IEEE SpectrumPub Date : 2025-09-03DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2025.11150677
{"title":"The Student & The Professor: Two Perspectives on Engineering Education in Africa","authors":"","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2025.11150677","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2025.11150677","url":null,"abstract":"JOHNSON I. EJIMANYA is a one-man pony express. Walking the exhaust-fogged streets of Owerri, Nigeria, Ejimanya, the engineering dean of the Federal University of Technology, Owerri, carries with him a department's worth of communications, some handwritten, others on disk. He's delivering them to a man with a PC and an Internet connection, who converts the missives into emails and downloads the responses. To Ejimanya, broadband means lugging a big bundle of printed emails back with him to the university, which despite being one of the country's largest and most prestigious engineering schools has no reliable means of connecting to the Internet.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"62 9","pages":"36-37"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144934482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IEEE SpectrumPub Date : 2025-09-03DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2025.11150672
Hunter McDaniel
{"title":"Careers: Learn to Love the Problem First: A Tech Founder on why your Solution Should Come Second when Going from Research to Market","authors":"Hunter McDaniel","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2025.11150672","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2025.11150672","url":null,"abstract":"When I left Los Alamos National Laboratory to start a company 11 years ago, I thought my team was ready. We had developed a new class of quantum dots窶馬anoscale particles of light-emitting semi-conductor material that can be used in displays, solar cells, and more. Our technology was safer, more stable, and less expensive than existing quantum-dot materials. The technical advantages were real, but I quickly learned that no amount of scientific merit guarantees market success.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"62 9","pages":"19-20"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=11150672","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144934410","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IEEE SpectrumPub Date : 2025-09-03DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2025.11150641
Engineer Bainomugisha
{"title":"Learning More with Less: How Improving Access to Electronics Hardware Could Transform Engineering Education in Africa","authors":"Engineer Bainomugisha","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2025.11150641","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2025.11150641","url":null,"abstract":"My name is Engineer Bainomugisha. Yes, Engineer is my first name and also my career. My parents named me Engineer, and they recognized engineering traits in me from childhood, such as perseverance, resilience, and wanting to understand how things work.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"62 9","pages":"40-50"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144934555","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IEEE SpectrumPub Date : 2025-09-03DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2025.11150674
Harry Goldstein
{"title":"Connecting Africa's Next Generation of Engineers: Sub-Saharan Africa Needs Broadband, Electricity, and Hardware Resources to Develop its Engineers","authors":"Harry Goldstein","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2025.11150674","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2025.11150674","url":null,"abstract":"I get a lot of email from people asking to contribute to IEEE Spectrum. Usually, they want to write an article for us. But one bold query I received in January 2024 went much further: An undergraduate engineering student named Oluwatosin Kolade, from Obafemi Awolowo University, in Ilé-Ifẹ̀, Nigeria, volunteered to be our robotics editor.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"62 9","pages":"2-2"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=11150674","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144934403","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IEEE SpectrumPub Date : 2025-09-03DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2025.11150643
Samuel K. Moore
{"title":"5 Questions: Todd Austin: Future Processors will have to get Lean","authors":"Samuel K. Moore","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2025.11150643","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2025.11150643","url":null,"abstract":"In July, a University of Michigan computer engineering professor put out a new idea for measuring the efficiency of a processor design. Todd Austin's LEAN metric received both praise and skepticism, but even the critics understood the rationale: A lot of silicon is devoted to things that are not actually doing computing. For example, more than 95 percent of an Nvidia Blackwell GPU is designated for other tasks, Austin told IEEE Spectrum. It's not like these parts aren't doing important things, such as choosing the next instruction to execute, but Austin believes processor architectures can and should move toward designs that maximize computing and minimize everything else.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"62 9","pages":"21-21"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=11150643","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144934529","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IEEE SpectrumPub Date : 2025-09-03DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2025.11150669
Lucas Laursen
{"title":"In Nigeria, Why Isn't Broadband Everywhere?: It Has 8 Undersea Cables, but Fiber-Optic Networks Miss Half the Country","authors":"Lucas Laursen","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2025.11150669","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2025.11150669","url":null,"abstract":"Under the shade of a cocoa tree, outside the hamlet of Atan, in southwest Nigeria, Bolaji Adeniyi holds court in a tie-dyed T-shirt. “In Nigeria we see farms as father's work,” he says. Adeniyi's father taught him to farm with a hoe and a machete, which he calls a cutlass. These days, he says, farming in Nigeria can look quite different, depending on whether the farmer has access to the Internet or not. Not far away, farmers are using drones to map their plots and calculate their fertilizer inputs. Elsewhere, farmers can swipe through security-camera footage of their fields on their mobile phones. That saves them from having to patrol the farm's perimeter and potentially dangerous confrontations with thieves. To be able to do those things, Adeniyi notes, the farmers need broadband access, at least some of the time. “Reliable broadband in Atan would attract international cocoa dealers and enable access to agricultural extension agents, which would aid farmers,” he says.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"62 9","pages":"22-31"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144934394","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IEEE SpectrumPub Date : 2025-09-03DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2025.11150668
David Schneider;Steven Searcy
{"title":"Dim Bulb, Bright Idea: This DIY Test Equipment is a Must-Have for Repairing Vintage Electronics","authors":"David Schneider;Steven Searcy","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2025.11150668","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2025.11150668","url":null,"abstract":"Recently I noticed an irresistible offer on Craigslist: a Majestic 3C70 AM/shortwave radio for just US $50. This model dates from the 1930s, when such radios came in gorgeous wooden cabinets. The specimen I stumbled on was still in the possession of the original owner, who used to listen to it with her family when she was a little girl. The wood and speaker fabric were nicely preserved, probably looking much as they did when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. I snatched it up.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"62 9","pages":"16-18"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144934441","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
IEEE SpectrumPub Date : 2025-09-03DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2025.11150644
Oluwatosin Kolade
{"title":"Lessons from a Janky Drone: What a Failed Class Project Taught Me About Engineering","authors":"Oluwatosin Kolade","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2025.11150644","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2025.11150644","url":null,"abstract":"The package containing the arducopter 2.8 board finally arrived from China, bearing the weight of our anticipation. I remember picking it up, the cardboard box weathered slightly from its journey. As I tore through the layers of tape, it felt like unwrapping a long-awaited gift. But as I lifted the ArduCopter 2.8 board out of the box, my heart sank. The board, which was to be the cornerstone of our project, looked worn out and old, with visible scuffs and bent pins. This was just one of a cascade of setbacks my team would face.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"62 9","pages":"38-49"},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2025-09-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144934457","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"工程技术","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}