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Friday, August 14, 2026

Digital Signal Processing Pioneer Bede Liu Dies At 91

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/portrait-of-an-elderly-asian-man-softly-smiling-in-a-suit-jacket-and-tie.jpg?id=67609508&width=1245&height=700&coordinates=0%2C62%2C0%2C63"/> Bede Liu, a digital signal processing pioneer, died on 7 May. He was 91.Liu was widely regarded as one of the founders of modern digital signal processing, a field that applies mathematical algorithms to analyze, modify, and transmit signals including sound, images, and video.The IEEE Life Fellow taught electrical engineering at <a href="https://www.princeton.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Princeton</a> for more than 50 years. From 1994 to 1997, he chaired the university’s <a href="https://ece.princeton.edu/front" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">electrical and computer engineering department</a>.Liu’s research aided the transition from analog to digital processing of sound, images, and video. His work helped establish many of the mathematical and engineering techniques that underpin modern communications, multimedia systems, and consumer electronics.Although little known outside engineering circles, his work is embedded in technologies used by billions of people. The low-power digital signal processors that make cellphone calls, streaming video, and Internet communications possible can be traced to research he conducted in the 1970s and ‘80s.Liu received the 2018 <a href="https://corporate-awards.ieee.org/award/ieee-jack-kilby-signal-processing-medal/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE Jack S. Kilby Signal Processing Medal</a> for “sustained contributions to the analysis and the development of low-complexity realizations of digital signal processing algorithms.”“We stream music and video. We take photos with our phones, and we send them around. We don’t even think about it,” IEEE Life Fellow <a href="https://ece.princeton.edu/people/h-vincent-poor" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">H. Vincent Poor</a> said in an <a href="https://engineering.princeton.edu/news/2026/06/24/bede-liu-pioneer-digital-signal-processing-and-beloved-mentor-dies-age-91" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">obituary for Liu</a>. “But it’s all because of the signal processing, image processing, and video processing that’s been developed over the years, as well as other technologies that have grown up beside it and enabled it, like semiconductors. The development of these processing advances was exactly what Bede was a major part of.” Poor is a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Princeton.<h2>An impactful scholar and teacher</h2>Liu was born in Shanghai in 1934. During his childhood, his family relocated to Taiwan amid the upheaval of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Civil_War" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Chinese Civil War</a>. His father, Henry Liu Sr., was an electrical engineer.Liu earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering in 1954 from the <a href="https://www.ntu.edu.tw/english/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">National Taiwan University</a>, in Taipei. After graduating, he and his family moved to the United States. Liu and his father attended the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (now the <a href="https://engineering.nyu.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">New York University Tandon School of Engineering</a>) together. They earned their master’s degrees in electrical engineering in 1956. Liu continued his studies at the school, earning a doctoral degree in electrical engineering four years later.In 1959 he was awarded a <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/7-bell-labs-ieee-milestones" target="_self">Bell Labs</a> <a href="https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/institute/media/bell-labs-fellows/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">fellowship</a> and worked at the company’s Murray Hill, N.J., location until he joined Princeton in 1962.“Liu was a highly impactful scholar and teacher—always thinking ahead of future needs and changing technologies,” said IEEE Life Fellow <a href="https://ece.princeton.edu/people/peter-j-ramadge" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Peter J. Ramadge</a>, a Princeton professor emeritus of engineering.Cellphones make use of a considerable amount of digital signal processing, Liu once noted. Many of the field’s advances, he added, involved making sophisticated processing practical on devices with limited computing power—which is the challenge that confronted generations of engineers designing portable electronics.Liu’s research contributions helped shape both the theory and practice of digital signal processing. With <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abe_Peled" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Abe Peled</a>, a former graduate student, he authored the 1976 textbook <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Signal-Processing-Theory-Implementation/dp/0471019410" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Digital Signal