joined Planck as a scientist in residence, and not long after, Parkin learned that the Max Planck Institute was looking for a director to reorganize and revitalize its 30-year-old microstructure physics group.

    The institute, which is funded by federal and state governments, is dedicated to furthering research in the natural sciences, life sciences, and humanities. It maintains 84 individual institutes and other facilities worldwide.

    Parkin accepted the position and moved to Halle.

    The institute “is like IBM was in the old days, in that the philosophy is to give researchers sufficient funding so they can focus on moving science forward,” he says. “We want to do fundamental science, with a view to impacting the world, technologically in the next 5, 10, and 20 years.”

    Parkin says he applies the same philosophy when advising Ph.D. students at Martin Luther University.

    “The job is to encourage them to do the impossible. What a beautiful thing,” he says. “It’s great to see so many of them be creative and go beyond what they believed was possible.

    “When you discover something new, you have novel insights into how the world works. That’s what I hope the students come to appreciate.”

    Spintronics increases access to knowledge

    Growing up in Manchester, England, and then Edinburgh, Parkin was shy, he says, spending much of his time reading.

    “I like to think nowadays paper books aren’t needed as much because everything is digital,” he says. “It’s a wonder to think I played some role in enabling that, because it makes all this knowledge more accessible to all of us. I find that amazing.”

    Books weren’t Parkin’s only companions when he was young, however. He was drawn to plants and amassed a collection of cacti in particular. He marveled at how they required only sun and just a bit of water to thrive. It led him to wonder about the underlying biology.

    “I find nature so beautiful and incredible,” he says. “I wanted to understand how it could be that such diverse forms, colors, and a multitude of shapes could proliferate. Nature is so simple and yet so complex.”

    His fascination with the natural world led him to push the frontiers of technology and engineering, essentially to understand more of the world, he says: “That’s what science is for me.”

    Parkin received a scholarship to Trinity College Cambridge, in England, where he studied physics and theoretical physics. He earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics simultaneously in 1977, then earned a Ph.D. in 1980. He moved to Paris to complete his postdoctoral research in organic superconductivity at the urging of his mentor Richard Friend. Two years later, Parkin was hired by IBM.

    IEEE is a voice for science and engineering

    As a scientist, Parkin is acutely aware that “most people don’t appreciate the technologies that sustain their lives—from sewage systems, reliable electricity, and clean water to inventions like the iPhone. They make our lives easier, but they all depend on myriad technologies that took years of research.”

    Supporting such research, and the engineers and scientists behind it, is why he continues to be part of IEEE, he says, as the organization is a voice for science.

    “We need more representation of how important science and engineering are to solving the world’s challenges,” Parkin says. “They are a major key to making the world a better place.”

23. This Startup’s AI Tool Makes Moving Day Easier

    

    Engineers are used to being experts in their field, but when Zach Rattner cofounded his artificial-intelligence startup, Yembo, he quickly realized he needed to get comfortable with being out of his depth. He found the transition from employee to business owner to be a steep learning curve. Taking on a host of unfamiliar responsibilities like finance and sales required a significant shift in mind-set.

    Rattner cofounded Yembo in 2016 to develop an AI-based tool for moving companies that creates an inventory of objects in a home by analyzing video taken with a smartphone. Today, the startup employs 70 people worldwide and operates in 36 countries, and Rattner says he’s excited to get out of bed every morning because he’s building a product that simply wouldn’t exist otherwise.

    Zach Rattner

    Employer:

    Yembo

    Occupation:

    Chief technology officer and cofounder

    Education:

    Bachelor’s degree in computer engineering, Virginia Tech

    “I’m making a dent in the universe,” he says. “We are bringing about change. We are going into an industry and improving it.”

    How Yembo grew out of a family business

    Rattner has his wife to thank for his startup idea. From 2011 to 2015, she worked for a moving company, and she sometimes told him about the challenges facing the industry. A major headache for these companies, he says, is the time-consuming task of taking a manual inventory of everything to be moved.

    At the time, he was a software engineer in Qualcomm’s internal incubator in San Diego, where employees’ innovative ideas are turned into new products. In that role, he got a lot of hands-on experience with AI and computer vision, and he realized that object-detection algorithms could be used to automatically catalog items in a house.

    Rattner reports that his clients are able to complete three times more inspections in a day than traditional methods. Also his customers have increased their chances of getting jobs by 27 percent because they’re able to get quotes out faster than the competition, often in the same day.

    “Comparing Yembo’s survey to a virtual option like Zoom or FaceTime, our clients have reported being able to perform three to five times as many surveys per day with the same headcount,” he says. “If you compare us to an in-house visit, the savings are even more since Yembo doesn’t have drive time.”

    Getting used to not being an expert

    In 2016, he quit his job to become a consultant and work on his startup idea in his spare time. A few months later, he decided the idea had potential, and he convinced a former Qualcomm colleague, Siddharth Mohan, to join him in cofounding Yembo.

    Rattner admits that the responsibilities that come with starting a new business took some getting used to. In the early days, you’re not only building the technology, he says, you also have to get involved in marketing, finance, sales, and a host of other areas you have little experience in.

    “If you try to become that rigorous expert at everything, it can be crippling, because you don’t have enough time in the day,” Rattner says. “You just need to get comfortable being horrible at some things.”

    As the company has grown, Rattner has become less hands-on, but he still gets involved in all aspects of the business and is prepared to tackle the most challenging problems on any front.

    In 2020, the company branched out, developing a tool for property insurers by adapting the original AI algorithms to provide the information needed for an accurate insurance quote. Along with cataloging the contents of a home, this version of the AI tool extracts information about the house itself, including a high-fidelity 3D model that can be used to take measurements virtually. The software can also be used to assess damage when a homeowner makes a claim.

    “It feels like it’s a brand-new startup again,” Rattner says.

