IEEE Foundation President Boosts Support for Future Engineers

Marko Delimar has been a proponent of empowering the next generation of engineers, scientists, and technologists since he was an undergraduate engineering student at the University of Zagreb, in Croatia. The IEEE senior member now mentors undergraduate and graduate students at his alma mater, where he is a professor of electrical engineering and computing.

IEEE has played a key role in his quest to provide students with the support they need, he says.

Marko Delimar

Employer:

University of Zagreb, in Croatia

Title:

Professor of electrical engineering and computing

Member grade:

Senior member

Alma mater:

University of Zagreb

Throughout his 30 years of volunteering, Delimar has worked to build a community for students. He founded the University of Zagreb’s IEEE student branch and later became its chair. He went on to become the branch’s counselor and a member of the IEEE Croatia Section’s student activities committee. He has held numerous IEEE leadership positions, and he served on the organization’s Board of Directors.

To engage more student members and help connect student branches worldwide, he helped found the IEEEXtreme programming competition, an annual, 24-hour virtual contest in which teams compete to solve computer coding problems.

He is continuing his mission as the 2025 president of the IEEE Foundation, focusing on how the organization’s charitable partner can help students and young professionals prosper. Thanks to donations, the Foundation is able to fund scholarships, research and travel grants, and fellowships in partnership with IEEE societies and sections.

“Supporting IEEE programs is something that I’m very proud of,” Delimar says. His goals as president, he says, are to increase awareness of the Foundation’s donor-supported programs and to persuade more people to support its causes.

Supporting the next generation of engineers

After learning about IEEE from several of his professors who were members, Delimar joined the organization in 1994 during his second year at the University of Zagreb. But without a student branch at the school, there was no local community for student members. That year he successfully petitioned IEEE to establish the first student branch in Croatia. He served as its chair until he graduated with his EE bachelor’s degree in 1996.

Through his involvement, he was simultaneously “learning about the organization and volunteering,” he says, adding that it helped him better understand IEEE.

After graduating, he joined his alma mater as a teaching assistant and researcher. He was later hired as a faculty member. He also conducted research in power engineering under his former professor, IEEE Senior Member Zdravko Hebel, who is known for his work on the Croatian power transmission network.

Delimar continued to volunteer, serving as chair of student activities for the IEEE Croatia Section until 2001. He also was the counselor for the student branch.

“For me, IEEE Foundation Day highlights how the IEEE Foundation is more than a charitable organization—it is the heart of IEEE’s philanthropic efforts, where generosity meets impact.”

Within four years of his guidance, “the branch was collaborating with other branches in not only Region 8 [Europe, Middle East, and Africa] but also around the world,” he says. He decided it was time to spread his wings, and he began volunteering for the region.

His first position was as the 2005–2006 vice chair of the IEEE Region 8 student activities committee, which is responsible for student programs and benefits. At the time, IEEE was having trouble retaining student members, he says.

“Students would graduate and not renew their membership,” he says. “There was also an issue with some of the student branches, as they were not communicating well or collaborating with each other.”

Delimar and IEEE Member Ricardo Varela, who was also on the committee, brainstormed how to better engage students and increase their participation. The two men wanted to create an event that would allow students across the world to participate at the same time.

“It sounded like a very crazy idea,” he says, “because it’s nighttime for one half of the world and daytime for the other half. You can’t even hold a meeting at the same time everywhere, let alone an activity.”

To overcome the time-zone issue, Delimar and Varela devised a 24-hour competition on programming, which was popular among engineering students at the time, Delimar says. Having the contest take place over 24 hours ensured all participants were on equal footing, he says.

Forty teams participated in the first IEEE Xtreme competition, which was held in October 2006. It has since grown in popularity. Last year nearly 8,800 teams from 75 countries participated.

Although he’s not involved in the contest anymore, Delimar says he’s proud of its success.

In 2007 he became vice chair of the IEEE Region 8 membership activities committee, which plans events for members. He was then elected as the 2010–2011 Region 8 director, and in 2013 he became IEEE secretary. Both are Board-level positions.

“Being a part of the IEEE Board of Directors gave me the opportunity to learn about and serve on several interesting committees that were trying to reach particular goals at the time, such as increasing member engagement, improving training for new IEEE officers, and refining IEEE’s ability to quickly adapt to the fast-changing environment,” Delimar says.

