technology 24 for you

Monday, October 12, 2026

Meet the Anthropic Engineer Keeping Its AI Agent Trustworthy

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/an-indian-man-in-a-dress-shirt-smiling-in-front-of-the-entrance-to-an-office-building.jpg?id=68416593&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C469%2C0%2C469"/> If you’ve ever wondered how <a href="https://claude.ai" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Claude</a> and similar AI agents can answer complex questions in seconds and where they get the information, you’re not alone.<a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/gurmeetsaran" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Gurmeet Saran</a> works to find that answer every day as an engineer at <a href="https://www.anthropic.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Anthropic</a> in San Francisco, the AI research company behind Claude. The IEEE senior member is developing an infrastructure to understand the mechanics behind the chatbot’s behavior and to ensure its underlying architecture produces reliable outputs.<h3>Gurmeet Saran</h3> Employer Anthropic in San FranciscoTitle Member of technical staffMember grade IEEE senior memberAlma maters University of Kalyani, in India; Birla Institute of Technology and Science, in Pilani, India “My job is to make sure the data is accurate, structured, and trustworthy, and that private data stays private,” he says. “As I learned earlier in my career, privacy can’t be a layer you bolt on—it has to be part of the architecture from the start.” If you can’t trust the logic, he adds, you can’t make reliable claims about the behavior, and that has real safety implications.Safety is a priority for Anthropic, he says. According to Claude’s <a href="https://www.anthropic.com/constitution" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">mission statement</a>, the company wants the AI agent to be “genuinely helpful to the people it works with or on behalf of, as well as to society, while avoiding actions that are unsafe, unethical, or deceptive.” Crucial to the mission is ensuring that researchers can observe and understand how AI models behave, a challenge that is especially acute for <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/large-language-models-ieee-course" target="_self">large language models</a>, Saran says.“We have decent tools to monitor databases and web services,” he says, “but for LLMs, we’re still figuring it out.”<h2>Solving data quality problems at Yahoo, Intuit, and Meta</h2>Saran’s interest in computing systems dates back to his childhood in Kolkata, where he logged as much time as he could in the school computer lab.“I remember the first time I used one of the computers,” he says. “What struck me was that you could write instructions, and the machine would follow them exactly. No ambiguity.“That felt magical to me.”After graduating from high school in 1999, he stayed in India to pursue advanced degrees. He earned a bachelor’s degree in electronics and telecommunication engineering in 2004 at the <a href="https://klyuniv.ac.in/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">University of Kalyani</a>. In 2010, he earned a master’s degree in software engineering from the <a href="https://www.bits-pilani.ac.in/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Birla Institute of Technology and Science</a> in Pilani.While a graduate student, he began his career in 2007 at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Yahoo</a> as a technical lead of the data team in Bengaluru, India. While there, he encountered the project that shaped his career trajectory: working on web analytics and business intelligence reporting solutions.“We kept running into a frustrating problem,” he recalls. “Different teams would calculate the same website metric—something like daily active site users—using slightly different logic, and end up with conflicting answers. It sounds like a small issue, but when leadership is making decisions about resource allocation and product development using that data, not knowing which number is correct becomes a problem.”The team built a central data repository with defined metrics, essentially serving as a single source of truth. Saran created a model that defined what “daily active site users” means, breaking down which events counted, how to handle edge cases (or when standard code fails), and more.With the new model, data teams across the company could rely on a standard method to determine the number of daily active users for the projects and sites they were responsible for and obtain comparable results using the same logic.From there, Saran and his team built <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262286424_Yahoo_Digits_A_Design_Driven_to_Provide_Instant_%27Data_Driven_Insights%27_and_its_Use_in_User_Experience_Design" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Yahoo! Digits</a>, an internal web analytics tool used for all the company’s products.Saran left Yahoo in 2010 to join <a href="https://www.intuit.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Intuit</a> as a staff engineer in Mountain View, Calif. He helped build the analytics infrastructure that unified data across the company’s products, including <a href="https://turbotax.intuit.