    A teenage Web developer

    From a young age, Rattner had an entrepreneurial streak. As a 7-year-old, he created a website to display his stamp collection. By his teens, he was freelancing as a Web developer.

    “I had this strange moment where I had to confess to my parents that I had a side job online,” he says. “I told them I had a couple of hundred dollars I needed to deposit into their bank account. They weren’t annoyed; they were impressed.”

    When he entered Virginia Tech in 2007 to study computer engineering, he discovered his roommate had also been doing freelance Web development. Together they came up with an idea for a tool that would allow people to build websites without writing code.

    They were accepted into a startup incubator to further develop their idea. But acceptance came with an offer of only US $15,000 for funding and the stipulation that they had to drop out of college. As he was writing the startup’s business plan, Rattner realized that his idea wasn’t financially sustainable long term and turned the offer down.

    “That is where I learned there’s more to running a startup than just the technology,” he says.

    This experience reinforced his conviction that betting everything on one great business idea wasn’t a smart move. He decided to finish school and get some experience at a major tech company before striking out on his own.

    Managing Qualcomm’s internal incubator

    In 2010, the summer before his senior year, he interned at Qualcomm. As 4G technology was just rolling out, the company was growing rapidly, and it offered Rattner a full-time job. He joined in 2011 after earning his bachelor’s degree in computer engineering.

    Rattner started out at Qualcomm as a modem software engineer, working on technology that measured cellphone signal strength and searched for the best cell connections. He took algorithms designed by others and used his coding skills to squeeze them onto the meager hardware available on cellphones of the era.

    Rattner says the scale of Qualcomm’s operations forced him to develop a rigorous approach to engineering quality.

    “You just need to get comfortable being horrible at some things.”

    “If you ship code on something that has a billion installs a year and there’s a bug, it will be found,” he says.

    Eventually, Rattner decided there was more to life than signal bars, and he began looking for new career opportunities. That’s when he discovered Qualcomm’s internal incubator. After having one of his ideas accepted and following the project through to completion, Rattner accepted a job to help to manage the program. “I got as close as I could to running a startup inside a big company,” he says.

    A book about running a startup

    Rattner wrote a book about his journey as a startup founder called Grow Up Fast, which he self-published last year. In it, he offers a few tips for those looking to follow in his footsteps.

    Rattner suggests developing concrete skills and obtaining experience before trying to make it on your own. One way to do this is to get a job at a big tech company, he says, since they tend to have a wealth of experienced employees you can learn from.

    It’s crucial to lean on others, he writes. Joining startup communities can be a good way to meet people in a similar situation whom you can turn to for advice when you hit roadblocks. And the best way to master the parts of the job that don’t come naturally to you is to seek out those who excel at them, he points out. “There’s a lot you can learn from just observing, studying, and asking questions of others,” he says.

    Most important, Rattner advises, is to simply learn by doing.

    “You can’t think of running a business as if you’re at school, where you study, practice, and eventually get good at it, because you’re going to be thrown into situations that are completely unforeseen,” he says. “It’s about being willing to put yourself out there and take that first step.”

    This article has been updated from an earlier version.

24. The Engineer Behind Samsung’s Speech Recognition Software

    

    Every time you use your voice to generate a message on a Samsung Galaxymobile phone or activate a Google Home device, you’re using tools Chanwoo Kim helped develop. The former executive vice president of Samsung Research’s Global AI Centers specializes in end-to-end speech recognition, end-to-end text-to-speech tools, and language modeling.

    “The most rewarding part of my career is helping to develop technologies that my friends and family members use and enjoy,” Kim says.

    He recently left Samsung to continue his work in the field at Korea University, in Seoul, leading the school’s speech and language processing laboratory. A professor of artificial intelligence, he says he is passionate about teaching the next generation of tech leaders.

    “I’m excited to have my own lab at the school and to guide students in research,” he says.

    Bringing Google Home to market

    When Amazon announced in 2014 it was developing smart speakers with AI assistive technology, a gadget now known as Echo, Google decided to develop its own version. Kim saw a role for his expertise in the endeavor—he has a Ph.D. in language and information technology from Carnegie Mellon, and he specialized in robust speech recognition. Friends of his who were working on such projects at Google in Mountain View, Calif., encouraged him to apply for a software engineering job there. He left Microsoft in Seattle where he had worked for three years as a software development engineer and speech scientist.

    After joining Google’s acoustic modeling team in 2013, he worked to ensure the company’s AI assistive technology, used in Google Home products, could perform in the presence of background noise.

    Chanwoo Kim

    Employer

    Korea University in Seoul

    Title

    Director of the the speech and language processing lab and professor of artificial intelligence

    Member grade

    Member

    Alma maters

    Seoul National University; Carnegie Mellon

    He led an effort to improve Google Home’s speech-recognition algorithms, including the use of acoustic modeling, which allows a device to interpret the relationship between speech and phonemes (phonetic units in languages).

    “When people used the speech-recognition function on their mobile phones, they were only standing about 1 meter away from the device at most,” he says. “For the speaker, my team and I had to make sure it understood the user when they were talking farther away.”

    Kim proposed using large-scale data augmentation that simulates far-field speech data to enhance the device’s speech-recognition capabilities. Data augmentation analyzes training data received and artificially generates additional training data to improve recognition accuracy.

    His contributions enabled the company to release its first Google Home product, a smart speaker, in 2016.

    “That was a really rewarding experience,” he says.

    That same year, Kim moved up to senior software engineer and continued improving the algorithms used by Google Home for large-scale data augmentation. He also further developed technologies to reduce the time and computing power used by the neural network and to improve multi-microphone beamforming for far-field speech recognition.

    Kim, who grew up in South Korea, missed his family, and in 2018 he moved back, joining Samsung as vice president of its AI Center in Seoul.

