Leading Educator Weighs in on University DEI Program Cuts

Many U.S. university students returning to campus this month will find their school no longer has a diversity, equity, and inclusion program. More than 200 universities in 30 states so far this year have eliminated, cut back, or changed their DEI efforts, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

It is happening at mostly publicly funded universities, because state legislators and governors are enacting laws that prohibit or defund DEI programs. They’re also cutting budgets and sometimes implementing other measures that restrict diversity efforts. Some colleges have closed their DEI programs altogether to avoid political pressure.

The Institute asked Andrea J. Goldsmith, a top educator and longtime proponent of diversity efforts within the engineering field and society, to weigh in.

Goldsmith shared her personal opinion about DEI with The Institute, not as Princeton’s dean of engineering and applied sciences. A wireless communications pioneer, she is an IEEE Fellow who launched the IEEE Board of Directors Diversity and Inclusion Committee in 2019 and once served as its chair.

She received this year’s IEEE Mulligan Education Medal for educating, mentoring, and inspiring generations of students, and for authoring pioneering textbooks in advanced digital communications.

“For the longest time,” Goldsmith says, “there was so much positive momentum toward improving diversity and inclusion. And now there’s a backlash, which is really unfortunate, but it’s not everywhere.” She says she is proud of her university’s president, who has been vocal that diversity is about excellence and that Princeton is better because its students and faculty are diverse.

In the interview, Goldsmith spoke about why she thinks the topic has become so controversial, what measures universities can take to ensure their students have a sense of belonging, and what can be done to retain female engineers—a group that has been underrepresented in the field.

The Institute: What do you think is behind the movement to dissolve DEI programs?

Goldsmith: That’s a very complex question, and I certainly don’t have the answer.

It has become a politically charged issue because there’s a notion that DEI programs are really about quotas or advancing people who are not deserving of the positions they have been given. Part of the backlash also was spurred by the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, the war in Gaza, and the protests. One notion is that Jewish students are also a minority that needs protection, and why is it that DEI programs are only focused on certain segments of the population as opposed to diversity and inclusion for everyone, for people with all different perspectives, and those who are victims or subject to explicit bias, implicit bias, or discrimination? I think that these are legitimate concerns, and that programs around diversity and inclusion should be addressing them.

The goal of diversity and inclusion is that everybody should be able to participate and reach their full potential. That should go for every profession and, in particular, every segment of the engineering community.

Also in the middle of this backlash is the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision that ended race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions—which means that universities cannot take diversity into account explicitly in their admission of students. The decision in and of itself only affects undergraduate admissions, but it has raised concerns about broadening the decision to faculty hiring or for other kinds of programs that promote diversity and inclusion within universities and private companies.

I think the Supreme Court’s decision, along with the political polarization and the recent protests at universities, have all been pieces of a puzzle that have come together to paint all DEI programs with a broad brush of not being about excellence and lowering barriers but really being about promoting certain groups of people at the expense of others.

How might the elimination of DEI programs impact the engineering profession specifically?

Goldsmith: I think it depends on what it means to eliminate DEI programs. Programs to promote the diversity of ideas and perspectives in engineering are essential for the success of the profession. As an optimist, I believe we should continue to have programs that ensure our profession can bring in people with diverse perspectives and experiences.

Does that mean that every DEI program in engineering companies and universities needs to evolve or change? Not necessarily. Maybe some programs do because they aren’t necessarily achieving the goal of ensuring that diverse people can thrive.

“My work in the profession of engineering to enhance diversity and inclusion has really been about excellence for the profession.”

We need to be mindful of the concerns that have been raised about DEI programs. I don’t think they are completely unfounded.

If we do the easy thing—which is to just eliminate the programs without replacing them with something else or evolving them—then it will hurt the engineering profession.

The metrics being used to assess whether these programs are achieving their goals need to be reviewed. If they are not, the programs need to be improved. If we do that, I think DEI programs will continue to positively impact the engineering profession.

For universities that have cut or reduced their programs, what are some other ways to make sure all students have a sense of belonging?

Goldsmith: I would look at what other initiatives could be started that would have a different name but still have the goal of ensuring that students have a sense of belonging.

Long before DEI programs, there were other initiatives within universities that helped students figure out their place within the school, initiated them into what it means to be a member of the community, and created a sense of belonging through various activities. These include prefreshman and freshman orientation programs, student groups and organizations, student-led courses (with or without credit), eating clubs, fraternities, and sororities, to name just a few. I am referring here to any program within a university that creates a sense of community for those who participate—which is a pretty broad category of programs

These continue, but they aren’t called DEI programs. They’ve been around for decades, if not since the university system was founded.

How can universities and companies ensure that all people have a good experience in school and the workplace?

Goldsmith: This year has been a huge challenge for universities, with protests, sit-ins, arrests, and violence.

One of the things I said in my opening remarks to freshmen at the start of this semester is that you will learn more from people around you who have different viewpoints and perspectives than you will from people who think like you. And that engaging with people who disagree with you in a respectful and scholarly way and being open to potentially changing your perspective will not only create a better community of scholars but also better prepare you for postgraduation life, where you may be interacting with a boss, coworkers, family, and friends who don’t agree with you.

Finding ways to engage with people who don’t agree with you is essential for engaging with the world in a positive way. I know we don’t think about that as much in engineering because we’re going about building our technologies, doing our equations, or developing our programs. But so much of engineering is collaboration and understanding other people, whether it’s your customers, your boss, or your collaborators.

I would argue everyone is diverse. There’s no such thing as a nondiverse person, because no two people have the exact same set of experiences. Figuring out how to engage with people who are different is essential for success in college, grad school, your career, and your life.

I think it’s a bit different in companies, because you can fire someone who does a sit-in in the boss’s office. You can’t do that in universities. But I think workplaces also need to create an environment where diverse people can engage with each other beyond just what they’re working on in a way that’s respectful and intellectual.

Reports show that half of female engineers leave the high-tech industry because they have a poor work experience. Why is that, and what can be done to retain women?

Goldsmith: That is one of the harder questions facing the engineering profession. The challenges that women face are implicit, including sometimes explicit bias. In extreme cases, there are sexual and other kinds of harassment, and bullying. These egregious behaviors have decreased some. The Me Too movement raised a lot of awareness, but [poor behavior] still is far more prevalent than we want it to be. It’s very difficult for women who have experienced that kind of egregious and illegal behavior to speak up. For example, if it’s their Ph.D. advisor, what does that mean if they speak up? Do they lose their funding? Do they lose all the research they’ve done? This powerful person can bad-mouth them for job applications and potential future opportunities.

So, it’s very difficult to curb these behaviors. However, there has been a lot of awareness raised, and universities and companies have put protections in place against them.

Then there’s implicit bias, where a qualified woman is passed over for a promotion, or women are asked to take meeting notes but not the men. Or a woman leader gets a bad performance review because she doesn’t take no for an answer, is too blunt, or too pushy. All these are things that male leaders are actually lauded for.

There is data on the barriers and challenges that women face and what universities and employers can do to mitigate them. These are the experiences that hurt women’s morale and upward mobility and, ultimately, make them leave the profession.