His time on the board inspired him to advocate for the formation of an ad hoc committee on European public policy activities. He served as its chair, and in 2018 it became a permanent committee. Renamed the IEEE European Public Policy Committee, it supports members of the European Union and European Free Trade Association in developing technology-related policies. Delimar was its chair until 2020.

“IEEE has been able to provide a united, unbiased voice of what is good for technology and what is good for Europe,” he says. “It has been very well received by the European Commission.”

In 2016 Pedro Ray, the 2010 IEEE president, asked Delimar to be a volunteer for the IEEE Foundation, and he joined the board the next year.

“It’s been a very rewarding experience,” he says.

Leading the IEEE Foundation

Delimar says that his main goal as president is to increase awareness among IEEE members of the Foundation and its programs.

“The Foundation supports more than 250 funds and programs, and I want to strengthen its connections and partnerships across IEEE,” he says.

To accomplish that goal, the Foundation has been raising its visibility. In 2023 it celebrated its 50th anniversary with a reception in New York City. Other celebratory activities were held that year at the IEEE Vision, Innovation, and Challenges Summit and Honors Ceremony and the IEEE Power & Energy Society General Meeting.

Last year the Foundation established 16 February as IEEE Foundation Day. The annual celebration marks the day in 1973 when the philanthropic organization was launched. The inaugural event was designed to reflect the Foundation’s vision of being the heart of IEEE’s charitable giving. This year’s celebration focused on students and young professionals, highlighting beneficiaries of scholarships, grants, and fellowships and the impact they have had on the recipients.

“For me, IEEE Foundation Day highlights how the IEEE Foundation is more than a charitable organization—it is the heart of IEEE’s philanthropic efforts, where generosity meets impact,” Delimar says. “Our donor-supported programs—like scholarships, travel grants, awards, research grants, and competitions—are more than financial support for our students and young professionals; they are catalysts for making dreams come true.”

He says he wants to engage members who aren’t typically donors and thus expand the Foundation’s reach.

“I want to enable people with different professional journeys, economic backgrounds, cultures, and geography to be able to participate as donors for the IEEE Foundation,” he says. “Every donor—whether they are a student, young professional, or IEEE life member—is important.”

Visit the IEEE Foundation website to discover upcoming events, learn ways to make a gift, and see how the organization’s charitable efforts are making an impact.

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OpenAI’s new AI image generator is potent and bound to provoke

The arrival of OpenAI's DALL-E 2 in the spring of 2022 marked a turning point in AI when text-to-image generation suddenly became accessible to a select group of users, creating a community of digital explorers who experienced wonder and controversy as the technology automated the act of visual creation.

But like many early AI systems, DALL-E 2 struggled with consistent text rendering, often producing garbled words and phrases within images. It also had limitations in following complex prompts with multiple elements, sometimes missing key details or misinterpreting instructions. These shortcomings left room for improvement that OpenAI would address in subsequent iterations, such as DALL-E 3 in 2023.

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced new multimodal image generation capabilities that are directly integrated into its GPT-4o AI language model, making it the default image generator within the ChatGPT interface. The integration, called "4o Image Generation" (which we'll call "4o IG" for short), allows the model to follow prompts more accurately (with better text rendering than DALL-E 3) and respond to chat context for image modification instructions.

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Improve Your Chances of Landing That Job Interview

IEEE Spectrum is rebooting our careers newsletter! In partnership with tech career development company Taro, every issue will be bringing you deeper insight into how to pursue your goals and navigate professional challenges. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies delivered to your inbox for free.

One of my close friends is a hiring manager at Google. She recently posted about an open position on her team and was immediately overwhelmed with applications. We’re talking about thousands of applicants within days.

What surprised me most, however, was the horrendous quality of the average submission. Most applicants were obviously unqualified or had concocted entirely fake profiles. The use of generative AI to automatically fill out (and, in some cases, even submit) applications is harmful to everyone; employers are unable to filter through the noise, and legitimate candidates have a harder time getting noticed—much less advancing to an interview.

This problem exists even for companies that don’t have the magnetism of the Google brand. Recruiting is a numbers game with slim odds. As AI becomes increasingly mainstream, the job search can feel downright impossible.

So how can job seekers stand out among the deluge of candidates? When there are hundreds or thousands of applicants, the best way to distinguish yourself is by leveraging your network.

With AI, anyone with a computer can trivially apply to thousands of jobs. On the other hand, people are restricted by Dunbar’s number—the idea that humans can only maintain stable social relationships with about 150 people. Being one of those 150 people is harder, but it also carries more weight than a soulless job application.