    When he joined Samsung, he aimed to develop end-to-end speech recognition and text-to-speech recognition engines for the company’s products, focusing on on-device processing. To help him reach his goals, he founded a speech processing lab and led a team of researchers developing neural networks to replace the conventional speech-recognition systems then used by Samsung’s AI devices.

    “The most rewarding part of my work is helping to develop technologies that my friends and family members use and enjoy.”

    Those systems included an acoustic model, a language model, a pronunciation model, a weighted finite state transducer, and an inverse text normalizer. The language model looks at the relationship between the words being spoken by the user, while the pronunciation model acts as a dictionary. The inverse text normalizer, most often used by text-to-speech tools on phones, converts speech into written expressions.

    Because the components were bulky, it was not possible to develop an accurate, on-device speech-recognition system using conventional technology, Kim says. An end-to-end neural network would complete all the tasks and “greatly simplify speech-recognition systems,” he says.

    Chanwoo Kim [top row, seventh from the right] with some of the members of his speech processing lab at Samsung Research.Chanwoo Kim

    He and his team used a streaming attention-based approach to develop their model. An input sequence—the spoken words—are encoded, then decoded into a target sequence with the help of a context vector, a numeric representation of words generated by a pretrained deep learning model for machine translation.

    The model was commercialized in 2019 and is now part of Samsung’s Galaxy phone. That same year, a cloud version of the system was commercialized and is used by the phone’s virtual assistant, Bixby.

    Kim’s team continued to improve speech recognition and text-to-speech systems in other products, and every year they commercialized a new engine.

    They include the power-normalized cepstral coefficients, which improve the accuracy of speech recognition in environments with disturbances such as additive noise, changes in the signal, multiple speakers, and reverberation. It suppresses the effects of background noise by using statistics to estimate characteristics. It is now used in a variety of Samsung products including air conditioners, cellphones, and robotic vacuum cleaners.

    Samsung promoted Kim in 2021 to executive vice president of its six Global AI Centers, located in Cambridge, England; Montreal; Seoul; Silicon Valley; New York; and Toronto.

    In that role he oversaw research on incorporating artificial intelligence and machine learning into Samsung products. He is the youngest person to be an executive vice president at the company.

    He also led the development of Samsung’s generative large language models, which evolved in Samsung Gauss. The suite of generative AI models can generate code, images, and text.

    In March he left the company to join Korea University as a professor of artificial intelligence—which is a dream come true, he says.

    “When I first started my doctoral work, my dream was to pursue a career in academia,” Kim says. “But after earning my Ph.D., I found myself drawn to the impact my research could have on real products, so I decided to go into industry.”

    He says he was excited to join Korea University, as “it has a strong presence in artificial intelligence” and is one of the top universities in the country.

    Kim says his research will focus on generative speech models, multimodal processing, and integrating generative speech with language models.

    Chasing his dream at Carnegie Mellon

    Kim’s father was an electrical engineer, and from a young age, Kim wanted to follow in his footsteps, he says. He attended a science-focused high school in Seoul to get a head start in learning engineering topics and programming. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Seoul National University in 1998 and 2001, respectively.

    Kim long had hoped to earn a doctoral degree from a U.S. university because he felt it would give him more opportunities.

    And that’s exactly what he did. He left for Pittsburgh in 2005 to pursue a Ph.D. in language and information technology at Carnegie Mellon.

    “I decided to major in speech recognition because I was interested in raising the standard of quality,” he says. “I also liked that the field is multifaceted, and I could work on hardware or software and easily shift focus from real-time signal processing to image signal processing or another sector of the field.”

    Kim did his doctoral work under the guidance of IEEE Life Fellow Richard Stern, who probably is best known for his theoretical work in how the human brain compares sound coming from each ear to judge where the sound is coming from.

    “At that time, I wanted to improve the accuracy of automatic speech recognition systems in noisy environments or when there were multiple speakers,” he says. He developed several signal processing algorithms that used mathematical representations created from information about how humans process auditory information.

    Kim earned his Ph.D. in 2010 and joined Microsoft in Seattle as a software development engineer and speech scientist. He worked at Microsoft for three years before joining Google.

    Access to trustworthy information

    Kim joined IEEE when he was a doctoral student so he could present his research papers at IEEE conferences. In 2016 a paper he wrote with Stern was published in the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing. It won them the 2019 IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Best Paper Award. Kim felt honored, he says, to receive this “prestigious award.”

    Kim maintains his IEEE membership partly because, he says, IEEE is a trustworthy source of information, and he can access the latest technical information.

    Another benefit of membership is IEEE’s global network, Kim says.

    “By being a member, I have the opportunity to meet other engineers in my field,” he says.

    He is a regular attendee at the annual IEEE Conference for Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing. This year he is the technical program committee’s vice chair for the meeting, which is scheduled for next month in Seoul.

25. The Scoop on Keeping an Ice Cream Factory Cool

    

    Working in an ice cream factory is a dream for anyone who enjoys the frozen dessert. For control systems engineer Patryk Borkowski, a job at the biggest ice cream company in the world is also a great way to put his automation expertise to use.

    Patryk Borkowski

    Employer:

    Unilever, Colworth Science Park, in Sharnbrook, England

    Occupation:

    Control systems engineer

    Education:

    Bachelor’s degree in automation and robotics from the West Pomeranian University of Technology in Szczecin, Poland

    Borkowski works at the Advanced Prototype and Engineering Centre of the multinational consumer goods company Unilever. Unilever’s corporate umbrella covers such ice cream brands as Ben & Jerry’s, Breyers, Good Humor, Magnum, and Walls.

    Borkowski maintains and updates equipment at the innovation center’s pilot plant at Colworth Science Park in Sharnbrook, England. The company’s food scientists and engineers use this small-scale factory to experiment with new ice cream formulations and novel production methods.