Processing: Theory, Design, and Implementation</a>, which is a standard reference for engineers. Published before digital signal processing had fully emerged as a distinct discipline, it helped define the subject for practitioners and students around the world.Liu also published 250 technical papers and was granted 12 U.S. patents. His papers are available to read on the <a href="https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/author/37087189074" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE Xplore Digital Library</a>.The first patent granted to him and Peled was in 1976 for a hardware design that processed bits in parallel, rather than in sequence. The innovation greatly increased computing efficiency for data including sound and communication signals.Peled says Liu “demonstrated an openness to new ideas and a willingness to challenge the orthodoxy of the EE department at that time—which leaned heavily toward more theoretical information theory.”<h2>A mentor to well-known engineers</h2>Liu’s influence extended beyond his own research. He advised 53 doctoral students, many of whom went on to distinguished careers in academia and industry, including leadership positions at <a href="https://about.google/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Google</a> and <a href="https://www.ibm.com/about" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IBM</a>. One former student, computer scientist <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/bob-kahn-2667754905" target="_self">Robert Kahn</a>, helped create the architecture of the modern Internet. Kahn, an IEEE Life Fellow, received the 2024 <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/medal-of-honor-bob-kahn" target="_self">IEEE Medal of Honor</a>.“His former students were very successful,” Poor said of Liu, “and I think that’s a testament to his skill as a mentor.”“Liu was a highly impactful scholar and teacher—always thinking ahead of future needs and changing technologies.”—Peter J. RamadgeTogether with several Ph.D. students, Liu developed methods of filtering and compressing digital signals to mitigate errors and dramatically reduce the computation needed for signal processing.As digital signal processing moved from laboratories into commercial products, the impact of Liu’s ideas spread across industries. His research helped spawn the development of lower-cost and lower-power electronics and contributed to advances in mobile communications, multimedia technology, industrial automation, and biomedical imaging.<h2>A focus on media integrity and copyrights</h2>In the 2000s, Liu turned his attention to media integrity and copyright issues.“With the increasing accessibility of digital media source material, the protection of ownership and the prevention of unauthorized alteration has become an important concern,” he wrote in his 2002 book, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Multimedia-Data-Hiding-Min-Wu/dp/0387954260" target="_blank">Multimedia Data Hiding</a>. The book, which he co-wrote with his former doctoral student IEEE Fellow Min Wu, discussed the theory, techniques, applications, and security of digital watermarking—hidden signals that could identify a genuine copy of a song, image or video to prevent unauthorized distribution or tampering.A Princeton team that included Liu, Wu, and another of his doctoral students uncovered serious vulnerabilities in watermarking technologies being considered by an industry consortium. They found that the standardization efforts were immature and would not protect against digital piracy.“Now nearly every copy of a Hollywood film given to a critic or theater carries a unique digital forensic watermark to prevent unauthorized redistribution,” said Wu.<h2>A force in the community</h2>Liu, an active IEEE volunteer, served on the <a href="https://www.ieee.org/about/corporate/board" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE Board of Directors</a> in 1984 and 1985. He was the 1982 president of the <a href="https://ieee-cas.org/welcome" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">IEEE Circuits and Systems Society</a>.He was a member of the U.S. <a href="https://www.nae.edu/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">National Academy of Engineering</a>, an academician of China’s <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/136208a0" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Academia Sinica</a>, and a foreign member of the <a href="https://english.cas.cn/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Chinese Academy of Sciences</a>.Outside the classroom, he was recognized for his humility, humor, enthusiasm, and generosity. When thinking of Liu, IEEE Life Fellow <a href="https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~ken/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Kenneth Steiglitz</a> says, cheer is the first word that comes to mind.Liu was “always ready with a positive remark, a quick smile or, maybe, some tips on the right way to cook a duck,” says Steiglitz, professor emeritus of computer science at Princeton.Liu encouraged his students to take on ambitious, unconventional projects, and he inspired students and colleagues with his adventurous spirit. Reference: https://ift.tt/PrExKFc