One of the most important things for a woman to be successful in this profession is to have mentors and supporters. So it is important to make sure that women engineers are assigned mentors at every stage, from student to senior faculty or engineer and everything in between, to help them understand the challenges they face and how to deal with them, as well as to promote and support them.

I also think having leaders in universities and companies recognize and articulate the importance of diversity helps set the tone from the top down and tends to mitigate some of the bias and implicit bias in people lower in the organization.

I think the backlash against DEI is going to make it harder for leaders to articulate the value of diversity, and to put in place some of the best practices around ensuring that diverse people are considered for positions and reach their full potential.

We have definitely taken a step backward in the past year on the understanding that diversity is about excellence and implementing best practices that we know work to mitigate the challenges that diverse people face. But that just means we need to redouble our efforts.

Although this isn’t the best time to be optimistic about diversity in engineering, if we take the long view, I think that things are certainly better than they were 20 or 30 years ago. And I think 20 or 30 years from now they’ll be even better.

Reference: https://ift.tt/wGnKYJx

Systems used by courts and governments across the US riddled with vulnerabilities

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Public records systems that courts and governments rely on to manage voter registrations and legal filings have been riddled with vulnerabilities that made it possible for attackers to falsify registration databases and add, delete, or modify official documents.

Over the past year, software developer turned security researcher Jason Parker has found and reported dozens of critical vulnerabilities in no fewer than 19 commercial platforms used by hundreds of courts, government agencies, and police departments across the country. Most of the vulnerabilities were critical.

One flaw he uncovered in the voter registration cancellation portal for the state of George, for instance, allowed anyone visiting it to cancel the registration of any voter in that state when the visitor knew the name, birthdate, and county of residence of the voter. In another case, document management systems used in local courthouses across the country contained multiple flaws that allowed unauthorized people to access sensitive filings such as psychiatric evaluations that were under seal. And in one case, unauthorized people could assign themselves privileges that are supposed to be available only to clerks of the court and, from there, create, delete, or modify filings.

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Reference : https://ift.tt/sDUCYlG

Leading Educator Weighs in on University DEI Program Cuts

Many U.S. university students returning to campus this month will find their school no longer has a diversity, equity, and inclusion program. More than 200 universities in 30 states so far this year have eliminated, cut back, or changed their DEI efforts, according to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

It is happening at mostly publicly funded universities, because state legislators and governors are enacting laws that prohibit or defund DEI programs. They’re also cutting budgets and sometimes implementing other measures that restrict diversity efforts. Some colleges have closed their DEI programs altogether to avoid political pressure.

The Institute asked Andrea J. Goldsmith, a top educator and longtime proponent of diversity efforts within the engineering field and society, to weigh in.

Goldsmith shared her personal opinion about DEI with The Institute, not as Princeton’s dean of engineering and applied sciences. A wireless communications pioneer, she is an IEEE Fellow who launched the IEEE Board of Directors Diversity and Inclusion Committee in 2019 and once served as its chair.

She received this year’s IEEE Mulligan Education Medal for educating, mentoring, and inspiring generations of students, and for authoring pioneering textbooks in advanced digital communications.

“For the longest time,” Goldsmith says, “there was so much positive momentum toward improving diversity and inclusion. And now there’s a backlash, which is really unfortunate, but it’s not everywhere.” She says she is proud of her university’s president, who has been vocal that diversity is about excellence and that Princeton is better because its students and faculty are diverse.

In the interview, Goldsmith spoke about why she thinks the topic has become so controversial, what measures universities can take to ensure their students have a sense of belonging, and what can be done to retain female engineers—a group that has been underrepresented in the field.

The Institute: What do you think is behind the movement to dissolve DEI programs?

Goldsmith: That’s a very complex question, and I certainly don’t have the answer.

It has become a politically charged issue because there’s a notion that DEI programs are really about quotas or advancing people who are not deserving of the positions they have been given. Part of the backlash also was spurred by the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, the war in Gaza, and the protests. One notion is that Jewish students are also a minority that needs protection, and why is it that DEI programs are only focused on certain segments of the population as opposed to diversity and inclusion for everyone, for people with all different perspectives, and those who are victims or subject to explicit bias, implicit bias, or discrimination? I think that these are legitimate concerns, and that programs around diversity and inclusion should be addressing them.

The goal of diversity and inclusion is that everybody should be able to participate and reach their full potential. That should go for every profession and, in particular, every segment of the engineering community.

Also in the middle of this backlash is the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision that ended race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions—which means that universities cannot take diversity into account explicitly in their admission of students. The decision in and of itself only affects undergraduate admissions, but it has raised concerns about broadening the decision to faculty hiring or for other kinds of programs that promote diversity and inclusion within universities and private companies.

I think the Supreme Court’s decision, along with the political polarization and the recent protests at universities, have all been pieces of a puzzle that have come together to paint all DEI programs with a broad brush of not being about excellence and lowering barriers but really being about promoting certain groups of people at the expense of others.

How might the elimination of DEI programs impact the engineering profession specifically?

Goldsmith: I think it depends on what it means to eliminate DEI programs. Programs to promote the diversity of ideas and perspectives in engineering are essential for the success of the profession. As an optimist, I believe we should continue to have programs that ensure our profession can bring in people with diverse perspectives and experiences.

Does that mean that every DEI program in engineering companies and universities needs to evolve or change? Not necessarily. Maybe some programs do because they aren’t necessarily achieving the goal of ensuring that diverse people can thrive.

“My work in the profession of engineering to enhance diversity and inclusion has really been about excellence for the profession.”

We need to be mindful of the concerns that have been raised about DEI programs. I don’t think they are completely unfounded.

If we do the easy thing—which is to just eliminate the programs without replacing them with something else or evolving them—then it will hurt the engineering profession.

The metrics being used to assess whether these programs are achieving their goals need to be reviewed. If they are not, the programs need to be improved. If we do that, I think DEI programs will continue to positively impact the engineering profession.

For universities that have cut or reduced their programs, what are some other ways to make sure all students have a sense of belonging?

Goldsmith: I would look at what other initiatives could be started that would have a different name but still have the goal of ensuring that students have a sense of belonging.

Long before DEI programs, there were other initiatives within universities that helped students figure out their place within the school, initiated them into what it means to be a member of the community, and created a sense of belonging through various activities. These include prefreshman and freshman orientation programs, student groups and organizations, student-led courses (with or without credit), eating clubs, fraternities, and sororities, to name just a few. I am referring here to any program within a university that creates a sense of community for those who participate—which is a pretty broad category of programs

These continue, but they aren’t called DEI programs. They’ve been around for decades, if not since the university system was founded.

How can universities and companies ensure that all people have a good experience in school and the workplace?

Goldsmith: This year has been a huge challenge for universities, with protests, sit-ins, arrests, and violence.