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">TurboTax</a> and <a href="https://quickbooks.intuit.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">QuickBooks</a> accounting software. During his tenure, Intuit developed a feature that detected fraudulent tax filings in real time. It required Saran and other engineers to build a system to protect taxpayer data while adhering to strict U.S. <a href="https://www.irs.gov/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Internal Revenue Service</a> policies.“IEEE operates in a lot of countries where engineers don’t have easy pathways into the global professional community. That kind of connection matters as AI development spreads beyond a handful of organizations.”“This taught me that privacy and governance can’t be layers you bolt onto software after the fact,” he says. “They have to be part of the architecture from the start.”Saran joined <a href="https://www.meta.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Meta</a> (known as Facebook at the time) in 2016 as a lead software engineer in Menlo Park, Calif. The company was facing controversy over its video metrics: Meta publicly acknowledged an error that caused it to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/24/business/media/facebook-apologizes-for-overstating-video-metrics.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">overstate the number of views for posted videos</a>.“This wasn’t a coding bug; it was an architectural problem,” Saran says. He built a system that worked similarly to what he had developed at Intuit, whereby one single truth was defined to govern all video view metrics across the site.That system, <a href="https://metrics360.ai/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Metric360</a>, eventually became part of the site’s architecture. By the time he left Meta in 2021, he says, Metric360 was being used across the company to calculate video metrics.He left the company to become a principal software engineer at <a href="https://www.wealthfront.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Wealthfront</a>, a financial services company in Palo Alto, Calif. He helped build the company’s data infrastructure.<h2>Building trustworthy AI systems at Anthropic</h2>Saran joined Anthropic in 2025 as a member of the technical staff.To describe the implications of his work, he uses a medical analogy: “Imagine a doctor is monitoring a patient’s vital signs and making treatment decisions based on those numbers. What if one or a few of the medical devices used were slightly miscalibrated? Even if most readings are fine, it’s a serious problem because the difficult decisions happen in the margins.“It’s the same with AI systems. My job is essentially to make sure the instruments are giving accurate readings—that the data means what it says it means.”His job comes with high stakes and complex problems to solve.“<a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-agent-security" target="_self">AI agents</a> are especially tricky to observe,” he says. “When a system is taking sequences of actions [generating conversational responses with different users], you need a way to capture what it did, what information it was working from, and whether outcomes matched what the end user expected. And you have to do all of that without exposing anyone’s private information—the systems are designed to recognize sensitive data and keep it protected as it flows through. It’s a much more demanding observability problem than anything I’ve worked on before.”Solving for system reliability while AI is still in its early days of adoption is both Saran’s passion and the problem that keeps him up at night, he says.“I think making AI systems genuinely auditable and transparent is one of the more important engineering problems of the next decade,” he says, “and it doesn’t get talked about as much as model capabilities do.”<h2>IEEE can play a role in shaping AI development</h2>Saran joined IEEE in March 2025.“After more than 20 years of building data infrastructure across organizations like Yahoo, Intuit, Meta, and Wealthfront,” he says, “I wanted to contribute back to the technical community through peer review, publishing, and engaging with the broader engineering research ecosystem.”He says he believes <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ieee-ai-training-mini-mba" target="_self">IEEE can play an essential role</a> in shaping the future of AI through its <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ieee-ai-3119-standards" target="_self">standards work</a>.“We have standards for everything, from building codes to software testing,” he says. “AI infrastructure needs something similar, and IEEE has the credibility and the reach to do that.”Another problem that IEEE can solve for, he says, is access: “IEEE operates in a lot of countries where engineers don’t have easy pathways into the global professional community. That kind of connection matters, especially as AI development spreads beyond a handful of organizations in a few cities.” Reference: https://ift.tt/HtozOTm

