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Investing in Your Professional Community Yields Big Returns

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Engineering is so much more than solving problems or writing efficient code. It is about creating solutions that affect billions of lives and contributing to a profession built on innovation, responsibility, and collaboration. Although technical skills remain critical, what truly will accelerate the growth of the next generation of engineers is community and professional involvement. Learning from communities University programs provide a strong foundation in theory and practice, but they cannot capture the complexity of real-world engineering. As an IEEE senior member, I believe professional communities such as IEEE can help bridge the gap by offering: Practical experience through hackathons , open-source projects, and collaborative research . Exposure to diverse perspectives , with young engineers learning from peers across industries and cultures. Mentorship opportunities that accelerate career growth and instill professional values early. I have served as a mentor and judge for a ...
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40 Years of Wireless Evolution Leads to a Smart, Sensing Network

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Every generation of mobile networks, from 1G to 5G, has rewritten the rules of how the world lives and works. The coming 6G revolution , by decade’s end, will represent a new direction still, toward a universal data fabric where millions of agents collaborate in real-time across the digital and physical worlds. The story of wireless connectivity is often told in speeds and standards—megabits per second, latency, and spectrum bands. But these generational shifts in device specs obscure a deeper pattern. Each generation, from 1G to 5G , rewrote the relationships between three elements: the D evices we carry, the N etworks that connect them, and the A pplications that run on them. We call this connectivity’s DNA. With 6G, that DNA of interconnection is about to change fundamentally. As with the “7 Phases of the Internet”—an article we published with IEEE Spectrum last October —mobile networks’ 6 generations follow a similar arc toward system-wide intelligence. That arc traces through eve...
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IEEE Launches Global Virtual Career Fairs

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In 2025 IEEE launched its first virtual career fair to help strengthen the engineering workforce and connect top talent with industry professionals. The event, which was held in the United States, attracted thousands of students and professionals. They learned about more than 500 job opportunities in high-demand fields including artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and power and energy. They also gained access to career resources. Hosted by IEEE Industry Engagement , the event marked a milestone in the organization’s expanding workforce development efforts to bridge the gap between academic training and industry needs while bolstering the technical talent pipeline, says Jessica Bian , 2025 chair of the IEEE Industry Engagement Committee . The IEC works to strengthen the connection with industry professionals, companies, and technology sectors through global career fairs , as well as its Industry Newsletter , AI-powered career guidance tools , and World Technology Summits, where i...
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Keep Your Intuition Sharp While Using AI Coding Tools

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This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum ’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written i n partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free! How to Keep Your Engineering Skills Sharp in an AI World Engineers today are caught in a strange new reality. We’re expected to move faster than ever using AI tools for coding, analysis, documentation, and design. At the same time, there’s a growing worry in the background: If the AI is doing the work, what happens to my skills? That concern isn’t just philosophical. Research from Anthropic , the company behind Claude, has suggested that heavy AI assistance can interfere with human learning—especially for more junior software engineers. When a tool fills in the gaps too quickly, you may deliver working output without ever building a strong mental model of what’s happening underneath. More experienced engineers often feel a different vers...
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How Robert Goddard’s Self-Reliance Crashed His Rocket Dreams

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There’s a moment in John Williams’s Star Wars overture when the brass surges upward. You don’t just hear it; you feel propulsion turning into pure possibility. On 16 March 1926, in a snow-dusted field in Auburn, Mass., Robert Goddard created an earlier version of that same feeling. His first liquid-fueled rocket—a spindly, three meter tangle of pipes and tanks—lifted off, climbed about 12.5 meters, traveled roughly 56 meters downrange, and crashed into the frozen ground after 2.5 seconds. A few witnesses, Goddard’s helpers, shivered in the cold. The little machine defied common sense. It rose through the air with nothing to push against. Anyone who still insisted spaceflight was impossible now faced a question: Why had this contraption risen at all? Six years earlier, The New York Times had ridiculed Goddard, declaring that rockets could never work in a vacuum and implying that he had somehow forgotten high-school physics. Nearly half a century later, as Apollo 11 sped moonward, the...
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Why AI Chatbots Agree With You Even When You’re Wrong

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In April of 2025, OpenAI released a new version of GPT-4o, one of the AI algorithms users could select to power ChatGPT, the company’s chatbot. The next week, OpenAI reverted to the previous version. “The update we removed was overly flattering or agreeable—often described as sycophantic,” the company announced . Some people found the sycophancy hilarious. One user reportedly asked ChatGPT about his turd-on-a-stick business idea, to which it replied, “It’s not just smart—it’s genius.” Some found the behavior uncomfortable. For others, it was actually dangerous. Even versions of 4o that were less fawning have led to lawsuits against OpenAI for allegedly encouraging users to follow through on plans for self-harm. Unremitting adulation has even triggered AI-induced psychosis. Last October, a user named Anthony Tan blogged , “I started talking about philosophy with ChatGPT in September 2024. Who could’ve known that a few months later I would be in a psychiatric ward, believing I was pro...
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Intel Demos Chip to Compute With Encrypted Data

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Summary Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) allows computing on encrypted data without decryption, but it’s currently slow on standard CPUs and GPUs. Intel’s Heracles chip accelerates FHE tasks up to 5,000 times faster than top Intel server CPUs. Heracles uses a 3-nanometer FinFET technology and high-bandwidth memory , enabling efficient encrypted computing at scale. Startups and Intel are racing to commercialize FHE accelerators , with potential applications in AI and secure data processing. Worried that your latest ask to a cloud-based AI reveals a bit too much about you? Want to know your genetic risk of disease without revealing it to the services that compute the answer? There is a way to do computing on encrypted data without ever having it decrypted. It’s called fully homomorphic encryption, or FHE. But there’s a rather large catch. It can take thousands—even tens of thousands—of times longer to compute on today’s CPUs and GPUs than simply working with the decrypted data. So u...
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