One of the things I said in my opening remarks to freshmen at the start of this semester is that you will learn more from people around you who have different viewpoints and perspectives than you will from people who think like you. And that engaging with people who disagree with you in a respectful and scholarly way and being open to potentially changing your perspective will not only create a better community of scholars but also better prepare you for postgraduation life, where you may be interacting with a boss, coworkers, family, and friends who don’t agree with you.

Finding ways to engage with people who don’t agree with you is essential for engaging with the world in a positive way. I know we don’t think about that as much in engineering because we’re going about building our technologies, doing our equations, or developing our programs. But so much of engineering is collaboration and understanding other people, whether it’s your customers, your boss, or your collaborators.

I would argue everyone is diverse. There’s no such thing as a nondiverse person, because no two people have the exact same set of experiences. Figuring out how to engage with people who are different is essential for success in college, grad school, your career, and your life.

I think it’s a bit different in companies, because you can fire someone who does a sit-in in the boss’s office. You can’t do that in universities. But I think workplaces also need to create an environment where diverse people can engage with each other beyond just what they’re working on in a way that’s respectful and intellectual.

Reports show that half of female engineers leave the high-tech industry because they have a poor work experience. Why is that, and what can be done to retain women?

Goldsmith: That is one of the harder questions facing the engineering profession. The challenges that women face are implicit, including sometimes explicit bias. In extreme cases, there are sexual and other kinds of harassment, and bullying. These egregious behaviors have decreased some. The Me Too movement raised a lot of awareness, but [poor behavior] still is far more prevalent than we want it to be. It’s very difficult for women who have experienced that kind of egregious and illegal behavior to speak up. For example, if it’s their Ph.D. advisor, what does that mean if they speak up? Do they lose their funding? Do they lose all the research they’ve done? This powerful person can bad-mouth them for job applications and potential future opportunities.

So, it’s very difficult to curb these behaviors. However, there has been a lot of awareness raised, and universities and companies have put protections in place against them.

Then there’s implicit bias, where a qualified woman is passed over for a promotion, or women are asked to take meeting notes but not the men. Or a woman leader gets a bad performance review because she doesn’t take no for an answer, is too blunt, or too pushy. All these are things that male leaders are actually lauded for.

There is data on the barriers and challenges that women face and what universities and employers can do to mitigate them. These are the experiences that hurt women’s morale and upward mobility and, ultimately, make them leave the profession.

One of the most important things for a woman to be successful in this profession is to have mentors and supporters. So it is important to make sure that women engineers are assigned mentors at every stage, from student to senior faculty or engineer and everything in between, to help them understand the challenges they face and how to deal with them, as well as to promote and support them.

I also think having leaders in universities and companies recognize and articulate the importance of diversity helps set the tone from the top down and tends to mitigate some of the bias and implicit bias in people lower in the organization.

I think the backlash against DEI is going to make it harder for leaders to articulate the value of diversity, and to put in place some of the best practices around ensuring that diverse people are considered for positions and reach their full potential.

We have definitely taken a step backward in the past year on the understanding that diversity is about excellence and implementing best practices that we know work to mitigate the challenges that diverse people face. But that just means we need to redouble our efforts.

Although this isn’t the best time to be optimistic about diversity in engineering, if we take the long view, I think that things are certainly better than they were 20 or 30 years ago. And I think 20 or 30 years from now they’ll be even better.

Reference: https://ift.tt/ufEopDv

The Incredible Story Behind the First Transistor Radio

Imagine if your boss called a meeting in May to announce that he’s committing 10 percent of the company’s revenue to the development of a brand-new mass-market consumer product, made with a not-yet-ready-for-mass-production component. Oh, and he wants it on store shelves in less than six months, in time for the holiday shopping season. Ambitious, yes. Kind of nuts, also yes.

But that’s pretty much what Pat Haggerty, vice president of Texas Instruments, did in 1954. The result was the Regency TR-1, the world’s first commercial transistor radio, which debuted 70 years ago this month. The engineers delivered on Haggerty’s audacious goal, and I certainly hope they received a substantial year-end bonus.

Why did Texas Instruments make the Regency TR-1 transistor radio?

But how did Texas Instruments come to make a transistor radio in the first place? TI traces its roots to a company called Geophysical Service Inc. (GSI), which made seismic instrumentation for the oil industry as well as electronics for the military. In 1945, GSI hired Patrick E. Haggerty as the general manager of its laboratory and manufacturing division and its electronics work. By 1951, Haggerty’s division was significantly outpacing GSI’s geophysical division, and so the Dallas-based company reorganized as Texas Instruments to focus on electronics.

Meanwhile, on 30 June 1948, Bell Labs announced John Bardeen and Walter Brattain’s game-changing invention of the transistor. No longer would electronics be dependent on large, hot vacuum tubes. The U.S. government chose not to classify the technology because of its potentially broad applications. In 1951, Bell Labs began licensing the transistor for US $25,000 through the Western Electric Co.; Haggerty bought a license for TI the following year.

The engineers delivered on Haggerty’s audacious goal, and I certainly hope they received a substantial year-end bonus.

TI was still a small company, with not much in the way of R&D capacity. But Haggerty and the other founders wanted it to become a big and profitable company. And so they established research labs to focus on semiconductor materials and a project-engineering group to develop marketable products.

The TR-1 was the first transistor radio, and it ignited a desire for portable gadgets that continues to this day. Bettmann/Getty Images

Haggerty made a good investment when he hired Gordon Teal, a 22-year veteran of Bell Labs. Although Teal wasn’t part of the team that invented the germanium transistor, he recognized that it could be improved by using a single grown crystal, such as silicon. Haggerty was familiar with Teal’s work from a 1951 Bell Labs symposium on transistor technology. Teal happened to be homesick for his native Texas, so when TI advertised for a research director in the New York Times, he applied, and Haggerty offered him the job of assistant vice president instead. Teal started at TI on 1 January 1953.

Fifteen months later, Teal gave Haggerty a demonstration of the first silicon transistor, and he presented his findings three and a half weeks later at the Institute of Radio Engineers’ National Conference on Airborne Electronics, in Dayton, Ohio. His innocuously titled paper, “Some Recent Developments in Silicon and Germanium Materials and Devices,” completely understated the magnitude of the announcement. The audience was astounded to hear that TI had not just one but three types of silicon transistors already in production, as Michael Riordan recounts in his excellent article “The Lost History of the Transistor” (IEEE Spectrum, October 2004).

And fun fact: The TR-1 shown at top once belonged to Willis Adcock, a physical chemist hired by Teal to perfect TI’s silicon transistors as well as transistors for the TR-1. (The radio is now in the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.)

The TR-1 became a product in less than six months

This advancement in silicon put TI on the map as a major player in the transistor industry, but Haggerty was impatient. He wanted a transistorized commercial product now, even if that meant using germanium transistors. On 21 May 1954, Haggerty challenged a research group at TI to have a working prototype of a transistor radio by the following week; four days later, the team came through, with a breadboard containing eight transistors. Haggerty decided that was good enough to commit $2 million—just under 10 percent of TI’s revenue—to commercializing the radio.

