technology 24 for you

Friday, July 17, 2026

This Graduate Student Equips NASA’s Robots With Assembly Skills

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-young-woman-with-blonde-hair-softly-smiling-next-to-a-pair-of-collaborative-robot-arms.jpg?id=67499761&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C156%2C0%2C157"/> Like many engineers, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarahdownsprofile" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Sarah Downs</a> says she knew she wanted to pursue a STEM career from a young age. As a teenager, she discovered <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/topic/robotics/" target="_self">robotics</a> through her Tulsa, Okla., middle school’s <a href="https://www.firstlegoleague.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">First Lego League</a> team, and she fell in love with the field, she says. Downs participated in the international robotics program from 2014 to 2016.Watching <a href="https://www.pbs.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">PBS</a> specials on <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">NASA</a> Mars rovers <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/mars-for-the-rest-of-us" target="_self">Spirit</a> and <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/video-friday-opportunity-celebrates-10-years-on-mars" target="_self">Opportunity</a>, and seeing the live broadcast of the <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/if-necessary-mars-rover-curiosity-could-rip-its-own-wheels-off-to-stay-mobile" target="_self">Curiosity</a> rover launch in 2011, inspired the teen to dream of a career working with NASA.<h3>Sarah Downs</h3> MEMBER GRADEGraduate student memberUNIVERSITY Texas A&M University in College StationMAJOR Electric engineering<h3></h3> This year the IEEE graduate student member achieved that dream. For her final project as a master’s degree candidate in electrical engineering at the <a href="https://utulsa.edu/" target="_blank">University of Tulsa</a>, she worked on an algorithm in collaboration with NASA and the U.S. <a href="https://www.airforce.com/en" target="_blank">Air Force</a>.The algorithm she developed enables a robot assembling satellites in space to insert an antenna into the correct spot, addressing robotics’s classic peg-in-hole problem of inserting an object into its corresponding hole.Now a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering at <a href="https://www.tamu.edu/index.html" target="_blank">Texas A&M University</a> in College Station, Downs is continuing her research on satellite assembly and manipulation “but on a much larger scale,” she says.<h2>Following a childhood passion</h2>Downs grew up in the Tulsa area. Her father, who died from a heart attack in 2015 when she was 13, was a safety advisor in the oil and gas industry. Her mother stayed home to take care of her brother, who has autism. After her father died, her mother went back to college to earn a bachelor’s degree in business so she could support the family.“We didn’t have much income, and my mom was always worried about money,” Downs says. “That made me more aware of having a successful career, in a monetary sense.”From then on, whenever she considered her future career, having a decent salary to support the family was high on her list.By pursuing a career in robotics, she says, she can follow her passion while obtaining financial security.In high school, Downs joined the <a href="https://www.firstinspires.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">First</a> robotics club, where she found herself drawn to the electrical components used in the machines she and her classmates built.During her final two years of high school, she participated in an <a href="https://tulsatech.edu/full-time-programs/science-technology-engineering-and-mathematics/pre-engineering/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">extension program</a> at <a href="https://tulsatech.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Tulsa Tech</a>, a training school. She spent half her day in high school classes and the other half taking engineering courses at the vocational school.After graduating in 2020, she accepted scholarships to attend the University of Tulsa. She began her freshman year at UTulsa not knowing whether she wanted to major in electrical or mechanical engineering, she says, adding that her love of working with small systems helped her choose EE.For her <a href="https://utulsa.edu/news/celebrating-student-innovation-tus-role-in-tasms-new-exhibits/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">senior year capstone project</a>, she and two of her classmates designed a lunar lander exhibit for the <a href="https://www.tulsamuseum.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Tulsa Air and Space Museum</a>. They created an interactive game that simulates missions on lunar and martian surfaces. Four celestial bodies—the moon, Venus, Mars, and Titan—are listed across three computer monitors. Using a game controller, museum visitors can explore the virtual surface of each one. The <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7207091982790266880/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">exhibit</a> is still on display.Downs earned her bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 2024 and continued her education at the university’s EE master’s degree program.<h2>Both more and less complicated than people think</h2>When Downs began her graduate studies, she was supposed to be part of a NASA robotics project for two years. But when a delay in government funding postponed the project’s start, she instead spent her first year in the school’s <a href="https://utulsa.edu/research/robotics-institute/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Institute for Robotics and Autonomy</a>, then newly launched. Its main focus is developing robots to assist people who have mobility challenges.Inspired by her grandmother, who was wheelchair-bound due to severe arthritis, Downs developed a robotic arm that helps older people and wheelchair users live independently. The arm was able to identify and place objects in the appropriate locations inside the home, such as unloading certain groceries from a shopping bag and placing them on a shelf or in separate containers.Before the start of her sophomore year in 2025, the NASA project finally secured government funding. She developed a robot that achieves the peg-in-hole task without using any vision systems. Typically, cameras help guide robots’ satellite-assembly work. But in the harsh, remote environment of outer space, cameras might malfunction or encounter delays.<h3></h3> “Don’t stop asking questions. Especially in engineering, don’t pretend like you know everything, because science is about constantly wanting to learn and listen.”<h3></h3> Rather than using cameras, Downs’s robotic arm deploys a force-based insertion process to sense position and orientation of objects in the arm’s environment. The robot loosely grips an antenna and, with a torque sensor on its gripper, “feels” the force feedback of where the satellite and antenna are in relation to each other. The robot then guides the antenna assembly into a target opening on its satellite and maintains the position during adhesion.Adding to the complexity, the robot performs its task in zero gravity.