First Utility-Scale Enhanced Geothermal Plant Goes Live

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/large-industrial-structure-in-the-desert-with-4-rows-of-16-large-fans.jpg?id=68403579&width=2000&height=1500&coordinates=10%2C0%2C10%2C0"/> This article was originally published by <a href="https://www.canarymedia.com/subscribe-to-our-newsletters" target="_blank">Canary Media</a>.The geothermal startup <a href="https://fervoenergy.com/" target="_blank">Fervo Energy</a> is now selling power to the grid from its Cape Station project in Utah — marking the first time a utility-scale, next-generation geothermal facility has achieved such a feat worldwide. The Houston-based firm <a href="https://fervoenergy.com/fervo-energy-achieves-first-power-at-cape-station-a-landmark-moment-for-the-future-of-enhanced-geothermal-systems/" target="_blank">turned on</a> an initial 33-megawatt unit late last week and has been testing and ramping up output since then. On Thursday, Fervo will officially begin commercial operations, supplying carbon-free electricity to Shell Energy, a retail power provider in California. Cape Station, a $2 billion project that will eventually be 500 MW, is unique among the world’s commercial geothermal plants. While other facilities draw on naturally occurring hot water and steam, Fervo has engineered its own geothermal resource deep underground. The startup uses drilling techniques from the oil and gas industry to create reservoirs in hot, dry rocks that generate steam to produce electricity. “Traditional geothermal would have never been done in southern Utah,” says <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/geodawn/" target="_blank">Dawn Owens</a>, Fervo’s senior vice president and head of development and commercial markets. With the first unit online, Fervo says it is working to commission two more 33-MW power blocks by 1 January, 2027. The project’s remaining 400 MW — which is supported by a <a href="https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/geothermal/fervo-google-deal-next-gen-geothermal" target="_blank">new agreement with Google</a> — is under construction and slated to come online in 2028. <h2>Fervo’s Next-Generation Geothermal Journey</h2>Fervo already operates a 3.5-MW commercial pilot plant in Nevada, which <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/geothermal-energy" target="_blank">went online</a> in late 2023. Owens says the pilot, called Project Red, was important for demonstrating the technology itself. But firing up Cape Station proves that Fervo’s approach can achieve utility scale and export power to wider markets. “This is massive for both Fervo and the geothermal industry at large,” she says. Fervo, which <a href="https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/geothermal/fervo-energy-ipo-milestone" target="_blank">went public</a> in May, is leading the fast-growing movement to develop clean, always-on geothermal power to meet soaring demand from data centers and balance growing supplies of intermittent solar and wind energy. <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/advanced-geothermal-germany" target="_blank">Next-generation geothermal firms</a> have <a href="https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/geothermal/chart-global-investment-clean-energy" target="_blank">raised billions</a> of dollars in private capital in recent years to develop and deploy technologies that can harness energy in harsh, deep environments. <img alt="A tall, thin scaffold surrounded by tanks protrudes from the desert " class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="0edb7641a89e3180a4325edd10c3144b" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="dd69a" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-tall-thin-scaffold-surrounded-by-tanks-protrudes-from-the-desert.jpg?id=68403069&width=980"/> Drilling continues at Fervo Energy’s Cape Station geothermal plant in Beaver County, Utah, where the company plans to ramp up production to 500 MW. Fervo EnergyToday, geothermal represents just 0.4 percent of total U.S. electricity generation every year. Expanding geothermal’s share of the mix will require not just building more projects like Cape Station but also tackling high upfront drilling costs and <a href="https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/geothermal/geothermal-big-potential-states" target="_blank">other economic and regulatory barriers</a> — all while working to <a href="https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/geothermal/next-generation-geothermal-technology-revolution" target="_blank">limit potential impacts</a> on communities and the environment, experts say. “Fervo’s first power achievement shows investors the size and scale of the opportunity to fuel many more such milestones across developers and sites in the future,” says <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/mitchellsmithb/" target="_blank">Mitchell Smith</a>, who serves as grid lead for the Mountain West Geothermal Consortium. The <a href="https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/geothermal/geothermal-energy-boost-western-governors" target="_blank">bipartisan initiative</a> is calling for increased public and private financing “to help bring more projects online responsibly and at the speed of demand,” he added. <h2>Enhanced Geothermal Energy Gets Cheaper</h2>Fervo has declined to disclose the terms of its power purchase agreements for in-progress and future development, which together represent about 1,000 MW, or enough to power roughly 1 million U.S. homes every year. Phase 1 of Cape Station is set to deliver power at $7,000 per kilowatt, while Phase 2 should come at $5,500 per kilowatt, the company <a href="https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/geothermal/fervo-energy-ipo-milestone" target="_blank">previously told</a> Canary Media. (By comparison, the average cost to build a natural gas–fired power plant was <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-23/cost-to-build-natural-gas-fired-power-plant-surges-66-bnef-says" target="_blank">$2,157 per kilowatt </a>in 2025.) Along with slashing drilling costs, enhanced geothermal projects could improve their economics by delivering power when it’s most valuable to utilities, <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-023-01437-y" target="_blank">according to researchers</a>. While geothermal plants traditionally provide around-the-clock, baseload power, next-generation facilities might operate flexibly during certain periods — like in the evening, when solar output declines — to reduce overall grid costs. Geothermal plants could also operate “behind the meter” to directly power data centers, so that the costs of adding new electricity capacity aren’t passed on to utility customers, Owens says. “We’ve been saying all along that our technology makes geothermal more scalable and affordable in more places,” she says. On Cape Station’s powering-up, she adds, “That’s just something no next-generation geothermal company has ever been able to do before.” Reference: https://ift.tt/Lnsp27E