Of course, a working prototype is not the same as a mass-production product, and Haggerty knew TI needed a partner to help manufacture the radio. That partner turned out to be Industrial Development Engineering Associates (IDEA), a small company out of Indianapolis that specialized in antenna boosters and other electronic goods. They signed an agreement in June 1954 with the goal of announcing the new radio in October. TI would provide the components, and IDEA would manufacture the radio under its Regency brand.

Germanium transistors at the time cost $10 to $15 apiece. With eight transistors, the radio was too expensive to be marketed at the desired price point of $50 (more than $580 today, which is coincidentally about what it’ll cost you to buy one in good condition on eBay). Vacuum-tube radios were selling for less, but TI and IDEA figured early adopters would pay that much to try out a new technology. Part of Haggerty’s strategy was to increase the volume of transistor production to eventually lower the per-transistor cost, which he managed to push down to about $2.50.

By the time TI met with IDEA, the breadboard was down to six transistors. It was IDEA’s challenge to figure out how to make the transistorized radio at a profit. According to an oral history with Richard Koch, IDEA’s chief engineer on the project, TI’s real goal was to make transistors, and the radio was simply the gimmick to get there. In fact, part of the TI–IDEA agreement was that any patents that came out of the project would be in the public domain so that TI was free to sell more transistors to other buyers.

At the initial meeting, Koch, who had never seen a transistor before in real life, suggested substituting a germanium diode for the detector (which extracted the audio signal from the desired radio frequency), bringing the transistor count down to five. After thinking about the configuration a bit more, Koch eliminated another transistor by using a single transistor for the oscillator/mixer circuit.

TI’s original prototype used eight germanium transistors, which engineers reduced to six and, ultimately, four for the production model.Division of Work and Industry/National Museum of American History/Smithsonian Institution

The final design was four transistors set in a superheterodyne design, a type of receiver that combines two frequencies to produce an intermediate frequency that can be easily amplified, thereby boosting a weak signal and decreasing the required antenna size. The TR-1 had two transistors as intermediate-frequency amplifiers and one as an audio amplifier, plus the oscillator/mixer. Koch applied for a patent for the circuitry the following year.

The radio ran on a 22.5-volt battery, which offered a playing life of 20 to 30 hours and cost about $1.25. (Such batteries were also used in the external power and electronics pack for hearing aids, the only other consumer product to use transistors up until this point.)

While IDEA’s team was working on the circuitry, they outsourced the design of the TR-1’s packaging to the Chicago firm of Painter, Teague, and Petertil. Their first design didn’t work because the components didn’t fit. Would their second design be better? As Koch later recalled, IDEA’s purchasing agent, Floyd Hayhurst, picked up the molding dies for the radio cases in Chicago and rushed them back to Indianapolis. He arrived at 2:00 in the morning, and the team got to work. Fortunately, everything fit this time. The plastic case was a little warped, but that was simple to fix: They slapped a wooden piece on each case as it came off the line so it wouldn’t twist as it cooled.

This video shows how each radio was assembled by hand:

On 18 October 1954, Texas Instruments announced the first commercial transistorized radio. It would be available in select outlets in New York and Los Angeles beginning 1 November, with wider distribution once production ramped up. The Regency TR-1 Transistor Pocket Radio initially came in black, gray, red, and ivory. They later added green and mahogany, as well as a run of pearlescents and translucents: lavender, pearl white, meridian blue, powder pink, and lime.

The TR-1 got so-so reviews, faced competition

Consumer Reports was not enthusiastic about the Regency TR-1. In its April 1955 review, it found that transmission of speech was “adequate” under good conditions, but music transmission was unsatisfactory under any conditions, especially on a noisy street or crowded beach. The magazine used adjectives such as whistle, squeal, thin, tinny, and high-pitched to describe various sounds—not exactly high praise for a radio. It also found fault with the on/off switch. Their recommendation: Wait for further refinement before buying one.

More than 100,000 TR-1s were sold in its first year, but the radio was never very profitable.Archive PL/Alamy

The engineers at TI and IDEA didn’t necessarily disagree. They knew they were making a sound-quality trade-off by going with just four transistors. They also had quality-control problems with the transistors and other components, with initial failure rates up to 50 percent. Eventually, IDEA got the failure rate down to 12 to 15 percent.

Unbeknownst to TI or IDEA, Raytheon was also working on a transistorized radio—a tabletop model rather than a pocket-size one. That gave them the space to use six transistors, which significantly upped the sound quality. Raytheon’s radio came out in February 1955. Priced at $79.95, it weighed 2 kilograms and ran on four D-cell batteries. That August, a small Japanese company called Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corp. released its first transistor radio, the TR-55. A few years later, the company changed its name to Sony and went on to dominate the world’s consumer radio market.

The legacy of the Regency TR-1

The Regency TR-1 was a success by many measures: It sold 100,000 in its first year, and it helped jump-start the transistor market. But the radio was never very profitable. Within a few years, both Texas Instruments and IDEA left the commercial AM radio business, TI to focus on semiconductors, and IDEA to concentrate on citizens band radios. Yet Pat Haggerty estimated that this little pocket radio pushed the market in transistorized consumer goods ahead by two years. It was a leap of faith that worked out, thanks to some hardworking engineers with a vision.

Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.

An abridged version of this article appears in the October 2024 print issue as “The First Transistor Radio.”

References

In 1984, Michael Wolff conducted oral histories with IDEA’s lead engineer Richard Koch and purchasing agent Floyd Hayhurst. Wolff subsequently used them the following year in his IEEE Spectrum article “The Secret Six-Month Project,” which includes some great references at the end.

Robert J. Simcoe wrote “The Revolution in Your Pocket” for the fall 2004 issue of Invention and Technology to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Regency TR-1.

As with many collectibles, the Regency TR-1 has its champions who have gathered together many primary sources. For example, Steve Reyer, a professor of electrical engineering at the Milwaukee School of Engineering before he passed away in 2018, organized his efforts in a webpage that’s now hosted by https://www.collectornet.net.

Reference: https://ift.tt/F1TJqsb

How to Disable a Nuclear Warhead in Midflight

In 1956 Henry Kissinger speculated in Foreign Affairs about how the nuclear stalemate between the United States and the Soviet Union could force national security officials into a terrible dilemma. His thesis was that the United States risked sending a signal to potential aggressors that, faced with conflict, defense officials would have only two choices: settle for peace at any price, or retaliate with thermonuclear ruin. Not only had “victory in an all-out war become technically impossible,” Kissinger wrote, but in addition, it could “no longer be imposed at acceptable cost.”

His conclusion was that decisionmakers needed better options between these catastrophic extremes. And yet this gaping hole in nuclear response policy persists to this day. With Russia and China leading an alliance actively opposing Western and like-minded nations, with war in Europe and the Middle East, and spiraling tensions in Asia, it would not be histrionic to suggest that the future of the planet is at stake. It is time to find a way past this dead end.

Seventy years ago only the Soviet Union and the United States possessed nuclear weapons. Today there are eight or nine countries that have weapons of mass destruction. Three of them—Russia, China, and North Korea—have publicly declared irreconcilable opposition to American-style liberal democracy.