    The reality of the job might not exactly live up to an ice cream lover’s dream. For safety reasons, eating the product in the plant is prohibited.

    “You can’t just put your mouth underneath the nozzle of an ice cream machine and fill your belly,” he says.

    For an engineer, though, the complex chemistry and processing required to create ice cream products make for fascinating problem-solving. Much of Borkowski’s work involves improving the environmental impact of ice cream production by cutting waste and reducing the amount of energy needed to keep products frozen.

    And he loves working on a product that puts a smile on the faces of customers. “Ice cream is a deeply indulgent and happy product,” he says. “We love working to deliver a superior taste and a superior way to experience ice cream.”

    Ice Cream Innovation

    Borkowski joined Unilever as a control systems engineer in 2021. While he’s not allowed to discuss many of the details of his research, he says one of the projects he has worked on is a modular manufacturing line that the company uses to develop new kinds of ice cream. The setup allows pieces of equipment such as sauce baths, nitrogen baths for quickly freezing layers, and chocolate deposition systems to be seamlessly switched in and out so that food scientists can experiment and create new products.

    Ice cream is a fascinating product to work on for an engineer, Borkowski says, because it’s inherently unstable. “Ice cream doesn’t want to be frozen; it pretty much wants to be melted on the floor,” he says. “We’re trying to bend the chemistry to bind all the ingredients into a semistable mixture that gives you that great taste and feeling on the tongue.”

    Making Production More Sustainable

    Helping design new products is just one part of Borkowski’s job. Unilever is targeting sustainability across the company, so cutting waste and improving energy efficiency are key. He recently helped develop a testing rig to simulate freezer doors being repeatedly opened and closed in shops. This helped collect temperature data that was used to design new freezers that run at higher temperatures to save electricity.

    In 2022, he was temporarily transferred to one of Unilever’s ice cream factories in Hellendoorn, Netherlands, to uncover inefficiencies in the production process. He built a system that collected and collated operational data from all the factory’s machines to identify the causes of stoppages and waste.

    “There’s a deep pride in knowing the machines that we’ve programmed make something that people buy and enjoy.”

    It wasn’t easy. Some of the machines were older and no longer supported by their manufacturers. Also, they ran legacy code written in Dutch—a language Borkowski doesn’t speak.

    Borkowski ended up reverse-engineering the machines to figure out their operating systems, then reprogrammed them to communicate with the new data-collection system. Now the data-collection system can be easily adapted to work at any Unilever factory.

    Discovering a Love for Technology

    As a child growing up in Stargard, Poland, Borkowski says there was little to indicate that he would become an engineer. At school, he loved writing, drawing, and learning new languages. He imagined himself having a career in the creative industries.

    But in the late 1990s, his parents got a second-hand computer and a modem. He quickly discovered online communities for technology enthusiasts and began learning about programming.

    Because of his growing fascination with technology, at 16, Borkowski opted to attend a technical high school, pursuing a technical diploma in electronics and learning about components, soldering, and assembly language. In 2011, he enrolled at the West Pomeranian University of Technology in Szczecin, Poland, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in automation and robotics.

    When he graduated in 2015, there were few opportunities in Poland to put his skills to use, so he moved to London. There, Borkowski initially worked odd jobs in warehouses and production facilities. After a brief stint as an electronic technician assembling ultrasonic scanners, he joined bakery company Brioche Pasquier in Milton Keynes, England, as an automation engineer.

    This was an exciting move, Borkowski says, because he was finally doing control engineering, the discipline he’d always wanted to pursue. Part of his duties involved daily maintenance, but he also joined a team building new production lines from the ground up, linking together machinery such as mixers, industrial ovens, coolers, and packaging units. They programmed the machines so they all worked together seamlessly without human intervention.

    When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, new projects went on hold and work slowed down, Borkowski says. There seemed to be little opportunity to advance his career at Brioche Pasquier, so he applied for the control systems job at Unilever.

    “When I was briefed on the work, they told me it was all R&D and every project was different,” he says. “I thought that sounded like a challenge.”

    The Importance of a Theoretical Foundation

    Control engineers require a broad palette of skills in both electronics and programming, Borkowski says. Some of these can be learned on the job, he says, but a degree in subjects like automation or robotics provides an important theoretical foundation.

    The biggest piece of advice he has for fledgling control engineers is to stay calm, which he admits can be difficult when a manager is pressuring you to quickly get a line back up to avoid production delays.

    “Sometimes it’s better to step away and give yourself a few minutes to think before you do anything,” he says. Rushing can often result in mistakes that cause more problems in the long run.

    While working in production can sometimes be stressful, “There’s a deep pride in knowing the machines that we’ve programmed make something that people buy and enjoy,” Borkowski says.

26. Remembering Jung Uck Seo, Former IEEE Region 10 Director

    

    Jung Uck Seo, who served as 2003–2004 IEEE Region 10 director, died on 11 January at the age of 89.

    While working at Korea Telecom, the IEEE Life Fellow led the development of the TDX-1 digital telephone switching system. Later he worked to commercialize the code division multiple access method of encoding data sources. CDMA, known as 2G, allowed data to be transmitted over a single radio-frequency carrier by one transmitter, or to use a single RF carrier frequency with multiple transmitters.

    Seo also served in leadership positions for several South Korean government divisions including the Agency for Defense Development and the Korean Communications Agency.

    Early days in defense technology

    After earning a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Seoul National University in 1957, Seo joined the Republic of Korea Air Force Academy, in Cheongju, as an instructor of communications and electronics. Three years later he left for the United States to attend Texas A&M University, in College Station. He earned master’s and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering there in 1963 and 1969, respectively.

    He returned to South Korea in 1969 and joined the newly established Agency for Defense Development, in Daejon, as a section chief. There he developed technologies for the military, including a two-way radio, a telephone linking system, and a portable calculator. Seo rose through the ranks and eventually was named president of the electronics and communications division.