A referral from a trusted connection immediately elevates you as a promising candidate. Your goal, therefore, is to aggressively pursue opportunities based on people you’ve worked with.

A strong referral has two benefits:

1. Your profile gets increased visibility.
2. You “borrow” the credibility of the person who gave a vote of confidence.

So how do you get one of these coveted referrals? Start with groups you’re part of that have a well-defined admission criteria. Most commonly, this will be your university or workplace. Engage with university alumni working in interesting roles, or reconnect with an ex-colleague to see what they’re up to.

Good luck out there!
—Rahul

ICYMI: Despite 2024 Layoffs, Tech Jobs Expected to Take Off

In 2024, the technology sector saw massive cuts in 2022 and 2023. Despite these numbers, however, engineers seem to be doing just fine. U.S. employment for electrical engineers is expected to grow 9 percent from 2023 to 2033, compared with 4 percent for all occupations. And the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, revealed that technology-related roles are the fastest-growing categories globally, with the most rapid growth in demand anticipated for big data specialists, financial-technology engineers, AI specialists, and software developers. Read more at https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-jobs

ICYMI: Electric Vehicles Made These Engineers Expendable

When veteran Wall Street Journal reporter Mike Colias began writing about the automotive industry in 2010, the internal-combustion engine still served as the beating heart of legacy carmakers. Since then, the hard pivot to electric vehicles has sidelined engine design and upended a century of internal order at these companies. Colias has observed the transformation, and the recent detour back to plug-in hybrids, from a front-row seat in Detroit. Read an excerpt from his new book Inevitable: Inside the Messy, Unstoppable Transition to Electric Vehicles that tells the tale of one power-train engineer at Ford whose internal-combustion-engine expertise slowly became expendable.

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5 Ways Women Can Advance Their Careers in Tech

In my career, I’ve often been the only woman in a room full of men, a situation all too common in tech-related fields. From the start of my engineering journey, I was among a handful of women in my graduate program. This trend continued when I began my first software engineering job as the only woman on my team, and eight years later, I remain a minority in the tech world.

Women currently comprise about 35 percent of the technical workforce. This statistic highlights the ongoing challenge of gender disparity in tech, where women have historically been underrepresented. And the gap becomes even more pronounced in leadership roles, with women making up only about 25 percent of CEOs in the technology sector, according to one report.

While the gender gap remains, many women have successful careers in tech. With these five actionable tips, women can take charge and own their space in the engineering world.

Negotiate Your Compensation with Confidence

Women engineers in the United States earn about 10 percent less than their male counterparts in similar roles. When I started my career, I believed that as long as I worked on solving the problems I enjoyed, my compensation didn’t really matter. But over time, I realized this mindset is flawed. Compensation isn’t just about money. It reflects your value and contributions to a company.

Salary negotiation can feel daunting, especially if you feel uncertain about what’s fair or struggle to articulate your worth. But this is your chance to own your value.

The first step in negotiating your salary is learning your market value. Websites like Glassdoor and Levels.fyi provide salary insights based on data from employees in similar roles. They’re excellent starting points to get a sense of base salaries, bonuses, stock options, and other compensation factors.

Your network can provide another valuable source of information. Ask trusted friends or colleagues working at similar companies what someone with your experience would typically be paid. Phrasing the question as a hypothetical avoids putting anyone on the spot to disclose their salary, while still giving you helpful information. Once you clearly understand your market worth, you are in a solid position to negotiate your compensation, whether switching jobs or discussing a raise with your current employer.

If you are in the midst of a job switch and have received an offer, you’ve already proven your value to the new company. The hiring team has invested significant time and resources in the interview process and is eager to bring you onboard. They’re often willing to negotiate at this point, but it’s essential to know when you have leverage. One of the best times to negotiate is when you have more than one offer or are approaching the final rounds of interviews with other companies. This creates a healthy competition for your skills.

There are also ways to prepare if you’re approaching a compensation cycle in your current company. Start early: Begin conversations with your boss three to five months before you expect changes, as compensation is often finalized months ahead. You should also know your company’s policies; some employers may increase salary, while others focus on benefits or long-term career growth. Compensation isn’t just salary—stock and bonuses also matter. When you’re ready, talk to your manager confidently and with the right data. A good manager will appreciate your asking for what you deserve.