Their antagonism creates an urgent security challenge. During its war with Ukraine, now in its third year, Russian leadership has repeatedly threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons. Then, earlier this year, the Putin government blocked United Nations enforcement of North Korea’s compliance with international sanctions, enabling the Hermit Kingdom to more easily circumvent access restrictions on nuclear technology.

Thousands of nuclear missiles can be in the air within minutes of a launch command; the consequence of an operational mistake or security miscalculation would be the obliteration of global society. Considered in this light, there is arguably no more urgent or morally necessary imperative than devising a means of neutralizing nuclear-equipped missiles midflight, should such a mistake occur.

Today the delivery of a nuclear package is irreversible once the launch command has been given. It is impossible to recall or de-activate a land-based, sea-based, or cruise missile once they are on their way. This is a deliberate policy-and-design choice born of concern that electronic sabotage, for example in the form of hostile radio signals, could disable the weapons once they are in flight.

And yet the possibility of a misunderstanding leading to nuclear retaliation remains all too real. For example, in 1983, Stanislav Petrov literally saved the world by overruling, based on his own judgement, a “high reliability” report from the Soviet Union’s Oko satellite surveillance network. He was later proven correct; the system had mistakenly interpreted sunlight reflections off high altitude clouds as rocket flares indicating an American attack. Had he followed his training and allowed a Soviet retaliation to proceed, his superiors would have realized within minutes that they had made a horrific mistake in response to a technical glitch, not an American first strike.

A Trident I submarine-launched ballistic missile was test fired from the submarine USS Mariano G. Vallejo, which was decommissioned in 1995.U.S. Navy

So why, 40 years later, do we still lack a means of averting the unthinkable? In his book “Command and Control,” Eric Schlosser quoted an early commander in chief of the Strategic Air Command, General Thomas S. Power, who explained why there is still no way to revoke a nuclear order. Power said that the very existence of a recall or self-destruct mechanism “would create a fail-disable potential for knowledge agents to ‘dud’” the weapon. Schlosser wrote that “missiles being flight-tested usually had a command-destruct mechanism—explosives attached to the airframe that could be set off by remote control, destroying the missile if it flew off course. SAC refused to add that capability to operational missiles, out of concern that the Soviets might find a way to detonate them all in midflight.”

In 1990, Sherman Frankel pointed out in “Science and Global Security” that “there already exists an agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union, usually referred to as the 1971 Accidents Agreement, that specifies what is to be done in the event of an accidental or unauthorized launch of a nuclear weapon. The relevant section says that “in the event of an accident, the Party whose nuclear weapon is involved will immediately make every effort to take necessary measures to render harmless or destroy such weapon without its causing damage.” That’s a nice thought, but “in the ensuing decades, no capability to remotely divert or destroy a nuclear-armed missile . . . has been deployed by the US government.” This is still true today.

The inability to reverse a nuclear decision has persisted because two generations of officials and policymakers have grossly underestimated our ability to prevent adversaries from attacking the hardware and software of nuclear-equipped missiles before or after they are launched.

The systems that deliver these warheads to their targets fall into three major categories, collectively known as the nuclear triad. It consists of submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), ground-launched intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), and bombs launched from strategic bombers, including cruise missiles. About half of the United States’ active arsenal is carried on the Navy’s 14 nuclear Trident II ballistic-missile submarines, which are on constant patrol in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The ground-launched missiles are called Minuteman III, a fifty-year old system that the Air Force describes as the “cornerstone of the free world.” Approximately 400 ICBMs are siloed in ready-to-launch configurations across Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming. Recently, under a vast program known as Sentinel, the U.S. Department of Defense embarked on a plan to replace the Minuteman IIIs at an estimated cost of $140 billion.

Each SLBM and ICBM can be equipped with multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles, or MIRVs. These are aerodynamic shells, each containing a nuclear warhead, that can steer themselves with great accuracy to targets established in advance of their launch. Trident II can carry as many as twelve MIRVs, although to stay within treaty constraints, the U.S. Navy limits the number to about four. Today the United States has about 1,770 warheads deployed in the sea, in the ground, or on strategic bombers.

While civilian rockets and some military systems carry bidirectional communications for telemetry and guidance, strategic weapons are deliberately and completely isolated. Because our technological ability to secure a radio channel is incomparably improved, a secure monodirectional link that would allow the president to abort a mission in case of accident or reconciliation is possible today.

U.S. Air Force technicians work on a Minuteman III’s Multiple Independently-targetable Reentry Vehicle system. The reentry vehicles are the black cones.U.S. Air Force

ICBMs launched from the continental United States would take about thirty minutes to reach Russia; SLBMs would reach targets there in about half that time. During the five-minute boost phase that lifts the rocket above the atmosphere, controllers could contact the airframe through ground-, sea-, or space-based (satellite) communication channels. After the engines shut down, the missile continues on a twenty- or twenty-five minute (or less for SLBMs) parabolic arc, governed entirely by Newtonian mechanics. During that time, both terrestrial and satellite communications are still possible. However, as the reentry vehicle containing the warhead enters the atmosphere, a plasma sheaths the vehicle. That plasma blocks reception of radio waves, so during the reentry and descent phases, which combined last about a minute, receipt of abort instructions would only be possible after the plasma sheaths subside. What that means in practical terms is that there would be a communications window of only a few seconds before detonation, and probably only with space-borne transmitters.

There are several alternative approaches to the design and implementation of this safety mechanism. Satellite-navigation beacons such as GPS, for example, transmit signals in the L- band and decode terrestrial and near-earth messages at about 50 bits per second, which is more than enough for this purpose. Satellite-communication systems, as another example, compensate for weather, terrain, and urban canyons with specialized K-band beamforming antennas and adaptive noise-resistant modulation techniques, like spread spectrum, with data rates measured in megabits per second (Mbps.)

For either kind of signal, the received-carrier strength would be about 100 decibels per milliwatt; anything above that level, as it presumably would be at or near the missile’s apogee, would improve reliability without compromising security. The upshot is that the technology needed to implement this protection scheme—even for an abort command issued in the last few seconds of the missile’s trajectory—is available now. Today we understand how to reliably receive extremely low-powered satellite signals, reject interference and noise, and encode messages, using such techniques as symmetric cryptography so that they are sufficiently indecipherable for this application.

The signals, codes, and disablement protocols can be dynamically programmed immediately prior to launch. Even if an adversary was able to see the digital design, they would not know which key to use or how to implement it. Given all this, we believe that the ability to disarm a launched warhead should be included in the Pentagon’s extension of the controversial Sentinel modernization program.

What exactly would happen with the missile if a deactivate message was sent? It could be one of several things, depending on where the missile was in its trajectory. It could instruct the rocket to self-destruct on ascent, re-direct the rocket into outer space, or disarm the payload before re-entry or during descent.

Of course, all of these scenarios presume that the microelectronics platform underpinning the missile and weapon is secure and has not been tampered with. According to the Government Accountability Office, “the primary domestic source of microelectronics for nuclear weapons components is the Microsystems Engineering, Sciences, and Applications (MESA) Complex at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico.” Thanks to Sandia and other laboratories, there are significant physical barriers to microelectronic tampering. These could be enhanced with recent design advances that promote semiconductor supply chain security.