Learning to Play Like a Pro: Adaptive Motion Planning and Tracking for Humanoid Robots

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/noitom-robotics-logo-with-stylized-nr-on-transparent-background.png?id=68382463&width=980"/> This White Paper provides roboticists and control engineers with a comprehensive overview of how motion planning and motion tracking can be decoupled to preserve professional athletic style in humanoid robots, and why adaptive, speed-aware control is essential for closing the gap between simulation and real-world deployment.What you will learn about: <ul><li>Why combining a professional athlete’s motion style with reliable task performance remains an open challenge in humanoid ball-sports robotics, and how separating a high-level planner from a low-level tracker addresses this trade-off.</li><li>How motion data extracted from broadcast video and motion-capture recordings can be reconstructed, retargeted, and physically corrected into reference motions a humanoid robot can safely track.</li><li>Why the sim-to-real transition introduces compounding tracking errors, and how training a tracker on randomized execution speeds, paired with a learned motion-speed adapter in the planner, improves robustness on physical hardware.</li><li>How this adaptive framework was validated across two humanoid platforms, including full-size, in-the-wild serving performed without any motion-capture system.</li></ul><div><a href="https://content.knowledgehub.wiley.com/learning-to-play-like-a-pro-adaptive-motion-planning-and-tracking-for-humanoid-robots/" target="_blank">Download this free whitepaper now!</a></div> Reference: https://ift.tt/KvTmrF3

Friday, October 9, 2026

PC shipments fall 20.1 percent in “sharpest decline” since Q1 2023

PC shipments saw a steep drop of about 20 percent in Q3 2026, analysts reported this week. The industry saw its “sharpest decline since “Q1 2023," Omdia said in an announcement toady. Global shipments of laptops, desktops, and workstations fell 21.2 percent year over year (YoY) to 58.1 million devices, the analyst said. Desktop PC shipments (including desktop workstations) decreased 23.5 percent to 11.7 million units, and laptop shipments (including laptop workstations) declined 20.6 percent to 46.4 million, per Omdia.<a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/10/pc-shipments-fall-20-1-percent-in-sharpest-decline-since-q1-2023/">Read full article</a> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/10/pc-shipments-fall-20-1-percent-in-sharpest-decline-since-q1-2023/#comments">Comments</a> Reference : https://ift.tt/MAfZg83