“Without gravity, you now have to consider the arm’s reaction torques on the satellite to avoid flinging it into space,” Downs says. Any motion from the arm during the insertion process, especially from increased forces, could cause the satellite to continue movement in that direction.To combat that, Downs is performing calculations for the project to direct targeted reverse thrusts and counter the force of the robot’s motions.Her graduate project captures the simple yet complex nature of robotics that she finds fascinating, she says.“I think robots are both more and also less complicated than people think,” she says. “Really, all you need to start programming a robot is its <a href="https://www.universal-robots.com/developer/hardware-and-motion/robot-motion-dh-parameters/" target="_blank">Denavit-Hartenberg parameters</a>, and you can do a lot with that,” she says, referencing the four values used to describe the position and orientation of a robotic arm and manipulators. Even with different grippers and degrees of freedom, “fundamentally, all robot manipulators start there,” she says.“But,” she adds, “we’re still learning so much about how robots interact with their environment. Even something simple to us, like manipulating a pen, is still incredibly complex for robots.”Downs is completing her doctoral thesis in the <a href="https://rad.engr.tamu.edu/robotic-space-simulator/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Robotic Space Simulator</a> project at Texas A&M’s <a href="https://rad.engr.tamu.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Robotics and Automation Design (RAD) Lab</a>, which specializes in developing machines that can survive in extreme environments. It collaborates with NASA.Her thesis advisor is <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/video-friday-punch-out" target="_self">Robert Ambrose</a>, a NASA veteran who launched the RAD Lab in 2022. The IEEE member is set to serve as associate director of the school’s Space Institute, due to open this year in Houston. The research facility is being built next to the <a href="https://www.nasa.gov/johnson/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Johnson Space Center</a>.After earning her Ph.D., Downs says, she hopes to one day work for NASA, developing rovers that collect samples from Mars or robotic arms that perform tasks on space stations.To learn more about robots, check out IEEE Spectrum’s <a href="https://robotsguide.com/about" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">guide</a>.<h2>Getting out of the engineering bubble</h2>Downs joined <a href="https://www.ieee.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE</a> in 2020 as a freshman at UTulsa to get more involved in electrical engineering events on campus. At the time, the <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/covid-19" target="_self">COVID-19 pandemic</a> kept clubs and organizations from meeting in person.She was active in her school’s <a href="https://utulsa.edu/academics/engineering-computer-science/academics/departments/electrical-computer-engineering/institute-of-electronics-and-electrical-engineers-ieee/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE student branch</a> and was elected as its 2022–2024 president. Under her leadership, the branch went from having a few events to hosting one every two weeks.They included lunch-and-learn sessions and dinners that connected students with professional engineers and the university’s alumni. Downs also organized hands-on workshops on soldering, <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/lunar-base-3d-printing" target="_self">3D printing</a>, CAD modeling, and <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/be-a-polarizing-job-seeker" target="_self">résumé-building</a>.Her efforts helped increase the branch’s executive board membership from roughly five students to 25 in 2023. The same year, her soldering workshop attracted about 80 students.She says she enjoyed working with IEEE, especially “engaging with alumni and learning from engineers.”IEEE is a great resource for networking opportunities, she says, noting that “during the COVID-19 pandemic, engineering students stayed in their bubbles.” IEEE events helped the students make connections that could serve them well, she says.“Networking is very important, especially in today’s tough job market,” she says. “It’s a lot about who you know and how people observe your work ethic.”Downs, who now serves as an IEEE graduate advisor for UTulsa’s student branch, says she has seen firsthand how the school’s student branch network has benefited its student members.“A lot of them have found jobs” because of IEEE, she says.<h3>The working and networking of an engineer</h3> As the IEEE graduate advisor for UTulsa’s student branch, Downs noticed that many engineering undergraduates finish college without any <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/hands-on-projects-career-advice" target="_self">hands-on experience</a>, whether it be a project or an internship.“Their résumés are very sparse, and they have no proof of their technical skills,” she says. She herself completed a facilities engineering internship at <a href="https://flytulsa.com/" target="_blank">Tulsa International Airport</a>’s <a href="https://www.google.com/aclk?sa=L&ai=DChsSEwiakeLTiIqVAxWRzsIEHX4aO3UYACICCAEQABoCcHY&ae=2&co=1&ase=2&gclid=CjwKCAjwxb7RBhA5EiwAQ-AAdIuO_CE21RKvxNvZKxWXCYpo9d0-vpx3D3XClr2XRTWwP13SUuMbKhoCzuIQAvD_BwE&ei=RV4waqKnFs-G0PEPpMyjoAg&cid=CAASZuRoVbgIgx56926ScONp0UCppyfOxCgiUjlNwIYIyRNwiPfCRnB-35o-3qx5zfez3l5RTJDkwOw_SW-pvC4ORqwKrbj2g4yojyTEu490Veitl0o0gJG9sB38UMie-GYDrIURjI2CPw&cce=2&category=acrcp_v1_71&sig=AOD64_2LzW3O1QygURf8h7S57YqN5jIk3A&q&sqi=2&nis=4&adurl&ved=2ahUKEwji3dfTiIqVAxVPAzQIHSTmCIQQ0Qx6BAgNEAE" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">American Airlines</a> maintenance facility after her sophomore year of college. And she was an electrical engineering intern at <a href="https://www.flightsafety.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Flight Safety International</a> outside Tulsa after her junior year and after she graduated. The company designs, builds, and maintains its own flight simulators.Her advice to undergraduates is to hone and demonstrate both their hard and soft skills by working on research projects or even personal passion projects.“A <a href="https://www.raspberrypi.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Raspberry Pi</a> doesn’t cost that much, and you can start working with that immediately,” she says. Students also can take part in engineering interest groups and professional organizations at their school, she adds.“Put yourself out there and join a research team,” she says. “It’s a great way to show people that you’re a good person to work with and you’d do a good job in the field.”She adds that it’s also a fine way to keep learning—which is what drew her to a field that has developed only within the past century.“We’re still constantly learning about robots,” she says.“Don’t stop asking questions,” she advises students. “Especially in engineering, don’t pretend like you know everything, because science is about constantly wanting to learn and listen.” Reference: https://ift.tt/FQqdU9e