Towards that end, Joe Costello, the founder and former CEO of the semiconductor software giant Cadence Design Systems, and a Kaufman Award winner, told us that there are many security measures and layers of device protection that simply did not exist as recently as a decade ago. He said, “We have the opportunity, and the duty, to protect our national security infrastructure in ways that were inconceivable when nuclear fail-safe policy was being made. We know what to do, from design to manufacturing. But we’re stuck with century-old thinking and decades-old technology. This is a transcendent risk to our future.”

Kissinger concluded his classic treatise by stating that “Our dilemma has been defined as the alternative of Armageddon or defeat without war. We can overcome the paralysis induced by such a prospect only by creating other alternatives both in our diplomacy and our military policy.” Indeed, the recall or deactivation of nuclear weapons post launch, but before detonation, is imperative to the national security of the United States and the preservation of human life on the planet.

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IEEE’s Let’s Make Light Competition Returns to Tackle Illumination Gap

In economically advantaged countries, it’s hard to imagine a time when electric lighting wasn’t available in nearly every home, business, and public facility. But according to the World Economic Forum, the sun remains the primary light source for more than 1 billion people worldwide.

Known as light poverty, the lack of access to reliable, adequate, artificial light is experienced by many of the world’s poorest people. They rely on unsafe, inefficient lighting sources such as candles and kerosene lamps to perform tasks such as studying, cooking, working, and doing household chores after dusk.

Overcoming the stark contrast in living conditions is the focus of IEEE Smart Lighting’s Let’s Make Light competition.

Open to anyone 18 or older, the contest seeks innovative lighting technologies that can be affordable, accessible, and sustainable for people now living in extreme poverty.

The entry that best responds to the challenge—developing a lighting system that is reliable and grid-independent and can be locally manufactured and repaired—will be awarded a US $3,000 prize. The second prize is $2,000, and the third-place finisher receives $1,000.

The deadline for submissions is 1 November.

The contest’s origin

The Let’s Make Light competition was born out of a presentation on global lighting issues, including light poverty, given to IEEE Life Fellow John Nelson, then chair of IEEE Smart Village, and IEEE Fellow Georges Zissis, former chair of the IEEE Future Directions Committee.

Wanting to know more about light poverty, Nelson forwarded the presentation to Toby Cumberbatch, who has extensive experience in developing practical solutions for communities facing the issue. Cumberbatch, an IEEE senior member, is a professor emeritus of electrical engineering at the Cooper Union, in New York City. For years, he taught his first-year engineering students how to create technology to help underserved communities.

“A winning design has to be usable by people who don’t even know what an on-off switch is.” —Toby Cumberbatch

Cumberbatch’s candid response was that the ideas presented didn’t adequately address the needs of impoverished end users he and his students had been trying to help.

That led Zissis to create the Let’s Make Light competition in hopes that it would ignite a spark in the larger IEEE community to develop technologies that would truly serve those who need it most. He appointed Cumberbatch as co-chair of the competition committee.

Understanding the wealth gap

Last year’s entries highlighted a significant gap in understanding the factors behind light poverty, Cumberbatch says. The factors include limited electrical grid access and the inability to afford all but the most rudimentary products. Cumberbatch says he and his students have even encountered communities with nonmonetary economies.
Past entries have failed to address the core challenge of providing practical and user-friendly lighting solutions.

Reflecting on some recent submissions, Cumberbatch noted a fundamental disconnect. “The entries included charging stations for electric vehicles and proposals to use lasers to light streets,” he says. “A winning design has to be usable by people who don’t even know what an on-off switch is.”

To ensure this year’s contestants better address the problem, IEEE Future Directions released a video illustrating the realities of poverty and the essential qualities that a successful lighting solution must possess, such as being safe, clean, accessible, and affordable.

“With the right resources,” the video’s narrator says, “people living in these remote communities will create new and better ways to work and live their lives.”

For more details, visit the Let’s Make Light competition’s website.

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Google and Meta update their AI models amid the rise of “AlphaChip”

Enlarge / There's been a lot of AI news this week, and covering it sometimes feels like running through a hall full of danging CRTs, just like this Getty Images illustration. (credit: Grandfailure via Getty Images)

It's been a wildly busy week in AI news thanks to OpenAI, including a controversial blog post from CEO Sam Altman, the wide rollout of Advanced Voice Mode, 5GW data center rumors, major staff shake-ups, and dramatic restructuring plans.

But the rest of the AI world doesn't march to the same beat, doing its own thing and churning out new AI models and research by the minute. Here's a roundup of some other notable AI news from the past week.

Google Gemini updates

(credit: Google)

On Tuesday, Google announced updates to its Gemini model lineup, including the release of two new production-ready models that iterate on past releases: Gemini-1.5-Pro-002 and Gemini-1.5-Flash-002. The company reported improvements in overall quality, with notable gains in math, long context handling, and vision tasks. Google claims a 7 percent increase in performance on the MMLU-Pro benchmark and a 20 percent improvement in math-related tasks. But as you know, if you've been reading Ars Technica for a while, AI typically benchmarks aren't as useful as we would like them to be.

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Ansys SimAI Software Predicts Fully Transient Vehicle Crash Outcomes

The Ansys SimAI™ cloud-enabled generative artificial intelligence (AI) platform combines the predictive accuracy of Ansys simulation with the speed of generative AI. Because of the software’s versatile underlying neural networks, it can extend to many types of simulation, including structural applications.
This white paper shows how the SimAI cloud-based software applies to highly nonlinear, transient structural simulations, such as automobile crashes, and includes:

• Vehicle kinematics and deformation
• Forces acting upon the vehicle
• How it interacts with its environment
• How understanding the changing and rapid sequence of events helps predict outcomes

These simulations can reduce the potential for occupant injuries and the severity of vehicle damage and help understand the crash’s overall dynamics. Ultimately, this leads to safer automotive design.

Download this free whitepaper now!

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IEEE Medal of Honor Prize Increased to $2 Million

For more than a century, IEEE has awarded its Medal of Honor to recognize the extraordinary work of individuals whose technical achievements have had world-changing impact. To better demonstrate how these technology, engineering, and science innovators have changed our society globally, IEEE announced that starting next year, the IEEE Medal of Honor monetary prize will be increased to US $2 million. This significant increase places the award among the largest such monetary prizes worldwide, and is a substantial increase from its previous prize of $50,000.

In addition, for the first time, the IEEE Medal of Honor laureate will be announced at a dedicated press conference, to be held in February in New York City. The organization’s highest award, as well as additional high-profile awards, will be presented to recipients at next year’s IEEE Honors Ceremony, which will for the first time be held in Tokyo, in April.

IEEE

“By significantly increasing the IEEE Medal of Honor monetary prize to $2 million, we are elevating our recognition of extraordinary individuals and the work they have done to benefit humanity to its rightful place as one of the world’s most prestigious technology-focused prizes and awards,” said 2024 IEEE President and CEO Thomas M. Coughlin.