Predict Antenna Coupling on Electrically Large Platforms Before Building Hardware

<img src="https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/wipl-d-logo-with-stylized-antenna-arcs-above-the-text.png?id=26851692&width=980"/> Learn how full-wave simulation predicts very low antenna coupling on aircraft-sized platforms, and which three modeling techniques deliver accurate results with fewer computational resources.<a href="https://content.knowledgehub.wiley.com/efficient-and-accurate-prediction-of-cosite-isolation-on-large-platforms/" target="_blank">Download this free whitepaper now!</a> Reference: https://ift.tt/m9k7dsX

PBS station fears losing 50TB of data after being ghosted by cloud storage provider

After its cloud storage provider went defunct, a PBS affiliate decided to sue a data center provider to regain access to 50TB of TV shows, videos, and other data dating back 70 years. As reported this week by <a href="https://current.org/2026/08/nine-pbs-sues-iron-mountain-over-blocked-access-to-archival-data/?wallit_nosession=1">Current</a>, a trade newspaper covering public broadcasting, St. Louis affiliate Nine PBS filed a lawsuit against Iron Mountain Data Centers on July 28, seeking access to the data. In the litigation filed in Denver District Court, Nine PBS says that its cloud storage provider, Open Source Storage (OSS), used one of Iron Mountain’s Denver data centers to store the channel’s data. However, OSS is being unresponsive, and Nine PBS says Iron Mountain has refused to release its data. The data in question includes the station’s coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, East St. Louis’ history, <a href="https://ny.pbslearningmedia.org/resource/ess05.sci.ess.earthsys.flood/the-great-flood-of-1993/">The Great Flood of 1993</a>, and over 11,000 files, <a href="https://www.denverpost.com/2026/07/29/st-louis-pbs-archives-denver-data-center-lawsuit/">The Denver Post</a> reported in July. The lawsuit claims that “most” of the data is “unique and irreplaceable,” according to the Post.<a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/08/pbs-station-fears-losing-50tb-of-data-after-being-ghosted-by-cloud-storage-provider/">Read full article</a> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/08/pbs-station-fears-losing-50tb-of-data-after-being-ghosted-by-cloud-storage-provider/#comments">Comments</a> Reference : https://ift.tt/6YlBOrw

OpenAI and Anthropic in price war as Chinese AI rivals gain ground

Leading US AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic are releasing cheaper models as they fight to retain cost-conscious customers who are switching to cut-price alternatives from Chinese rivals. The price war comes as rising AI bills push companies to curb usage and seek cheaper models, helping Chinese developers including Moonshot and DeepSeek make inroads with users from Silicon Valley to Europe. OpenAI recently said that it was slashing prices for GPT-5.6 Luna, its “fastest and most affordable model”, by 80 percent. Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 5, touting the system’s “frontier intelligence... at half the price” of Fable 5, the company’s most capable model.<a href="https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/openai-and-anthropic-in-price-war-as-chinese-ai-rivals-gain-ground/">Read full article</a> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/08/openai-and-anthropic-in-price-war-as-chinese-ai-rivals-gain-ground/#comments">Comments</a> Reference : https://ift.tt/UTxGQAb