    He left in 1982 to join Seoul National University, where he taught for a year as a professor of electromagnetic field theory.

    In 1983 he joined Korea Telecom (now KT Corp.), in Seongnam-si, where he served as senior executive vice president. He was in charge of R&D for digital switching and quality assurance systems. During his time at the agency, he led the development of the Time Division Exchange, or TDX-1—a digital switching system that was deployed across the country’s telecom networks in 1984.

    A leader in telecommunications in South Korea

    In 1991 Seo was appointed by the South Korean government to serve as minister of science and technology. In this role, he approved government funding for research and development.

    After two years he left to become president of the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, in Seoul, where he led the effort to commercialize CDMA technology. Seo and a team of KIST researchers worked with Qualcomm to develop CDMA technology for cellular networks. In 1996 mobile communications carriers in South Korea began to provide CDMA wireless services, becoming the first commercial carriers worldwide to apply the technology.

    In addition to his leadership at KIST, Seo served as president and vice chairman of SK Telecom, a wireless operator and former film distributor in Seoul. He was chief executive of the Korea Accreditation Board, which operates accreditation programs for management and systems certifications based on international standards.

    A lifelong member of IEEE–Eta Kappa Nu, Seo was named an eminent member in 2012, the honor society’s highest level of membership.

    The South Korean government bestowed him with several honors including the Order of Industrial Service Merit, the Order of Civil Merit, and the Order of Service Merit.

27. Ham Radio Inspired This Scranton University Student to Pursue Engineering

    

    Many college students participate in sports, listen to music, or play video games in their spare time, but IEEE Student Member Gerard Piccini prefers amateur radio, also known as ham radio. He’s been involved with the two-way radio communication, which uses designated frequencies, since his uncle introduced him to it when he was a youngster. His call sign is KD2ZHK.

    Piccini, from Monroe Township, N.J., is pursuing an electrical engineering degree at the University of Scranton, in Pennsylvania. The junior is president of the university’s W3USR amateur radio club. He’s also a member of Scranton’s IEEE student branch, the IEEE Club.

    Gerard Piccini

    Member grade

    Student member; member of IEEE-HKN’s Lambda Nu chapter

    University:

    University of Scranton in Pennsylvania

    Major:

    Electrical engineering

    Minors:

    Math and physics

    Grade:

    Junior

    Another of his passions is robotics. He captained one of the university club’s teams that participated in the Micro Mouse competition held during the October IEEE Region 2 Student Activities Conference, hosted by Marshall University in Huntington, W.Va. The Scranton team competed against other student branches to build and program small robots to navigate a maze in the shortest time possible. The team placed second.

    “The contest was a great opportunity for me,” Piccini says, “to learn how to apply the skills I’ve been learning from classes into a project that I designed myself.”

    Ham radio researcher

    Piccini joined Scranton’s amateur radio club when he was a freshman. Overseeing the club is IEEE Member Nathaniel Frissell, who has taught Piccini physics and electrical engineering. Frissell noticed Piccini’s interest in radio technology and asked the student to assist him with research. Piccini now is helping to develop a low-cost, low-power system to send a signal into the ionosphere and measure the time it takes to return.

    “The system will allow us to collect more data about the ionosphere, which is an ionized layer of the atmosphere and is important for radio propagation,” he says. “Right now there are not that many full-sized ionospheric sounding systems. If we can make them cheap enough, we could get ham radio operators to set them up and increase data points.”

    “I like it when I have a project and have to try to find a solution on my own.”

    Piccini is active with Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation, which includes amateur radio enthusiasts and professional scientists who collaborate on research.

    “The idea behind HamSCI is getting citizens involved in science,” Piccini says.

    His research, he says, has led him to consider a career in RF engineering or digital signal processing, either in academia or industry.

    A born problem-solver

    Like other budding engineers, Piccini has enjoyed taking things apart and figuring out how to put them back together again since his youth. Neither of his parents was an engineer, but they encouraged his interest by buying him engineering kits.

    A high school physics class inspired him to study electrical engineering. It covered circuits and wave mechanics, a branch of quantum physics in which the behavior of objects is described in terms of their wavelike properties.

    He initially was undecided about whether to pursue a degree in physics or engineering. It wasn’t until he learned how to code and work with hardware that he chose engineering. And although he still enjoys coding, he says he’s glad he ultimately chose electrical engineering: “I like it when I have a project and have to try to find a solution on my own.” He is minoring in mathematics and physics.

    Student Member Gerard N. Piccini [second from left] with teammates from the IEEE Club Student Branch who competed in the IEEE Region 2 Micro Mouse contest.Gabrina Garangmau

    An IEEE student leader

    Piccini says he joined IEEE because he felt “trapped in a bubble of academia.” As an underclassman, he recalls, he didn’t really know what was going on in the field of engineering or in industry.

    “Being involved with IEEE helps give you that exposure,” he says.

    He is a member of the Lambda Nu chapter of IEEE’s honor society, IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu.

    Scranton’s IEEE Club offers presentations by engineering companies and technical talks. The club also encourages students to explain the work they’ve done during their internships.

    To give members professional boosts, the club holds résumé-writing sessions, conducts mock interviews, and has the students practice their public-speaking skills.

    The branch also encourages its members to get involved with community projects.

    Piccini is secretary of the student branch. The position has given him leadership experience, he says, including teaching him how to organize and run meetings and coordinate events—skills he wouldn’t have picked up in his classes.

    As captain of the Micro Mouse team, he was responsible for mentoring younger students, overseeing the design of the robot, and setting the agenda so the team would meet the competition’s deadlines.

    He notes that the IEEE Student Activities Conference is a great way to meet fellow students from around the region.

    Being active in IEEE, he says, is “a great opportunity to network, meet people, and learn new skills that you might not have—or already have but want to develop further.”