Thursday, July 16, 2026

HP fined 1.4 billion rupees for “cartelization” of ink cartridges, toner, PCs

The Indian government has fined HP India and its partners a total of 1.4 billion rupees (about $14.4 million) for working with reseller partners in the “cartelization” of computers, ink cartridges, and toner. The Competition Commission of India (CCI) said this week that it found HP India had colluded with some channel partners to drive up the cost of bids for government contracts for computers, as well as for selling ink cartridges, toner, and other printing supplies, including graphic and digital manufacturing supplies. It said that HP was aiming to outcompete other OEMs and discourage resellers from selling “counterfeit” ink and toner.<a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/07/hp-fined-1-4-billion-rupees-for-cartelization-of-ink-cartridges-toner-pcs/">Read full article</a> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/07/hp-fined-1-4-billion-rupees-for-cartelization-of-ink-cartridges-toner-pcs/#comments">Comments</a> Reference : https://ift.tt/kl7s3GO

Wednesday, July 15, 2026

Sheetz moves 838 stores off VMware: Broadcom created “too much uncertainty"

Sheetz, a US convenience store chain, is moving its <a href="https://sheetzmenuu.com/sheetz-locations/">838 locations </a>off VMware. Sheetz has used VMware virtualization across two Dell R440/R450-series servers at each of its locations since 2019. Now it’s migrating 12 to 14 virtual machines (VMs) in each of its stores from VMware vSphere to StorMagic’s SvHCI, “with an additional two VMs to be replaced over the coming months to transition from Windows 10 to Windows 11,” Scott Robertson, infrastructure team manager at Sheetz, told Ars Technica via email. Ultimately, Sheetz will move about 11,000 VMs from Broadcom's virtualization platform. Sheetz is still running the original Dell server hardware. So far, Sheetz has finished migrating more than 600 stores, averaging 200 per month, according to a company announcement today. Sheetz should be finished with the migration in four months, the announcement said.<a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/07/sheetz-moves-838-stores-off-vmware-broadcom-created-too-much-uncertainty/">Read full article</a> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/07/sheetz-moves-838-stores-off-vmware-broadcom-created-too-much-uncertainty/#comments">Comments</a> Reference : https://ift.tt/FmdBCJE