The IEEE Medal of Honor is bestowed for remarkable, society-changing achievements such as the creation of the Internet; development of life-saving medical device technologies including the CAT scan, MRI, ultrasound, and pacemaker; as well as transistors, semiconductors, and other innovations at the heart of modern electronics and computing.

“IEEE Medal of Honor laureates dare to envision the new and revolutionary, and make possible what was previously considered impossible,” said K. J. Ray Liu, chair of the Ad Hoc Committee on Raising the Prestige of IEEE Awards and 2022 IEEE President and CEO. “Their seismic accomplishments and positive impact on our world inspires today’s technologists, who stand on their shoulders to continue advancing technology to make the world a better place.”

“By significantly increasing the IEEE Medal of Honor monetary prize to $2 million, we are elevating our recognition of extraordinary individuals and the work they have done to benefit humanity to its rightful place as one of the world’s most prestigious technology-focused prizes and awards.”—2024 IEEE President and CEO Thomas M. Coughlin

The IEEE Medal of Honor may be awarded to an individual or team of up to three who have made exceptional contributions or had extraordinary careers in technology, engineering, and science. The criteria for the award’s consideration include the significance and originality of the achievement and its impact on society and the profession, as well as relevant publications and patents tied to the achievement.

Past recipients include technology pioneers and IEEE Life Fellows Robert E. Kahn, Vinton G. “Vint” Cerf, Asad M. Madni, and Mildred Dresselhaus.

As IEEE continues to honor transformative achievements in technology, engineering, and science, it reinforces its commitment to recognizing innovation that shapes our world. As a public charity, the increased Medal of Honor prize reflects IEEE’s unwavering mission of advancing technology for humanity.

This book covers the past 100 years of the IEEE Medal of Honor.

Register for the press conference live stream to learn who the 2025 IEEE Medal of Honor recipient will be.

Read the full news release here.

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Tails OS joins forces with Tor Project in merger

Enlarge (credit: The Tor Project)

The Tor Project, the nonprofit that maintains software for the Tor anonymity network, is joining forces with Tails, the maker of a portable operating system that uses Tor. Both organizations seek to pool resources, lower overhead, and collaborate more closely on their mission of online anonymity.

Tails and the Tor Project began discussing the possibility of merging late last year, the two organizations said. At the time, Tails was maxing out its current resources. The two groups ultimately decided it would be mutually beneficial for them to come together.

Amnesic onion routing

“Rather than expanding Tails’s operational capacity on their own and putting more stress on Tails workers, merging with the Tor Project, with its larger and established operational framework, offered a solution,” Thursday’s joint statement said. “By joining forces, the Tails team can now focus on their core mission of maintaining and improving Tails OS, exploring more and complementary use cases while benefiting from the larger organizational structure of The Tor Project.”

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Exponential growth brews 1 million AI models on Hugging Face

Enlarge (credit: Hugging Face / anucha sirivisansuwan via Getty Images)

On Thursday, AI hosting platform Hugging Face surpassed 1 million AI model listings for the first time, marking a milestone in the rapidly expanding field of machine learning. An AI model is a computer program (often using a neural network) trained on data to perform specific tasks or make predictions. The platform, which started as a chatbot app in 2016 before pivoting to become an open source hub for AI models in 2020, now hosts a wide array of tools for developers and researchers.

The machine-learning field represents a far bigger world than just large language models (LLMs) like the kind that power ChatGPT. In a post on X, Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue wrote about how his company hosts many high-profile AI models, like "Llama, Gemma, Phi, Flux, Mistral, Starcoder, Qwen, Stable diffusion, Grok, Whisper, Olmo, Command, Zephyr, OpenELM, Jamba, Yi," but also "999,984 others."

The reason why, Delangue says, stems from customization. "Contrary to the '1 model to rule them all' fallacy," he wrote, "smaller specialized customized optimized models for your use-case, your domain, your language, your hardware and generally your constraints are better. As a matter of fact, something that few people realize is that there are almost as many models on Hugging Face that are private only to one organization - for companies to build AI privately, specifically for their use-cases."

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Detachable Robotic Hand Crawls Around on Finger-Legs

When we think of grasping robots, we think of manipulators of some sort on the ends of arms of some sort. Because of course we do—that’s how (most of us) are built, and that’s the mindset with which we have consequently optimized the world around us. But one of the great things about robots is that they don’t have to be constrained by our constraints, and at ICRA@40 in Rotterdam this week, we saw a novel new Thing: a robotic hand that can detach from its arm and then crawl around to grasp objects that would be otherwise out of reach, designed by roboticists from EPFL in Switzerland.

Fundamentally, robot hands and crawling robots share a lot of similarities, including a body along with some wiggly bits that stick out and do stuff. But most robotic hands are designed to grasp rather than crawl, and as far as I’m aware, no robotic hands have been designed to do both of those things at the same time. Since both capabilities are important, you don’t necessarily want to stick with a traditional grasping-focused hand design. The researchers employed a genetic algorithm and simulation to test a bunch of different configurations in order to optimize for the ability to hold things and to move.

You’ll notice that the fingers bend backwards as well as forwards, which effectively doubles the ways in which the hand (or, “Handcrawler”) can grasp objects. And it’s a little bit hard to tell from the video, but the Handcrawler attaches to the wrist using magnets for alignment along with a screw that extends to lock the hand into place.

“Although you see it in scary movies, I think we’re the first to introduce this idea to robotics.” —Xiao Gao, EPFL

The whole system is controlled manually in the video, but lead author Xiao Gao tells us that they already have an autonomous version (with external localization) working in the lab. In fact, they’ve managed to run an entire grasping sequence autonomously, with the Handcrawler detaching from the arm, crawling to a location the arm can’t reach, picking up an object, and then returning and reattaching itself to the arm again.

Beyond Manual Dexterity: Designing a Multi-fingered Robotic Hand for Grasping and Crawling, by Xiao Gao, Kunpeng Yao, Kai Junge, Josie Hughes, and Aude Billard from EPFL and MIT, was presented at ICRA@40 this week in Rotterdam. Reference: https://ift.tt/HGFoxWr

NIST proposes barring some of the most nonsensical password rules

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the federal body that sets technology standards for governmental agencies, standards organizations, and private companies, has proposed barring some of the most vexing and nonsensical password requirements. Chief among them: mandatory resets, required or restricted use of certain characters, and the use of security questions.

Choosing strong passwords and storing them safely is one of the most challenging parts of a good cybersecurity regimen. More challenging still is complying with password rules imposed by employers, federal agencies, and providers of online services. Frequently, the rules—ostensibly to enhance security hygiene—actually undermine it. And yet, the nameless rulemakers impose the requirements anyway.

Stop the madness, please!

Last week, NIST SP 800-63-4, the latest version of its Digital Identity Guidelines. At roughly 35,000 words and filled with jargon and bureaucratic terms, the document is nearly impossible to read all the way through and just as hard to understand fully. It sets both the technical requirements and recommended best practices for determining the validity of methods used to authenticate digital identities online. Organizations that interact with the federal government online are required to be in compliance.