We Need to Embed Ethics Into Our Engineering Courses

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/student-with-backpack-holding-a-map-before-entering-space-between-giant-circuit-boards.jpg?id=68389516&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C62%2C0%2C63"/> In mid-September, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei joined a growing group of researchers calling for the AI industry to slow down. While <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/13/technology/silicon-valley-ai-slowdown.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">some have questioned these researchers’ motivation</a> for <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/09/technology/anthropic-researchers-raise-alarm.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">voicing concerns</a> about the rapid pace of development, the plea highlighted a key tension between safety and speed. The underlying problem is not simply a technical error, but a sociotechnical failure: Pressure to move quickly has made it hard for engineers to fully assess and manage new risks of increasingly powerful AI systems. It is a clear warning that responsible engineering requires more than technical expertise; engineers must also understand workplace pressures, moral and ethical rules, and the social consequences rooted in the systems they create.Cases like this, alongside invasive <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/unintended-consequences-video-surveillance">surveillance technologies</a> and <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/untold-history-of-ai-the-birth-of-machine-bias">biased AI tools</a>, have exposed serious shortcomings in how engineers recognize and address the ethical and social implications of their work. While the need to educate graduates in ethics and social responsibility is widely recognized, a persistent gap remains—these topics are too often treated as afterthoughts, disconnected from the technical content of engineering coursework. This siloed approach leaves graduates ill-equipped to address real-world challenges; indeed, only about a third of engineering professionals in the United States <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jee.20590" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">report having received training on their public welfare responsibilities</a> during their formal engineering education.We are working to bridge this gap by designing two complementary instructional approaches, one that integrates social issues directly into foundation technical coursework and a second that prepares students to act as “public welfare watchdogs” through a standalone engineering course. By embedding ethics and social responsibility training directly into the core of undergraduate engineering coursework, we equip future professionals with the agency they will need to protect the public good.<h2>The gap in instruction about ethics and social responsibility</h2>Across the engineering profession, there is a persistent belief that technical skill-building is central to engineering, while ethical, social, and public welfare concerns are peripheral or distracting. This <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/285764" target="_blank">technical/social dualism</a> is evident even in the evaluation of scholarly research. For instance, we recently submitted an academic position paper discussing this ethics education gap to a leading peer-reviewed engineering journal. It was dismissed by reviewers along the very same dualism it described. One reviewer warned that it would be “highly irresponsible” to challenge technical skill-building as “the foundation of any kind of engineering” by adding ethics and social responsibility training into engineering classrooms. Another reviewer objected that integrating these considerations into foundational courses risks “distracting the students from fully absorbing the technology.” These comments miss the core argument of our work: that ethics and social responsibility are integral to responsible technical practice.Today, accreditation agencies like <a href="https://www.abet.org/" target="_blank">ABET</a> (formerly known as the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology) and professional licensing bodies like the <a href="https://www.nspe.org/" target="_blank">National Society of Professional Engineers</a> mandate student outcomes related to social and public welfare consequences. But these curriculum requirements tend to be unhelpfully generic and minimally enforced. As a result, engineering students often receive ethics instruction through introductory or non-engineering coursework, where the focus is on codes of conduct and academic integrity, rather than deeper topics of social responsibility. This instruction is almost always disconnected from the complex real-world dilemmas engineers face. Indeed, we find that only ethics instruction in actual engineering courses (not in other parts of the curriculum) can effectively instill ethical awareness as professionals. Concerningly, only about 4 in 10 engineers in the United States recall receiving this kind of training, and 3 in 10 <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jee.20590" target="_blank">report never receiving training on their public welfare responsibilities</a> at any point in their careers. This leaves most of the profession underprepared to handle the complex challenges of engineering practice.