When Career Risks Are Worth Taking

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/an-illustration-of-stylized-people-wearing-business-casual-clothing.jpg?id=59104110&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C232%2C0%2C233"/> 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!Before we get into this week’s article, I’d love to hear from you. If you have a question about your career or an upcoming decision that <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdj_2BZIhrGF__7BCLH33zJ9NMv8C7Vsg9NNusASrYj7-9Idw/viewform" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">you want advice</a> about, you can ask it <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdj_2BZIhrGF__7BCLH33zJ9NMv8C7Vsg9NNusASrYj7-9Idw/viewform" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">here</a>. I’ll be reading through your responses and picking questions to answer on a regular basis. Now back to our regularly scheduled program.<h1>The Safest Career Move Is Often the Riskiest</h1>Software engineers have some of the shortest tenures of any white-collar profession. The average software engineer stays at a company for roughly two years, about half as long as workers in most other knowledge professions. The layoffs of the past few years have certainly highlighted this instability, but it was already there.This isn’t an essay about a broken job market though. Rather, it’s about how to turn that instability to your advantage, which is something I’ve spent the last decade doing on purpose.<h2>Playing It Safe Was the Riskiest Option</h2>I switched careers into software in my 30s. I had a stable job at a community college, complete with a union and a pension. It was about as secure as a career gets, and I learned to program on the side.Then I did something nearly everyone in my life considered reckless: I quit, leaving the secure job to become a junior developer at 31. My own mother was skeptical. I took the riskier job anyway, for two reasons: It was the work I actually wanted, and I could see potential.My first development job was at a grocery retailer. Good people and a company I liked. But I kept meeting engineers earning twice my salary for the same work. In the San Francisco Bay Area, surrounded by some of the best engineering talent in the world, I realized my skills were stagnating.So I left for a small startup. I learned more in nine months than I had in the previous two years, and my salary doubled.Over the years I’ve come to treat career risk as something to manage deliberately. It falls into two categories.<h2>Take Risks With Your Job</h2>The first type of risk involves the job itself: Bet on yourself by striving for better roles and opportunities.Job-hopping for money alone isn’t wrong, especially early on. But the returns shrink after the first few hops, and the stress of chasing a slightly bigger paycheck every year will wear you down.There’s another career risk with rewards that compound: Seeking positions to work alongside the strongest engineers. You might struggle to keep up. You might even get laid off. But the skills you absorb working alongside people better than you are the ones that create durable stability. You build marketable expertise, you see how different organizations actually operate, and every project becomes another tool you carry to the next opportunity. Working next to stronger engineers is a proven way to increase your own expertise.If that feels too big, try volunteering for a project you have no idea how to do. The risk is that you fail in front of people. The reward is a new skill and a resume line that opens the next door.Compare that with the “safe” path. You stay at one company, assuming loyalty will be rewarded. It usually isn’t. And when you finally leave, by choice or not, you may find the skills you built are worth little on the open market. You might be the in-house expert in an aging tech stack while employers are hiring for more cutting edge technologies. Suddenly you’re competing against people with half your experience. You could be taking on a risk you didn’t notice.<h2>Risk Your Time</h2>The second form is risking your time, which means betting on trends.Some trends are non-negotiable. If you’re a software engineer, then cloud services, ReactJS, and AI are mainstream enough that ignoring them actively damages your career. A backend engineer who refuses to learn cloud architecture is volunteering for obsolescence.The real gamble is with the smaller trends: the niche tools you stumble onto and find quietly interesting, with no idea whether they’ll matter.About two and a half years ago, I learned about retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Almost no one in my circle was talking about vector databases, a central piece of RAG. Today RAG is close to mainstream, and for once, I had the early-adopter advantage.Most of these bets don’t pay off. But when one turns into a major trend, you’re already on the ground floor. Right now I’m making the same bet on voice AI. It isn’t mainstream. It may never be. But if it becomes the next thing, I’m already there, building a foundation.<h2>Short-Term Risk, Long-Term Stability</h2>Counter-intuitively, job-hopping and betting on trends gave me the thing I was after the whole time: stability. I’ve rarely struggled to find work, because every risky move stacked skills the market actually wanted.If you feel stable and comfortable right now, enjoy it. But ask yourself whether you’re still learning. Because if you’re not, the comfortable choice and the dangerous one may have converged.The goal isn’t to avoid the open market forever. It’s to make sure that when you land on it, you’re not at its mercy.By Brian JenneyP.S. Don’t forget to submit questions about your career or an upcoming decision that you want advice about <a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdj_2BZIhrGF__7BCLH33zJ9NMv8C7Vsg9NNusASrYj7-9Idw/viewform" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">here</a>!—Brian<h2><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-in-mathematics" target="_self">What It Means to Be a Mathematician When AI Does the Math</a></h2>Until recently, human mathematicians have been central to creating new proofs, even when the work relies on massive computational resources. AI is now challenging that status quo. Writer Benjamin Skuse surveys the ongoing debate in the field about the role of AI, and the existential questions mathematicians have about their own careers. If AI mathematicians surpass human knowledge, could these researchers become “priests to oracles”?<a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-in-mathematics" target="_blank">Read more here. </a><h2><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-chip-design-fab-ucla" target="_self">Chip R&D Is Accelerating to Keep Pace with AI</a></h2>A new partnership between UCLA and five major semiconductor companies is the latest program aiming to bridge the gap between industry and academia. The US $125 million university-industry hub is meant to strengthen collaboration and speed up the R&D process to help meet AI’s fast-paced hardware demands. <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-chip-design-fab-ucla" target="_blank">Read more here. </a><h2><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/mentorship-is-an-underrated-leadership-skill" target="_self">Why Mentorship Is the Most Underrated Leadership Skill</a></h2>True mentorship is far more than friendly advice. This key leadership skill requires advocacy and honest feedback via lasting relationships, and it can strongly benefit both mentor and mentee. Parul Jain, a product management leader at Deloitte, shares what she learned from serving as a mentor—something she didn’t have for much of her own early career. <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/mentorship-is-an-underrated-leadership-skill" target="_blank">Read more here. </a> Reference: https://ift.tt/HTwz6oX