Thursday, August 13, 2026

White House recruits security firms to hack overseas cybercriminals

The Trump administration is recruiting private security firms to conduct federal government-authorized operations, including cyber attacks, against overseas-based criminal organizations that commit hacks on US persons, organizations, or government entities. In a <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/08/expanding-capabilities-to-combat-transnational-cyber-enabled-crime/">National Security Presidential Memorandum</a> issued Thursday, US President Donald Trump directed the National Coordination Center (NCC), which operates under the Homeland Security Task Force, to develop a program for conducting specific cyber operations that combat foreign transnational criminal organizations (TCOs). The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security will provide oversight. The lynchpin of that program is bringing in private sector companies to participate. <h2>Devil will be in the still-undefined details</h2> A <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/08/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-expands-capabilities-to-combat-transnational-cyber-enabled-crime/">fact sheet</a> that accompanied Thursday’s memo listed ransomware, sextortion schemes, phishing campaigns, financial fraud, and impersonation scams as activities eligible for private-sector security firms to target. The memo said such firms could “conduct Cyber Surveillance Operations and Cyber Effects Operations” against “cyber-enabled” TCOs. Such groups are defined as “any foreign group that conducts cyber-enabled crime against the United States Government, a United States person, or United States interests, and that is not an institutional part of a foreign government or wholly operated under a foreign government’s direction.”<a href="https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/white-house-recruits-security-firms-to-hack-overseas-cybercriminals/">Read full article</a> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/white-house-recruits-security-firms-to-hack-overseas-cybercriminals/#comments">Comments</a> Reference : https://ift.tt/TSGfK2Y

Bring a Product Manager Mindset to Your Next Engineering Job

<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"/> If you haven’t already seen a job listing for a “product engineer,” you probably will soon. The job everyone’s suddenly hiring for, this role is like a cross between a product manager and an engineer (as the name suggests). And it’s a hiring trend worth paying attention to.Companies are opening more of these roles every single month, but they’re struggling to fill them. The reason has almost nothing to do with engineers’ coding skills or years of experience.The best career move you can make to prepare for these types of roles has almost nothing to do with getting more technical. Instead, it comes down to one of the fluffiest, most overused, and potentially cringiest words in all of tech: mindset.Stick with me, I promise this goes somewhere useful.<h2>The problem: We were trained to be task-takers</h2>When I started out, my job looked like this:Drive to an office. Sit through meetings that led to other meetings until a project manager handed me a task they’d already chopped into tiny pieces.My job was to turn that task into code.It took years for me to get good at a coding language and tech stack, and once I did, I executed that knowledge against specs that somebody else wrote.You know what’s freakishly good at that exact job? I’ll give you a hint: It starts with A and ends with I.Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, recently said: “coding is basically solved,” and “the bottleneck is going to be good ideas.” So if your entire value is “hand me a task and I’ll build it,” you’re in a footrace with the robots. I don’t like that for you.<h2>The bad news... that is also good news</h2>Many companies are flattening. Middle management is getting stripped out, for better or worse (mostly for worse), which means many of us are doing more with less.This might sound like purely more work, but it’s also an opening for anyone who cares about what they’re building and can put on their manager hat. Companies are no longer just hunting for the strongest engineer in one narrow domain.What’s rare, and what actually moves revenue, is an engineer who can spot the thing that’s quietly costing money and either flag it to leadership or just go fix it.<h2>What this actually looks like</h2>Being product-minded has NOTHING to do with your tech stack.Here’s where to start:Have an opinion and back it up. As a former engineering manager, the worst thing I ever heard was silence. I’d often ask the team what they thought because I doubted myself and wanted a gut check. I was grateful to the ones who said “nope, bad idea, here’s why.” Pushback is a gift.Learn the domain, casually. Work for a plumbing company? You don’t need to become a plumber, but spend an hour on Reddit threads where plumbers vent. Now your ideas come from your potential customers.Make experiments cheap and safe. This is where any engineer has massive leverage. Experiments are not free. A bad one loses customers and frustrates users. Tools like LaunchDarkly and Optimizely let you ship a change to 5 percent of users and roll it back the second it tanks. Learn them, or build a scrappy version yourself. A team that can quickly run safe experiments will out-learn everyone else in the building.Be data-driven. Stop fighting about button colors. Pick a goal: making money, finding product-market fit, or making the product sticky so people come back. Then measure it. If your gorgeous redesign tanks time-on-site, it failed, no matter how good it looked to you. If the ugly version makes more money, ship the ugly version.You don’t have to be the ideas person. Maybe you’re not a visionary. That’s fine. Organize a hackathon around an actual company goal. Pull up your company’s quarterly targets and build something against one of them. Don’t know what those targets are? That’s your first assignment.<h2>Good ideas are the new bottleneck—and they always have been</h2>When I was a manager, I asked myself one question every week: What’s the single most impactful thing I could do right now? The answer was almost never “write more code.” It was understanding a gnarly problem nobody had defined yet. Building a deck to spread knowledge that was in one person’s head. Getting the right three people in a room to actually make a decision we’d been putting off.Code is cheap, and it always has been. We just couldn’t see it, because for decades the typing took so long that it felt like the hard part. It never was. The hard part was always knowing what’s worth building.— Brian<h2><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/siobahn-day-grady-ai-hbcu" target="_self">Siobahn Day Grady Wants Everyone to Be AI Literate</a></h2>In January 2025, Siobahn Day Grady launched the first AI research institute at a historically Black college or university. The institute aims to help expand AI skills for all students at North Carolina Central University, where Grady is an associate professor, through both AI research opportunities and skills training. Though the institute is the first of its kind, Grady hopes it could serve as a model for other HBCUs. Read more <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/siobahn-day-grady-ai-hbcu" target="_self">here</a>. <h2><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-scientist-research-paper-format" target="_self">Should Researchers Write Papers for AI Instead of People?</a></h2>AI is increasingly used in the scientific research process. So does publishing need to change to keep up? Jiachen Liu recently co-authored a paper published on ArXiv arguing that the PDF should be replaced with an “Agent-Native Research Artifact” designed with AI in mind. In this interview with IEEE Spectrum, Liu lays out a provocative vision of AI-driven research and an infrastructure that captures—and learns from—details that often get left out of today’s papers. Read more <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-scientist-research-paper-format" target="_self">here</a>. <h2><a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/dark-matter" target="_self">Detect Dark Matter’s Mark From Your Backyard</a></h2>Astronomers still don’t know exactly what dark matter is, but they can detect it—and so can you. With a small radio telescope and a few other pieces, you can create a DIY setup to gauge how fast hydrogen clouds are moving across the Milky Way. Feed those measurements into a spreadsheet, and you can see the same signals that have baffled the astronomical community for decades. Read more <a href="https://spectrum.ieee.org/dark-matter" target="_self">here</a>. Reference: https://ift.tt/TPhBdL6