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Talking to ChatGPT for the first time is a surreal experience

Enlarge / Putting the "chat" in ChatGPT (credit: Getty Images)

In May, when OpenAI first demonstrated ChatGPT-4o's coming audio conversation capabilities, I wrote that it felt like we were "on the verge of something... like a sea change in how we think of and work with large language models." Now that those "Advanced Voice" features are rolling out widely to ChatGPT subscribers, we decided to ask ChatGPT to explain, in its own voice, how this new method of interaction might impact our collective relationship with large language models.

That chat, which you can listen to and read a transcript of below, shouldn't be treated as an interview with an official OpenAI spokesperson or anything. Still, it serves as a fun way to offer an initial test of ChatGPT's live conversational chops.

Our first quick chat with the ChatGPT-4o's new "Advanced Voice" features.

Even in this short introductory "chat," we were impressed by the natural, dare-we-say human cadence and delivery of ChatGPT's "savvy and relaxed" Sol voice (which reminds us a bit of '90s Janeane Garofalo). Between ChatGPT's ability to give quick responses—offered in in milliseconds rather than seconds—and convincing intonation, it's incredibly easy to fool yourself into thinking you're speaking to a conscious being rather than what is, as ChatGPT says here, "still just a computer program processing information, without real emotions or consciousness."

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Forums, Competitions, Challenges: Inspiring Creativity in Robotics

This is a sponsored article brought to you by Khalifa University of Science and Technology.

A total of eight intense competitions to inspire creativity and innovation along with 13 forums dedicated to diverse segments of robotics and artificial intelligence will be part of the 36th edition of the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024) in Abu Dhabi.

These competitions at the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region’s first-ever global conference and exhibition from 14-18 October 2024 at the Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Center (ADNEC) will highlight some of the key aspects of robotics. These include physical or athletic intelligence of robots, remote robot navigation, robot manipulation, underwater robotics, perception and sensing as well as challenges for wildlife preservation.

This edition of IROS is one of the largest of its kind globally in this category because of active participation across all levels, with 5,740 authors, 16 keynote speakers, 46 workshops, 11 tutorials, as well as 28 exhibitors and 12 startups. The forums at IROS will explore the rapidly evolving role of robotics in many industry sectors as well as policy-making and regulatory areas. Several leading corporate majors, and industry professionals from across the globe are gathering for IROS 2024 which is themed “Robotics for Sustainable Development.”

“The intense robotics competitions will inspire creativity, while the products on display as well as keynotes will pave the way for more community-relevant solutions.” —Jorge Dias, IROS 2024 General Chair

Dr. Jorge Dias, IROS 2024 General Chair, said: “Such a large gathering of scientists, researchers, industry leaders and government stakeholders in Abu Dhabi for IROS 2024 also demonstrates the role of UAE in pioneering new technologies and in providing an international platform for knowledge exchange and sharing of expertise. The intense robotics competitions will inspire creativity, while the products on display as well as keynotes will pave the way for more community-relevant solutions.”

The competitions are:

• 2nd AI Olympics With RealAIGym: Is AI Ready for Athletic Intelligence in the Real World? focusing on the physical or athletic intelligence of robots

• The Earth Rovers Challenge on remote robot navigation

• Robotic Construction Challenge and the euROBIN Manipulation Skill Versatility Challenge (MSVC) on robot manipulation

• Underwater Robotics Challenges on innovation and problem-solving in underwater robotics and artificial intelligence

• ROAD-IROS: Automatic Data Annotation Challenge for ROAD Dataset on perception and sensing

• 21st F1Tenth Autonomous Racing Competition

• IEEE RAS Quadruped Robot Challenge (QRC), focusing on navigation

In addition to these competitions, the Falcon Monitoring Challenge (FMC) will focus on advancing the field of wildlife tracking and conservation through the development of sophisticated, noninvasive monitoring systems.

Khalifa University

IROS 2024 will also include three keynote talks on ‘Robotic Competitions’ that will be moderated by Professor Lakmal Seneviratne, Director, Center for Autonomous Robotic Systems (KU-CARS), Khalifa University. The keynotes will be delivered by Professor Pedro Lima, Institute for Systems and Robotics, Instituto Superior Técnico, University of. Lisbon, Portugal; Dr. Timothy Chung, General Manager, Autonomy and Robotics, Microsoft, US; and Dr. Ubbo Visser, President of the RoboCup Federation, Director of Graduate Studies, and Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Miami, US.

The forums at IROS 2024 will include:

• Robotics in Africa Forum

• Marine Robotics in Ocean Decade Initiative for Sustainable Development

• Robots for Sustainability and Sustainable Robots

• Government Forum: Funding for Robotics Research, Human-Avatars Symbiosis: Can you imagine a future society where you can remotely control multiple avatars?

• Moonshot R&D Program Goal 3 Forum. Envisioning a Future of Human-Robot Co-living: Potential for Robotics to Transform Human Lives

Other forums include:

• Sustainable Medical and Surgical Robotics

• Empowering Diverse Voices in Robotics, Robotics & AI in the UAE: Research Innovation and Entrepreneurship

• Europe Regulates Artificial Intelligence: the Challenge for Robotics, Industrial Opportunities and Socio-Economic Impact of Medical Robotics

• The Future of Work: AI-Enhanced Robotics and Human Interaction Research in M3S

• Robots for a Better Tomorrow: Wellbeing Through Advanced Technology.

One of the largest and most important robotics research conferences in the world, IROS 2024 provides a platform for the international robotics community to exchange knowledge and ideas about the latest advances in intelligent robots and smart machines. A total of 3,344 paper submissions representing 60 countries, have been received from researchers and scientists across the world. China tops the list with more than 1,000 papers, the US with 777, Germany with 302, Japan with 253, and the UK and South Korea with 173 each. The UAE remains top in the Arab region with 68 papers.

One of the largest and most important robotics research conferences in the world, IROS 2024 provides a platform for the international robotics community to exchange knowledge and ideas.

For eight consecutive years since 2017, Abu Dhabi has remained first on the world’s safest cities list, according to online database Numbeo, which assessed 329 global cities for the 2024 listing. This reflects the emirate’s ongoing efforts to ensure a good quality of life for citizens and residents. With a multicultural community, Abu Dhabi is home to people from more than 200 nationalities, and draws a large number of tourists to some of the top art galleries in the city such as Louvre Abu Dhabi and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, as well as other destinations such as Ferrari World Abu Dhabi and Warner Bros. World™ Abu Dhabi.

Because of its listing as one of the safest cities, Abu Dhabi continues to host several international conferences and exhibitions. Abu Dhabi is set to host the UNCTAD World Investment Forum, the 13th World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference (MC13), the 12th World Environment Education Congress in 2024, and the IUCN World Conservation Congress in 2025.

IROS 2024 is sponsored by IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, Abu Dhabi Convention and Exhibition Bureau, the Robotics Society of Japan (RSJ), the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers (SICE), the New Technology Foundation, and the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IES).

More information at https://iros2024-abudhabi.org/

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