Windows 0-day drops the same day Microsoft releases record number of patches

Right on the heels of Microsoft releasing a <a href="https://krebsonsecurity.com/2026/07/microsoft-patches-a-record-570-security-flaws/">record number</a> of security patches, a researcher has published exploit code that can enable low-privilege Windows accounts to make sensitive changes to administrator accounts. The exploit, which multiple researchers <a href="https://infosec.exchange/@wdormann/116925149776495861">say</a> <a href="https://infosec.exchange/@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social/116924831427611458">works</a>, is sending Microsoft scrambling, yet again, to patch a zero-day released by an anonymous researcher who has complained about the software maker’s handling of their bug reports. To date, the pseudonymous NightmareEclypse has published nine such exploits, including <a href="https://blog.projectnightcrawler.dev/posts/2026-07-14-legacyhive-public-disclosure/">Tuesday’s HiveLegacy</a>. The researcher said the proof-of-concept code included in the report was stripped down to prevent attackers from using it maliciously. <h2>A “pretty powerful primitive”</h2> HiveLegacy is an elevation-of-privilege exploit that targets a vulnerability residing in the Windows User Profile Service. It allows users (and with more work likely processes) with limited system rights to compromise an admin user's account by modifying its <a href="https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server/performance/windows-registry-advanced-users">classes registry hive</a>, a resource that ensures the correct application opens when certain types of files are clicked on in Windows Explorer.<a href="https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/07/windows-0-day-drops-the-same-day-microsoft-releases-record-number-of-patches/">Read full article</a> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/07/windows-0-day-drops-the-same-day-microsoft-releases-record-number-of-patches/#comments">Comments</a> Reference : https://ift.tt/DZJNWvB

Notice to Membership

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-word-bubble-with-the-ieee-inside.jpg?id=25592350&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C116%2C0%2C117"/> As of 21 June 2026, a Level 1 Expulsion has been imposed on IEEE Member Dr. Fei-Yue Wang, former editor-in-chief of the <a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?punumber=7274857" target="_blank">IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles</a>. In accordance with <a href="https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/governance" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE Bylaw</a> I-110.5(D)(i), Dr. Wang is no longer a member of IEEE, and is permanently banned from any type of membership in any IEEE organizational unit or participation in any IEEE activity. The <a href="https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/board" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Board of Directors</a> also determined this notice to IEEE membership should be made. Reference: https://ift.tt/FKyB5VL