Wednesday, August 12, 2026

Terabytes of credentials leaked in massive supply-chain attack

Terabytes worth of credentials, many belonging to the world’s biggest and most sensitive organizations, have been exposed in a supply-chain attack on LiteLLM, an open source tool that streamlines AI-driven software development. Microsoft, Amazon, Cisco, Samsung, and Salesforce are only a handful of the entities whose access secrets were exposed. The revelation was posted on <a href="https://www.cloudsek.com/blog/ai-supply-chain-breach-2500-companies-434000-cicd-pipelines">Tuesday</a> and <a href="https://www.hudsonrock.com/blog/largest-ai-supply-chain-breach-of-2026-litellm-hack-impacts-thousands-of-global-enterprises-claim-your-ethical-disclosure">Wednesday</a> by security firms CloudSEK and Hudson Rock. CloudSEK said it found cloud keys, repository tokens, SSH keys, Kubernetes secrets, package publishing credentials, environment variables, and AI provider keys that could allow attackers to gain access to more than 2,500 organizations. <h2>40 minutes is all it takes</h2> The credentials were extracted during a 40-minute window in March while the victims used compromised versions of LiteLLM downloaded from the package’s official location in the Python Package Index repository. Hudson Rock said it made the discovery after analyzing a 195TB file that it obtained. Neither firm identified the source of the information.<a href="https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/terabytes-of-credentials-leaked-in-massive-supply-chain-attack/">Read full article</a> <a href="https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/08/terabytes-of-credentials-leaked-in-massive-supply-chain-attack/#comments">Comments</a> Reference : https://ift.tt/oLneXEQ