<h2>A new approach: Integrating technical and social dimensions</h2>To advance a new paradigm—one that embeds ethics and social responsibility issues within the undergraduate engineering curriculum—we’ve designed two innovative course-based approaches: a library of one-hour sociotechnical modules for foundational circuits courses (described <a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11328324" target="_blank">here</a> and <a href="https://arrow.tudublin.ie/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1071&context=sefi2023_prapap" target="_blank">here</a>) and a <a href="https://peer.asee.org/learning-to-be-public-welfare-watchdogs-a-master-s-level-course-to-enhance-engineers-recognition-of-and-responsiveness-to-their-public-welfare-responsibilities" target="_blank">new engineering course</a> dedicated to public welfare responsibilities.The first approach integrates discussions about relevant social issues directly into foundational engineering courses, where students begin to form their identities as engineers. “Introduction to Circuits” is typically the first course in the electrical engineering major and is a requirement for many other engineering disciplines, making it a powerful site for introducing social content and ethical reasoning. We designed several one-hour modules for this course, where social issues provide context for a technical topic, offering a manageable entry point for faculty who may feel ill-prepared to teach about ethics and social responsibility.While many engineering faculty recognize the importance of teaching students about these topics, they struggle to integrate them into their courses amid heavy teaching and research demands. To overcome these challenges, each module provides ready-to-use materials, including lecture slides with scripts and homework and exam problems. Integrating these modules directly into the course signals to students that sociotechnical awareness is not an “add-on,” but a required professional competency.Our module on hospital power prioritization, for instance, connects the technical topics of power and equivalent circuits to the ethical challenges of healthcare infrastructure. Students learn about the reality of <a href="https://www.slashgear.com/1890596/hospitals-red-outlets-use-explained-what-for/">“red outlets” in medical settings</a>, debating the power needs of specific wards (e.g., the intensive care unit, operating rooms, and physiotherapy rooms) to decide which branches should receive emergency power during a hypothetical outage.Our conflict minerals module connects the technical topic of capacitors to the global tantalum supply chain. Students calculate the amount of tantalum used in cell phones and identify mining locations in regions like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where revenue often fuels armed conflict and human rights abuses. Students research the <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/whats-holding-up-conflict-mineral-rules-">conflict-mineral policies</a> of major companies such as Apple and Samsung and reflect on their future roles as ethical designers and consumers.<a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/15/9/1243" target="_blank">Student responses to these modules</a> have been overwhelmingly positive. In interviews, students told us that the content helped them get away from the “stigma that engineers only worry about math” and made the work more meaningful. We plan to share the modules widely to help circuits instructors across the globe bridge the technical-social divide.Beyond these integrated modules, our second approach is a standalone engineering course—Public Welfare Responsibilities in Engineering (PWRE)—that helps round out students’ sociotechnical education by preparing them to fulfil their professional obligations as engineers. While most dedicated ethics courses end by introducing engineers’ abstract responsibilities, PWRE helps students recognize specific public welfare concerns, enhances their motivation to act when they encounter them, and teaches concrete, practical intervention strategies.In addition to teaching students about professional codes, such as the <a href="https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance/p7-8" target="_blank">IEEE Code of Ethics</a>, PWRE engages students in discussion of where these formal definitions may fall short, and how structural barriers such as workplace culture can hinder engineers from fulfilling these responsibilities. Then, the course equips students with intervention strategies. Students learn about their rights and responsibilities as whistleblowers, review tactics for seeking advice from professional societies, and practice writing <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/type/opinion/">op-eds</a> to raise the alarm about ethical issues to the broader public. Our research shows that the course produces notable shifts in students’ ethical agency, strengthening their ability to serve as “public welfare watchdogs” in the modern workplace.<h2>Ethical engineers for the future</h2>Today’s engineering graduates face complex sociotechnical challenges beyond AI expansion, including climate change and global supply chains; they need tools to navigate ambiguity and act ethically in uncertain contexts. To meet these evolving demands, engineering education must move beyond outdated modes of instruction that focus only on building technical skills—some of which may soon be outsourced to AI. We must fundamentally reimagine the role of ethics and social responsibility, embedding them across the engineering curriculum and throughout the professional formation of engineers.All engineers learn to solve problems, but ethical engineers can also discern which problems are worth solving and anticipate the consequences of innovation for society. By centering ethics and social responsibility as core priorities of the profession, we can prepare engineers to be stewards of technology and trusted voices in public discourse.As one student reflected after participating in our modules, “we are a part of the issue if we don’t decide to fix it.” Reference: https://ift.tt/JDyL9AB