28. This Lockheed Martin Researcher’s Work on UAVs Saves Lives

    

    Kingsley Fregene wants to keep people out of harm’s way—so much so that he has ordered his life around that fundamental goal. As director of technology integration at Lockheed Martin, in Grand Prairie, Texas, he leads a team that is actively pursuing breakthroughs designed to, among other things, allow life-saving missions to be performed in hazardous environments without putting humans at risk.

    Fregene, an IEEE Fellow, has supervised the development of algorithms for autonomous aircraft used for military missions and disaster-recovery operations. He also contributed to algorithms enabling autonomous undersea vehicles to inspect offshore oil and gas platforms after hurricanes so that divers don’t have to.

    Kingsley Fregene

    Employer

    Lockheed Martin in Grand Prairie, Texas

    Title

    Director of technology integration and intellectual property

    Member grade

    Fellow

    Alma maters

    Federal University of Technology in Owerri, Nigeria; University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada

    One of his recent projects was helping to design the world’s first autonomous unmanned aircraft system in which the entire vehicle—not just its rotors—spins. The micro air vehicle was inspired by the aerodynamics of maple seeds, whose twirling slows and prolongs their descent.

    The benefits of unmanned aerial vehicles

    In a major project more than a decade ago, Fregene and colleagues at Lockheed Martin teamed up with Kaman Aerospace of Bloomfield, Conn., on an unmanned version of its K-Max helicopter. The K-Max can ferry as much as 2,700 kilograms of cargo in a single trip. The Lockheed team created and implemented mission systems and control algorithms that augmented the control system already on the helicopter, enabling it to fly completely autonomously.

    The U.S. Marine Corps used the autonomous K-Max helicopters for resupply missions in Afghanistan. It’s been estimated that those delivery flights made hundreds of ground-based convoy missions unnecessary, thereby sparing thousands of troops from being exposed to improvised explosive devices, land mines, and snipers.

    The autonomous version of the K-Max also has been demonstrated in disaster-recovery operations. It offers the possibility of keeping humanitarian aid workers away from dangerous situations, as well as rescuing people trapped in disaster zones.

    “It is often better to fly in lifesaving supplies instead of loading trucks with supplies to bring them along roads that might not be passable anymore,” Fregene says.

    K-Max and one of Lockheed Martin’s small UAVs, the Indago, have been used to fight fires. Indago flies above structures engulfed in flames and maps out the hot zones, on which K-Max then drops flame retardant or water.

    “This collaborative mission between two of our platforms means no firefighters are put in harm’s way,” Fregene says.

    He and his team also helped in the development of the maple seed–inspired Samarai, the first autonomous wholly rotating unmanned aircraft system. The 41-centimeter-long drone weighs a mere 227 grams. It depends on an algorithm that tells an actuator when and how much to adjust the angle of a flap that determines its direction.

    Compared with other aircraft, the spinning drone is simpler to produce, requires less maintenance, and is less complex to control because its only control surface is the trailing-edge flap.

    IEEE Fellow Kingsley Fregene holds up the maple seed–inspired Samarai, the first autonomous wholly rotating unmanned aircraft system.Kingsley Fregene

    Saving lives in Nigeria

    Fregene’s aim to keep people safe started with his first after-school job, as a bus conductor, when he was in the sixth grade. As part of the job, in Oghara, Nigeria, then a small fishing village along the Niger River, he collected fares and directed passengers on and off the bus.

    With no traffic cops or traffic lights, there often was chaos at major intersections. People would get injured, and he occasionally would get out and direct traffic.

    “I, a little guy, stood out there with a bright orange shirt and started directing traffic,” he says. “It’s amazing that people paid attention and listened to me.”

    Many youngsters are inspired to pursue engineering by fiddling with gadgets. Not Fregene.

    “The circumstances of my childhood did not provide opportunities to get my hands on devices to tinker with,” he says. “What we had were a lot of opportunities to observe nature.”

    The presence of oil and gas installations in his village, which is in the oil-producing part of Nigeria, led him to wonder how they worked and how they were remotely controlled. They didn’t remain mysterious for long.

    While attending the Federal University of Technology in Owerri, Nigeria, he interned at the Nigerian National Petroleum Corp., which was installing those remote operating systems, calibrating them, and validating their operation.

    After graduating first in his class in 1996 with a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering, he went on to graduate school at the University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Canada, where he researched autonomy and automatic control systems. While earning master’s and doctoral degrees, both in electrical and computer engineering, he found time to help those more needy than he was.

    He joined a team of student volunteers who organized drop-in homework clubs and provided mentoring to at-risk grade school students in the community. The activity won him the university’s President’s Circle Award in 2001.

    Thinking back on that time, Fregene recalls his interaction with one girl whose life he helped turn around.

    “She was dragged kicking and screaming most of the time to complete these sessions,” Fregene recalls. “But she started believing in herself and what she could do. And everything changed. She ended up getting accepted to the University of Waterloo and became part of the UW tutor team I was leading.”

    Fregene says his commitment to the tutoring and mentoring program came from having once been in need of academic assistance himself. Although he had excellent grades in history and language arts, he did poorly in mathematics and science. Things turned around for him in the ninth grade when a new teacher had a particular way of teaching math that “turned the light bulb on in my brain,” he says. “My grades took off right after he showed up.”

    After completing his doctorate in 2002, he began working as an R&D engineer at a Honeywell Aerospace facility in Minneapolis. During six years there, he worked on the development of unmanned aerial vehicles including a drone that was used in remote sensing of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive hazards. The drone became the world’s first aerial robot used for nuclear disaster recovery when it flew inside the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant in the aftermath of a 2011 tsunami that struck Japan and knocked out the plant’s power and cooling, causing meltdowns in three reactor cores.