Postdoctoral researcher Caitlin McCowan adjusts a customized scanning tunneling microscope. Craig Fritz

Don’t Attribute Your Success to Gender

When organizations are committed to advancing diversity, studies suggest that the public tends to perceive women’s promotions as driven less by their intelligence and effort, and more by their gender. If those perceptions also prevail within their company, women might be told they have an unfair advantage. These types of remarks can make it easy to start questioning, for example, whether you have truly earned a promotion.

If you’re encountering such attitudes, you can instead embrace your accomplishments and take ownership of the work that led to them. Keeping a “brag list” to record your achievements and strengths can serve as a reminder of your true capabilities. This list can include concrete results or milestones you’ve reached through effort and skill, as well as personal qualities that contribute to your success.

Creating a brag list isn’t about feeding your ego. It’s about reminding yourself of the hard work you’ve put in and acknowledging that you belong because of your talents.

Nandu Koripally [front] and Lulu Yao work with a structural supercapacitor developed by UC San Diego engineers.David Baillot/UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

Open Doors That Are Closed to You

If a door isn’t open to you, it doesn’t mean you don’t belong on the other side. I’m often surprised by how much women miss out on simply because we don’t ask about the opportunities that interest us. If you think you’re capable of an opportunity, clearly express interest to your manager.

When you approach them, explain the type of opportunity you seek, such as leading a project or transitioning to a new role. Then highlight your strengths by connecting your request to your previous successes. This shows that you’ve delivered in the past and are ready for the next step. Identifying where you can add value will also make your request more compelling. If you see a gap or area for improvement, frame your request around how you can help the team or organization.

If the opportunity isn’t immediately available, ask for feedback on your readiness and how to prepare for future opportunities. This shows you’re eager to learn and improve. Follow up regularly to express your continued interest as well.

Paula Kirya, a mechanical engineering graduate student at UC San Diego, studies light-manipulating micro- and nanostructures on Morpho butterfly wings to assess the level of fibrosis in cancer biopsy samples.David Baillot/UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

Practice Authentic Leadership

As women, we often possess leadership traits that differ from what’s expected of men. These are shaped by societal expectations, cultural influences, and workplace dynamics that historically defined leadership in a particular way. The traits that are often associated with women can be viewed negatively in leadership due to gender biases.

I’ve worked with many highly empathetic women who would make excellent leaders. However, they may be perceived as weak because traditional leadership norms prioritize assertiveness and authority over emotional intelligence. Traits like fostering relationships shouldn’t be seen as weaknesses simply because they don’t fit traditional leadership molds. Rather, these qualities can bring a different approach to leadership.

It can be helpful to create a Venn diagram highlighting your strengths, improvement areas, and the overlap between them. This process may reveal characteristics that aren’t necessarily flaws but, when harnessed effectively, can become strengths. By recognizing these traits and being intentional in their application, you can transform them into key advantages in your leadership style.

You don’t need to conform to a specific image of what leadership should look like. Instead, practice authentic leadership by providing guidance in a way that’s true to you.

See Yourself as a Leader

My final piece of advice is a simple one: Leadership isn’t just for other people—it’s for you, too. When my manager first asked if I would like to take on a new role as the team lead, I was thrilled. But when I went home, self-doubt and anxiety clouded my excitement. The image I had of a technical leader was that of a man, and I couldn’t envision myself in that role at first. Over time, however, I changed that mental image.

Start visualizing yourself as a leader in your organization, regardless of your current position. Leadership is less about title and more about mindset. Take initiative, lead by example, and make decisions that contribute to your team’s success. When you start thinking and acting like a leader, others will also begin to see you that way.

Navigating the tech industry as a woman can be challenging, but it’s important to recognize and embrace your value. By confidently negotiating compensation, attributing your success to your skills, asking about new opportunities, embracing authentic leadership, and seeing yourself as a leader, you can carve out your space in the engineering world. These strategies will not only empower you, but contribute to a more inclusive and diverse tech industry.

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Broadcom’s VMware says Siemens pirated “thousands” of copies of its software

VMware is suing the US arm of industrial giant AG Siemens. The Broadcom company claims that Siemens outed itself by revealing to VMware that it downloaded and distributed multiple copies of VMware products without buying a license.

VMware filed the lawsuit (PDF) on March 21 in the US District Court for the District of Delaware, as spotted by The Register.

In the complaint, VMware says that it has had a Master Software License and Service Agreement with Siemens since November 28, 2012. The virtualization company claims that in September, Siemens sent VMware a purchase order for maintenance and support services. Siemens was reportedly looking to exercise a previously agreed-upon option for a one-year renewal of support services. However, the list of VMware technology that Siemens was seeking support for "included a large number of products for which [VMware] had no record of Siemens AG purchasing a license," the complaint says.