Wednesday, October 7, 2026

Changing Your Career Isn’t Easy

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/an-illustration-of-stylized-people-wearing-business-casual-clothing.webp?id=65257424&width=1200&height=400&coordinates=0%2C250%2C0%2C250"/> This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. <a href="https://engage.ieee.org/Career-Alert-Sign-Up.html" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Sign up now</a> to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company <a href="https://www.parsity.io/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Parsity</a> and delivered to your inbox for free!When I changed careers at 30 to become a software engineer, I expected it to be hard. I expected to struggle to fit in, and I expected to bomb a lot of interviews (I did). What I didn’t expect was how few people would support me.As a parent, I get it now.A career change is a risk, and the people who care about you tend to project their fears onto you. They don’t want to watch you struggle or fail, so they discourage you or just don’t offer much enthusiasm.Right now is a strange time to be in engineering, or knowledge work in general. Plenty of us are excited about <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-code-review-software-engineers" target="_self">what AI means for our jobs.</a> More of us are nervous, and I think that fear is justified. <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-impact-on-job-market" target="_self">Employment for entry-level</a> software developers has fallen nearly 20 percent since late 2022, according to <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/state-of-ai-index-2026" target="_self">Stanford’s 2026 AI Index</a>, and it can feel like the knowledge we spent our careers building is being commoditized. Lately I’ve seen a flood of social media content telling software developers to go into the trades. YouTubers are telling you to become a plumber or a goat herder. But before you do that, I want to warn you, there is no EASY path. Even if you want to become a goat herder.I’ve changed careers once so far, but my business has forced me through several pivots that felt a lot like career changes—new audiences, new skills, new identity. Here’s what I’d tell anyone considering a change, whether you’re moving into engineering, leaving it, or finding a new speciality.<h3>Find someone who’s done it and ask how</h3>This is exactly what I told my oldest son, who’s getting ready to enter the job market full-time. Outside of the primary social media feeds, the internet is full of free and paid communities on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other sites. Reddit works, too, if you can stomach the trolls, because there’s valuable information buried in there. Many of these spaces are flooded with people trying to break in, so look for the ones full of people who already do the work and talk openly about what is and isn’t going well. Then find one or two people in your own circle who’ve done it and ask what the job takes. You’ll often find the degree matters less than you assumed. Indeed Hiring Lab found the share of U.S. postings requiring a bachelor’s degree fell from 20.4 percent in 2019 to 17.8 percent in early 2024, and more than half listed no education requirement at all.<h3>Build proof of work, even if it’s unpaid</h3>Yes, you’ll probably need to do some work for free, or at least far cheaper than you’re used to. I’ve had to do this in my business over and over. Nobody cares that I’ve been a software engineer for 12 years. They want to know whether I can do the thing they need.When I started pitching businesses, I offered to build something for free as a case study, then used it to land clients who paid well. You can copy this in most fields. Say you want to get into marketing: Learn how Facebook ads work, find a friend or small business that needs help, and run the campaigns at a low price. Now you’ve picked up the jargon, and you have something concrete to show a hiring manager.<h3>Stability is a myth</h3>It may be corny, but change is the only constant. If you’re a software engineer, you could argue you’re in the middle of a career change already, whether you opted in or not. Programmers in the 1990s had the same experience when the web showed up and they had to quickly learn new tools just to stay relevant.If you’re looking for stability, you’re in the wrong place, and I think it will get scarcer as AI and other forces reshape work. The best move is to build a strong foundation so you can adapt when the ground shifts. I wrote about <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/top-engineering-skills" target="_self">the foundational skills to focus on</a> if you’re interested.—Brian<h2><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/sustainability-robotics-barbara-mazzolai" target="_self">Barbara Mazzolai Wants to Build a New Field of Robotics</a></h2>Roboticist Barbara Mazzolai is a prime example of someone who advanced her career by switching fields—and now, she’s helping to create a new one. Learn how her background in biology led her to co-author a manifesto on “sustainability robotics.”Read more <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/sustainability-robotics-barbara-mazzolai" target="_self">here</a>. <h2><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talent-into-leadership-legacy" target="_self">Turning Tech Talent Into Leadership Legacy</a></h2>The transition from a technical role to a leadership position can be challenging. To help seasoned professionals navigate the shift, IEEE is hosting its first International Leadership Conference in Budapest. Read more <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talent-into-leadership-legacy" target="_self">here</a>.<h2><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ieee-technical-field-awards-2027" target="_self">IEEE Celebrates Innovators Shaping the Future</a></h2>Every year, IEEE recognizes engineers whose technical achievements and leadership have made a lasting impact with its Technical Field Awards. See who’s on the 2027 list of awardees, which was announced in late September. Read more <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ieee-technical-field-awards-2027" target="_self">here</a>. Reference: https://ift.tt/8c6hCHE

HiPHI: A Large-Scale Benchmark for High-Precision Human Motion and Object Interaction

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/noitom-robotics-logo-with-stylized-nr-monogram-on-transparent-background.png?id=68382308&width=980"/> This White Paper gives robotics researchers and engineers an overview of a new large-scale motion capture dataset built to close the data gap limiting humanoid robot learning. It also shows how policies trained on the dataset transfer to a real humanoid robot.What you will learn about: <ul><li>Why humanoid robot learning, a central problem in embodied AI and Physical AI, needs data that internet video and existing motion capture datasets cannot provide. </li><li>How FrameNet, a linguistic framework for human action, can guide motion capture collection to systematically cover a broad range of whole-body motion. </li><li>Why synchronized object trajectories and meshes make human-object interaction data useful for teaching robots real-world tasks such as carrying, pushing, and pulling. </li><li>How reinforcement learning policies trained on this motion capture data improve with scale, and how sim-to-real transfer carries them onto a physical humanoid robot.</li></ul><div><a href="https://content.knowledgehub.wiley.com/hiphi-a-large-scale-benchmark-for-high-precision-human-motion-and-object-interaction/" target="_blank">Download this free whitepaper now!</a></div> Reference: https://ift.tt/2quwc1t