    At Honeywell he also worked on microelectromechanical systems, which are used in gyroscopes and inertial measurement units. Both MEMS tools, which are used to measure the angular motion of a body, can be found in cellphones. Fregene also worked on a control system to make corrections to the imperfections that diminished the MEMS sensors’ accuracy.

    He left the company in 2008 to become lead engineer and scientist at the Lockheed Martin research facility in Cherry Hill, N.J.

    IEEE membership has its benefits

    Fregene became acquainted with IEEE as an undergrad by reading journals such as the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control and the IEEE Control Systemsmagazine, for which he has served as guest editor.

    He joined IEEE in grad school, and that decision has been paying dividends ever since, he says.

    The connections he made through the organization helped him land internships at leading laboratories, starting him on his career path. After meeting researchers at conferences or reading their papers in IEEE publications, he would send them notes introducing himself and indicating his interest in visiting the researcher’s lab and working there during the summer. The practice led to internships at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico, and at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, in Tennessee.

    The IEEE connections helped him get his first job. While working on his master’s degree, he presented a paper at the 1999 IEEE International Symposium on Intelligent Control.

    “After my presentation,” he says, “somebody from Honeywell came over and said, ‘That was a great presentation. By the way, these are the types of things we do at Honeywell. I think it would be a great place for you when you’re ready to start working.’”

    Fregene remains active in IEEE. He’s on the editorial board of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, serves as an associate editor for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, and recently completed two terms as chair of the IEEE technical committee on aerospace controls.

    IEEE “is the type of global organization that provides a forum for stellar researchers to communicate the work they are doing to colleagues,” he says, “and for setting standards that define real-life systems that are changing the world every day.”

29. IEEE Medal of Honor Goes to Bob Kahn

    

    IEEE Life Fellow Robert E. Kahn, widely known as one of the “fathers of the Internet,” is the recipient of the 2024 IEEE Medal of Honor. He is being recognized for “pioneering technical and leadership contributions in packet communication technologies and foundations of the Internet.”

    The IEEE Foundation sponsors the annual award.

    While working as a program manager in the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s information processing techniques office in 1973, Kahn and IEEE Life Fellow Vint Cerf designed the Transmission Control Protocol and the Internet Protocol. The TCP manages data packets sent over the Internet, making sure they don’t get lost, are received in the proper order, and are reassembled at their destination correctly. The IP manages the addressing and forwarding of data to and from its proper destinations. Together they make up the Internet’s core architecture and enable computers to connect and exchange information.

    “Bob Kahn’s contributions to the lifestyle, commerce, and culture of modern society are extensive and unequaled,” said one of the endorsers of the award. “It was his leadership and dedicated efforts in the application of the packet network concept that led to the development of the Internet, which has become indispensable to our society.”

    Kahn is president and CEO of the Corporation for National Research Initiatives, which he founded in 1986. The nonprofit, based in Reston, Va., undertakes, fosters, and promotes research in the strategic development of network-based information technologies. It also provides leadership and funding for information infrastructure research and development.

    A fruitful career at DARPA

    Kahn began working in computer networking in 1966 when he joined Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN) in Cambridge, Mass. There he was responsible for the system design of the ARPANET, the first packet-switched network. The project, funded by the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network, was the precursor to the Internet. (ARPA is now known as DARPA.)

    It was during that time that he met Cerf, who helped write ARPANET’s communication protocol.

    In 1972 Kahn left BBN to become a program manager in DARPA’s information processing techniques office, which invested in computer hardware and software research. He continued to work on the ARPANET and organized the first public demonstration of the network at the 1972 International Conference on Computer Communications, held in Washington, D.C.

    Khan soon after conceived the idea of open-architecture networking. In March 1973 he recruited Cerf to help him make his idea into reality. At the time, Cerf was an assistant professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford.

    It took the two of them six months to flesh out what they called the TCP, which provides networks with end-to-end reliability, error recovery, and congestion control. The TCP introduced the concept of IP addresses.

    After a decade of testing, the protocol suite was officially adopted by the ARPANET in 1983.

    That same year Kahn was promoted to director of the information processing techniques office. He launched several initiatives including the U.S. government’s Strategic Computing Program. It funded the development and implementation of multiprocessor computer architectures with major investments in natural language processing, speech understanding, image understanding, and expert systems.

    After 13 years at DARPA, Kahn left the organization in 1986 to launch the Corporation for National Research Initiatives.

    Together with Cerf, Kahn in 1992 founded the Internet Society, a nonprofit organization that helps set technical standards, develops Internet infrastructure, and advises policymakers.

    Kahn has received several recognitions for his work, including the 2004 Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. He also received the 1997 IEEE Alexander Graham Bell Medal together with Cerf.

    This article appears in the March 2024 print issue.

30. This Engineer’s Hardware Is Inspired by the Brain

    

    In work and in life, it’s easy to get stuck in your ways. That’s why Manan Suri has always looked to expand his horizons both professionally and personally.

    Growing up in India, he was used to transitions and new experiences because his family frequently moved around the country as his father relocated for his job as a chemical engineer. Traveling stuck with Suri in adulthood. He studied and worked in Dubai, the United States, France, and Belgium over the course of his twenties.

    Manan Suri

    Employer:

    Indian Institute of Technology Delhi

    Occupation:

    Associate professor and founder of Cyran AI Solutions, New Delhi

    Education:

    Bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical and computer engineering, both from Cornell; Ph.D. in nanoelectronics from the CEA-Leti research institute in Grenoble, France

    Eventually, Suri moved back to India to become an assistant professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. There he set up a research group focused on developing brain-inspired (neuromorphic) computer hardware for low-power devices like sensors, drones, and virtual-reality headsets. He is now an associate professor.