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Devs say AI crawlers dominate traffic, forcing blocks on entire countries

Software developer Xe Iaso reached a breaking point earlier this year when aggressive AI crawler traffic from Amazon overwhelmed their Git repository service, repeatedly causing instability and downtime. Despite configuring standard defensive measures—adjusting robots.txt, blocking known crawler user-agents, and filtering suspicious traffic—Iaso found that AI crawlers continued evading all attempts to stop them, spoofing user-agents and cycling through residential IP addresses as proxies.

Desperate for a solution, Iaso eventually resorted to moving their server behind a VPN and creating "Anubis," a custom-built proof-of-work challenge system that forces web browsers to solve computational puzzles before accessing the site. "It's futile to block AI crawler bots because they lie, change their user agent, use residential IP addresses as proxies, and more," Iaso wrote in a blog post titled "a desperate cry for help." "I don't want to have to close off my Gitea server to the public, but I will if I have to."

Iaso's story highlights a broader crisis rapidly spreading across the open source community, as what appear to be aggressive AI crawlers increasingly overload community-maintained infrastructure, causing what amounts to persistent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on vital public resources. According to a comprehensive recent report from LibreNews, some open source projects now see as much as 97 percent of their traffic originating from AI companies' bots, dramatically increasing bandwidth costs, service instability, and burdening already stretched-thin maintainers.

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AlphaXiv Wants to Be the Public Square for Scientific Discourse

There is an inherent tension in the dissemination of research. On one hand, science thrives on openness and communication. On the other, ensuring high-quality scientific work requires peer reviews that are often lengthy and closed. In 1991, physicist Paul Ginsparg created the arXiv repository to alleviate some of that tension. The idea is that researchers have a place to upload their preprint manuscripts before they are published in a journal. The preprints are free to all but have not undergone peer review (there is some screening).

However, arXiv doesn’t facilitate open, two-way discussion. Now, two Stanford students have developed an extension of arXiv that creates a centralized public square, of sorts, for researchers to discuss preprints. IEEE Spectrum spoke with one of the two, Rehaan Ahmad, about the project.

​Rehaan Ahmad

Rehaan Ahmad is the cofounder of alphaXiv, which he began as an undergraduate project while at Stanford University, alongside fellow student Raj Palleti.

How does alphaXiv work?

Rehaan Ahmad: You can change the “arXiv” in the URL to “alphaXiv,” and it opens up the paper and there’s comments and discussion. You can highlight sections and leave in-line comments. There’s also a more general home page where you can see what papers other people are reading through the site. It ends up being a nice way to filter for what papers are interesting and what aren’t.

What motivated you to create the site?

Ahmad: My cocreator Raj Palleti and I were undergrads at Stanford doing research in robotics and reinforcement learning. We figured a lot of people would have questions on papers, like us. So I put together a little mock-up two or three years ago. It was just sitting on my computer for a while. And then a year afterward I showed it to Raj, and he said we need to make this a public site. We thought of it as a version of Stack Overflow for papers.

How difficult was it to build?

Ahmad: Surprisingly difficult! Our background is in research, and one of the harder lessons for this project is that writing research code versus actual code that works are two different things. For research code, you write something once, you put it on GitHub, no one will use it—and if they do, it’s their problem to figure out. But here, the site has been around for a year and a half, and only recently have a lot of the bugs been kind of hashed out. The project started out on a single AWS server, and anytime someone would post about it, it would go viral, and the server would go down.

How do you hope alphaXiv will be used?

Ahmad: I see alphaXiv as just connecting the world of research in a way that’s more productive than Twitter [now X]. People find mistakes in papers here; people will read their opinions. I have been seeing more productive discussions with the authors.

Your advisors include Udacity cofounder Sebastian Thrun and Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun. How have your advisors contributed?

Ahmad: After the first few months of operating alphaXiv, we circulated a lot within the computer-science community. But after discussing the platform with [University of Maryland physics professor] Victor Galitski, we realized having his voice and opinion to guide decisions that were relevant to the physics community would be incredibly important. Those interested in computer-science papers are usually more interested in the trending/likes/filtering aspect of our site, whereas those interested in physics are usually more discussion-oriented.

This article appears in the April 2025 issue as “5 Questions for Rehaan Ahmad.”

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