The First Chatbot’s Multiple Personalities

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/photo-collage-of-a-charismatic-elderly-man-raising-his-eyebrows-against-a-background-of-obscured-computer-programming-script.jpg?id=67155632&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C0%2C0%2C0"/> ELIZA is remembered as the world’s first AI star, a kindly therapist in chatbot form that gently probed users’ worries. Even its creator, Joseph Weizenbaum, was surprised by the warm reception given to his experiment in human-machine interaction. For some, it heralded an age of automated psychotherapy, while others believed the program demonstrated sentience, a fallacy soon known as the “<a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/why-people-demanded-privacy-to-confide-in-the-worlds-first-chatbot" target="_self">ELIZA effect</a>.” Based on published descriptions, ELIZA has been implemented on many different computers, but only recently has <a href="https://sites.google.com/view/elizaarchaeology/code" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">the actual source code</a> been unearthed from <a href="https://archivesspace.mit.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">MIT’s archives</a>. In <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262052481/inventing-eliza/" target="_blank">Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI</a>, just published by <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">MIT Press</a>, a squad of researchers analyze the code and reveal a complex program capable of much more than faking psychiatry. In fact, it could assume several different personas. The authors have also created <a href="https://sites.google.com/view/elizaarchaeology/try-eliza" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">a faithful emulation of the therapist persona that you can try yourself</a> after reading the book excerpt below.When it debuted in the mid-1960s, the ELIZA software program transformed the way people thought about interacting with computers. As the first chatbot, ELIZA demonstrated how a calculation machine might engage in conversation, ushering in a host of social and technical questions that still resonate today. Now we don’t think twice about interacting with a machine in real time, conversing over text, or even speaking into the air to ask about the weather. In many ways, ELIZA shaped not only the way we think about interacting with computers but also how we think about them. It began to give a reality to the <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/science-fiction" target="_blank">science fiction</a> stories of how we expect computers to work. <img alt="Orange book cover titled \u201cInventing Eliza: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI\u201d" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="208d351be5eb0018c13ad5a993fa22b5" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="03894" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/orange-book-cover-titled-u201cinventing-eliza-how-the-first-chatbot-shaped-the-future-of-ai-u201d.jpg?id=67155786&width=980"/> This article is adapted from the new book “Inventing ELIZA: <a href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262052481/inventing-eliza/" target="_blank">How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI</a>“ (MIT Press, 2026).Although ELIZA was far from a faultless conversation partner, it astonished its users. The recent discovery and archaeology of the original ELIZA source code represents a significant intervention in the history of computing. By examining the actual implementation of ELIZA rather than relying on later reconstructions and reimplementations, we challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about this key software artifact.For example, the source code reveals that ELIZA was not merely a simple pattern-matching chatbot but can be better understood as a sophisticated platform designed for multiple “personas,” or scripts, with a complex set of capabilities, including script editing and contextual memory. The script that most people conflate with the program ELIZA was actually called Doctor, which performed the role of a psychotherapist. Yet, like a modern chatbot prompted to behave with different personalities, ELIZA could take on many roles.“This code and script…reveal underlying assumptions about language, therapy, and human-computer interaction that continue to influence modern AI development.”This unearthed material transforms our understanding of early AI development by demonstrating that Joseph Weizenbaum’s technical innovations were far more advanced than previously documented. Moreover, the discrepancies between his published descriptions and the actual implementation help to show the gap between theoretical computational models and their material instantiations in computer source code, a tension that continues to shape digital culture today.Although many technical innovations have emerged in the decades since ELIZA, examining the ELIZA/Doctor code offers a rare glimpse into one of the earliest formalized attempts to model human conversation. What makes ELIZA particularly fascinating is not only its historical significance but also what it reveals about Weizenbaum’s views on both computing and human interaction. This code and script do not merely showcase programming techniques of the 1960s; they reveal underlying assumptions about language, therapy, and human-computer interaction that continue to influence modern AI development. By examining this code, we can start to uncover the sophisticated linguistic and programming techniques that allowed a rudimentary pattern-matching system to create a convincing simulation of understanding. But before we can read the lines of code, let us offer an overview of the system.<h2>How Did ELIZA Create Personas?</h2>The architectural distinction between ELIZA and Doctor represents an important design decision in AI history. Think of ELIZA as a system for interaction and Doctor as one set of rules that Weizenbaum devised, among others. This separation, manifested in ELIZA’s system-script dichotomy, presaged numerous contemporary software patterns, from configuration-as-data to plug-in architectures and domain-specific languages. <img alt="A 1960s chatbot program running on a 1980s IBM personal computer." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="25a3713ea68f943c1be636d8e3cdbc0d" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="1b809" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/a-1960s-chatbot-program-running-on-a-1980s-ibm-personal-computer.jpg?id=67155917&width=980"/> Based on published journal articles, ELIZA was re-created on many platforms, such as the IBM PC. However, the actual source code sat untouched in the MIT archives for many years. VCF Museum at InfoAgeWithout question, the historical context of 1960s computing fundamentally shaped ELIZA’s architecture as well. Decisions in computing that reflect material constraints create path dependencies and eventually become programming cultural norms. These constraints manifested in ELIZA’s single-pass processing, tape-based storage and stack-oriented implementation. Yet within these limitations, Weizenbaum crafted an elegant solution. These technical features, though invisible to the users, are crucial to creating the illusion of understanding that made ELIZA so compelling.Weizenbaum explained many of ELIZA’s technical features in the 10-page paper published in the <a href="https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/365153.365168" target="_blank">January 1966 edition of the journal Communications of the Association of Computing Machinery</a> (CACM). But he chose to omit some essential details.In that paper Weizenbaum published ELIZA’s best known dialogue, which begins,<div style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: 16px; color: black; padding: 10px; line-height: 1.5;">Men are all alike.IN WHAT WAYThey’re always bugging us about something or other.CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLEWell, my boyfriend made me come here.</div>This dialogue marked ELIZA’s public debut in 1966 as one of the examples produced by the Doctor script. By finding the source code for ELIZA and examining how it performs the Doctor script, we now better understand these two separate parts of a system and can explore the many other personas of ELIZA. In just some of the other scripts known to date, ELIZA was programmed to discuss math, <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/tag/poetry" target="_blank">poetry</a>, color, paradoxes, synchronization, relativity, France, and elevators.These scripts work like templates. They are structured data that direct the ELIZA system to “play” a particular task or role. By comparing archival and published ELIZA dialogues from interactions with a variety of scripts, including Doctor, we can understand more about bot personas and how they function, paying close attention to how a bot evokes social dynamics between system and interactor.Ultimately, studying the dialogues and scripts demonstrates the crucial role that collaboration plays in these exchanges, as bot and user cocreate the sense of their interaction. To understand the full range of ELIZA’s capabilities and conversational possibilities, let’s take a look at the variety of scripts that were created for the ELIZA system.What distinguishes each ELIZA script is both its subject matter and the linguistic and stylistic choices used to deliver that content. These choices are not neutral; they can be said to construct a particular persona with characteristics that emerge through the script’s language patterns, vocabulary, and conversational approach. In short, it matters not just what you say but how you say it too.“The aim was less to create a functional automated therapist and more to find a suitably constrained role to match the limitations of the programming environment.”For example, with the Doctor script Weizenbaum deliberately echoed the style of a Rogerian “talk” therapist. He chose this persona because the psychiatric mode is one of the few types of conversations in which one person can “assume the pose of knowing almost nothing of the real world. If, for example, one were to tell a psychiatrist ‘I went for a long boat ride’ and he responded, ‘Tell me about boats,’ one would not assume that he knew nothing about boats but that he had some purpose in so directing the subsequent conversation.” <img alt="Close-up of paper loaded in a teletype machine with a few paragraphs of chatbot dialogue written on it. " class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="86bbdc58c1e01df11061af97b1e9b45c" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="97e5e" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/close-up-of-paper-loaded-in-a-teletype-machine-with-a-few-paragraphs-of-chatbot-dialogue-written-on-it.jpg?id=67161217&width=980"/> The first users of ELIZA interacted with it via teletype terminals.VCF Museum at InfoAgeThus, the most famous persona created for ELIZA was a technical convenience. As human-computer interaction expert Lucy Suchman explains, “The Doctor program exploited the maxim that shared premises can remain unspoken: that the less we say in conversation, the more what is said is assumed to be self-evident.” In creating the original ELIZA effect, less was more.The aim was less to create a functional automated therapist and more to find a suitably constrained role to match the limitations of the programming environment. Then Weizenbaum composed the script to match the role by choosing specific words that evoked rhetorical tone and characterization, for example, LET’S DISCUSS FURTHER WHY YOU … WHAT DOES THAT SUGGEST TO YOU. In Doctor, the machine side of the conversation needs to appear like a good listener who cares about what the user has mentioned before, so it often includes the user’s text in its replies and keeps its responses open-ended. Because a real doctor would be inquisitive, the script contains lots ofWHAT andWHY questions. In other scripts and dialogues, the script keywords and assigned responses reveal the design decisions that help create different specific personas. This variation becomes increasingly apparent as we look at the wider range of ELIZA scripts.<h2>What Were Some of ELIZA’s Alternate Personas?</h2>Let’s start with a script called Neweng, short for New England. By the mid-1950s, scientists were already taking up Turing’s proposition for conversing with a computer as a tangible idea. In 1959, a “conversation machine” made by a small team at the University of Toronto Computation Centre could make small talk about the weather if preprompted with current data. Its script included a ranked series of time words, weather words, and emotion words, but the system had “a rather narrow outlook,” limited vocabulary, and no knowledge of syntax. According to its creators, “in spite of this crudity, the results in passable conversation are surprisingly good, which in a way is a commentary on the shallowness of ordinary conversation about the weather.” <img alt="Typewritten list of inquisitive dialogue responses such as \u201cWhat does that suggest to you?\u201d" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="5fcf41cfad8ee21b240d837e7b66c660" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="17794" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/typewritten-list-of-inquisitive-dialogue-responses-such-as-u201cwhat-does-that-suggest-to-you-u201d.jpg?id=67156058&width=980"/> This fragment of ELIZA’s source code shows how scripted responses were encoded, in this case to make ELIZA sound like a Rogerian therapist. MIT Libraries, Distinctive CollectionsOne of ELIZA’s test scripts found in the archive had a similar function. Neweng does not soothe, therapize, or instruct, but only makes small talk. It chats as if at a boring dinner party.