    He also launched a startup to commercialize his lab’s expertise: Cyran AI Solutions, based in New Delhi, works with companies and government agencies on a variety of projects. These include automating the inspection process for identifying defects in semiconductors and developing computer-vision systems to improve crop yields and analyze geospatial Earth-observation data.

    While balancing a career in academia and industry is challenging, Suri says, he relishes the opportunity to constantly learn.

    “Once I’ve figured out how a system works, I start getting bored,” he says.

    Suri, an IEEE member, believes that embracing change is a key ingredient for success. This is what has driven him to continually move on to new projects, push into new disciplines, and even move from country to country to experience a different way of life.

    “It accelerates your ability to learn new things,” he says. “It puts you on a fast trajectory and helps shed some of your inhibitions or get over the inertia in what you’re doing or how you’re living.”

    Inspired by Cornell’s semiconductor lab

    Growing up, Suri’s passion was physics, but he quickly realized he was drawn more to the practical applications than theory. This led to a fascination with electronics.

    In 2005 he initially enrolled at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, in India, and studied electronics and instrumentation at the institute’s campus in Dubai. After his second year, he transferred to Cornell, in Ithaca, N.Y. His first six months living in the United States, acclimating to a new culture and a different academic environment, were overwhelming, Suri says. What hooked him were Cornell’s high-end facilities available to students studying semiconductor engineering and nanofabrication—in particular, the industry-grade semiconductor clean rooms.

    He earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering in 2009 and a master’s degree in the same subject the following year.

    New skills in computational neuroscience

    After graduating, Suri received offers for Ph.D. positions in the United States and Europe to work on conventional electronics projects. But he didn’t want to get pigeonholed as a traditional semiconductor engineer. He was intrigued by an offer to study neuromorphic systems at the CEA-Leti research institute in Grenoble, France. He was also eager to broaden his life experience and get a taste of the European way of doing things.

    The work would push Suri to develop new skills in computational neuroscience and computer science. In 2010 he started a Ph.D. program in the institute’s Advanced Memory Technology Group. There he worked on low-power AI hardware that uses new kinds of nonvolatile memory to emulate how biological synapses process data. This involved using phase-change memory and conductive-bridging RAM to create neural networks for visual pattern extractionand auditory pattern sensitivity.

    Suri discovered that his experience with electronics allowed him to approach neuromorphic engineering problems from an entirely different angle than his colleagues had considered. Experts can develop fairly rigid and conventional ways of thinking about their own field, he says, but when those with different skill sets apply them to the same problems, it can often lead to more innovative thinking.

    “You bring a completely different perspective,” he says. “It leads to a lot of creativity.”

    Setting up his own research lab

    After finishing his doctorate in nanoelectronics, Suri got a job working on high-voltage transistors for automotive applications at the semiconductor designer NXP Semiconductors, in Brussels. Since his role was to take a project all the way from concept to fabrication, it was as close to pure research as he could get in industry. But as interesting as the work was, Suri says, he missed the intellectual freedom of academia.

    When the opportunity of setting up his own lab at IIT Delhi came along, he jumped at it. He had also been away from his home country for almost a decade and wanted to be closer to family and contribute to the Indian science and technology ecosystem, he says.

    “Most users don’t really care about what technology we are using. They just want functional performance at the most cost-effective price.”

    “Moving abroad was more a matter of collecting experiences and seeing how different places work,” he says.

    Suri’s group at IIT Delhi has made contributions to AI hardware, neuromorphic hardware, and hardware security. The group collaborates with industry research teams around the world, including Meta Reality Labs, Tata Consultancy Services, and GlobalFoundries.

    Launching a startup

    Despite returning to academia, Suri says he has always been interested in developing practical solutions to real-world challenges, and this goal has guided his research. Whatever project he works on, he always asks himself two questions: Will it solve a real problem? And will someone buy it?

    Suri launched his startup in 2018 to turn some of his lab’s work in AI and neuromorphic hardware into commercial products. Cyran AI Solutions’ customers hire the company to solve a range of problems. These have included computer-vision systems for detecting defects in computer chips; hyperspectral data-analysis algorithms designed to run in real time on chips for crop-inspection drones; and AI systems for small, low-power devices and challenging environments like satellites.

    Manan Suri and researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi’s lab designed this custom electrical test setup for the characterization of memory-computing chips.Manan Suri

    While Cyran makes use of its neuromorphic expertise for some problems, it often uses more mature and simpler-to-deploy machine-learning approaches.

    “Most users don’t really care about what technology we are using,” Suri says. “They just want functional performance at the most cost-effective price.”

    One of the biggest lessons Suri learned from running a startup is to consider the market being served. For earlier projects, he says, the company often devised a solution that was specific to just one customer’s needs and couldn’t be repurposed for other uses. To create a sustainable business, he realized he needed to develop generic solutions that could be deployed more broadly.

    “Running Cyran has been like [pursuing a] mini-MBA,” he says. “You need to really pay attention to the market aspects and not just the technology.”

    In 2018, MIT Technology Review named Suri one of its 35 Innovators Under 35 for his work on neuromorphic computing.

    The need to be hands-on

    Keeping a foot in both academia and industry can be challenging, Suri says. Facing resource crunches, whether in time, staffing, or funding, is common. The only way he’s able to manage things is to plan extensively and remain nimble, building in contingencies.

    If you can manage it, Suri says, having your fingers in many pies can have major benefits. In particular, working on problems that bridge several disciplines can help you break out of rigid thinking and come up with novel solutions.

    It’s not possible to dedicate equal amounts of time to learning every area, he says, so he advises up-and-coming engineers to carefully pick the topics that are most likely to advance their progress. It’s also crucial to dive in and get your hands dirty, rather than focusing on theory, initially.

    “Take the plunge and try and figure it out,” he recommends. “As the problem unravels, then you can start getting into the theory or the more formal aspects of the project. You also start to appreciate learning more about the theory as it gets more hands-on.”