<div style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: 16px; color: black; padding: 10px; line-height: 1.5;">WHAT NEW ENGLAND STATE DO YOU LIKE BEST OF ALLi love rhode islandI ENJOY THE BEACHES ON LONG ISLAND SOUNDWHAT OTHER NEW ENGLAND STATE DO YOU LIKEi like massachusettsTHAT IS MY HOME STATEWHAT OTHER NEW ENGLAND STATE DO YOU LIKEyou must like massachusetts tooWHAT OTHER NEW ENGLAND STATE DO YOU LIKEi enjoy skiing in new hampshirePLEASANTLY COOL IN THE SUMMER UP THEREWHAT OTHER NEW ENGLAND STATE DO YOU LIKEi like missouriMISSOURI IS NOT A NEW ENGLAND STATEWHAT OTHER NEW ENGLAND STATE DO YOU LIKEi like cape codTHAT’S A BEAUTIFUL PART OF MASSACHUSETTS</div>What can we learn from such a basic conversation in which it seems like nothing interesting is shared? Despite the bland chat, a persona emerges from the bot script in phrases like PLEASANTLY COOL and UP THERE and in locations like THE BEACHES ON LONG ISLAND SOUND. From such comments, we can begin to imagine a persona who has not only a certain vocabulary but also certain hobbies and vacation spots. Perhaps implicit assumptions of race and class emerge as well.A chatty persona might take on many forms, depending on where and when the conversation occurs. This one seems reserved, perhaps fitting its setting in 1960s New England. The system reminds the user that Missouri is not a New England state, but what if this conversation took place in Missouri, Texas, or Mexico? The machine persona would sound different in its cadence, tone, and references. What would we come to understand about a chat persona from Fire Island, from Brooklyn, from Berlin? What would they sound like, and what topics would they discuss?These differences in subject matter do matter. They imply personas with entirely different backgrounds and experience, giving users wholly different interactions and affective relations. In this way, the Neweng script demonstrates how even simple algorithms making contextual responses about geography could generate a convincing sense of personhood and place. Whereas Neweng could be said to have created a casual, conversational persona focused on light social exchange, other scripts pushed ELIZA into more structured and educational roles. These scripts demonstrate how the system could be adapted not just for friendly chatter but for teaching. <img alt="Black-and-white portrait of a middle-aged balding man in aviator eyeglasses." class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="a02ade38f8966ac94c795b313e1c3a6b" data-rm-shortcode-name="rebelmouse-image" id="fc521" loading="lazy" src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/black-and-white-portrait-of-a-middle-aged-balding-man-in-aviator-eyeglasses.jpg?id=67155997&width=980"/>Edwin Taylor, at MIT’s Education Research Center, developed alternate scripts for ELIZA, testing its ability to act as a teacher.MIT Libraries, Distinctive CollectionsMeet ELIZA the tutor, quite unlike ELIZA the therapist or the chatty neighbor. Intrvw, Canvec, FVP1, and Arithm are a set of ELIZA scripts created as teaching tools used in experiments by Edwin F. Taylor at MIT’s Education Research Center. These scripts run on later versions of ELIZA that incorporated an important technical innovation called conditional keyword matching.Unlike the original ELIZA, which simply looked for keywords and generated responses based on their presence, these updated versions could track what had been discussed previously and branch into different conversational paths based on specific user answers. This development allowed ELIZA to simulate a kind of Socratic method, where a tutor guides learning through carefully sequenced questions that respond to student answers rather than simply presenting information.These scripts construct the tutor persona through many subtle linguistic gestures that create characterization and rhetorical tone. This tone differs from that of Doctor, which asks open-ended questions and comes across as gentle and nonscientific. In the tutoring scripts, large blocks of informative text from the bot tend to dominate the conversation, and the tone is often more dry and unemotional in these explanations. The dialogues indicate structured scripts that include guidance to lead the student through narrow, Socratic learning paths.In particular, the teaching scripts feature praise and critique. The dialogues for Intrvw, Canvec, and FVP1 are peppered with EXCELLENT, VERY GOOD, RIGHT YOU ARE, and CONGRATULATIONS. These create the sense of a supportive instructor cheering the student on. Such politeness has been taken up in contemporary bots like ChatGPT, which has been shown to perform better when people are polite back to it.ELIZA could become a tutor more effectively as the system grew in its capabilities, another valuable reminder that ELIZA was not one program but a family of programs. After the publication of the 1966 CACM article, Weizenbaum continued to develop the systems for interaction and understanding. As an experiment, Weizenbaum wrote the Arithm script less as a tutor and more so to “to illustrate the power of the evaluator to which ELIZA has access.” It uses a friendly, plain language interface to let users do simple programming. The script can do calculations, assign variables to values, and perform operations on them. Math problems can be described in sentence form:<div style="font-family: 'Courier New', Courier, monospace; font-size: 16px; color: black; padding: 10px; line-height: 1.5;">The radius of a globe is 10.A globe is a sphere. A sphere is an object.What is the area of the globe.IT’S 1256.635916</div>The updated 1967 version of the ELIZA system can accumulate facts and store additional information. In this later version of ELIZA, when the system does not recognize information, it asks follow-up questions to gain data. As Weizenbaum explains, “The present script is designed to reveal, as opposed to conceal, lack of understanding and misunderstanding. Notice, for example, that when the program is asked to compute the area of the ball, it doesn’t yet know that a ball is a sphere and that when the diameter of the ball needs to be computed the fact that a ball is an object has also not yet been established.” Unlike Doctor, which asks questions to keep the conversation going, Arithm is building its store of, if not knowledge, then data and logic statements.Although the variety of scripts helps us to see how a range of personas could be constructed through script programming ELIZA, they represent only half of the conversational process. A script can establish a foundation for a persona, but that persona only emerges fully through interaction with users who engage with it, interpret it, and respond to it in ways that may confirm, challenge, or transform the script’s implicit character. Reference: https://ift.tt/G15vVcm