IEEE SpectrumPub Date : 2025-03-07DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10991971
Kira K. Smiley;Rajesh Jadhav;Grace C. Young
{"title":"AI Goes Fishing: An Alphabet Spin-Off is Making Aquaculture More Sustainable","authors":"Kira K. Smiley;Rajesh Jadhav;Grace C. Young","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10991971","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10991971","url":null,"abstract":"Deep within a rugged fjord in Norway, our team huddled around an enclosed metal racetrack, full of salt water, that stood about a meter off the ground on stilts. We called the hulking metal contraption our “fish run.” Inside, a salmon circled the 3-meter diameter loop, following its instincts and swimming tirelessly against the current. A stopwatch beeped, and someone yelled “Next fish!” We scooped up the swimmer to weigh it and record its health data before returning it to the school of salmon in the nearby pen. The sun was high in the sky as the team loaded the next fish into the racetrack. We kept working well into the evening, measuring hundreds of fish.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"62 5","pages":"46-51"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143918708","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 : 2025-03-07DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10990326
Gwendolyn Rak
{"title":"5 Questions: Christiane Paul: What It's Like Curating Digital Art in the Age of AI","authors":"Gwendolyn Rak","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10990326","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10990326","url":null,"abstract":"Images generated by artificial intelligence are now seeping into advertising, social media, entertainment, and more, thanks to models like Midjourney and DALL-E. But creating visual art with AI actually dates back decades.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"62 5","pages":"22-23"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10990326","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143918713","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 : 2025-03-07DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10991970
Tekla S. Perry
{"title":"The Broadband Boss: Henry Samueli's Single-Chip Digital Modems Fueled the Broadband Boom","authors":"Tekla S. Perry","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10991970","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10991970","url":null,"abstract":"Those who did post in online forums or email friends from home typically accessed the Internet via telephone line, their messages traveling at a top speed of 14.4 kilobits per second. Meanwhile, cable TV was rocketing in popularity. By then, 60 percent of U.S. households subscribed to a cable service; cable rollouts in the rest of the world were also picking up speed. ¶ Hypothetically, using that growing cable network instead of phone lines for Internet access would dramatically boost the speed of communications. And making cable TV itself digital instead of analog would allow cable providers to carry many more channels. The theory of how to do that—using analog-to-digital converters and digital signal processing to translate the analog waveforms that travel on coaxial cable into digital form—was well established. But the cable modems required to implement such a digital broadband network were not on the mass market.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"62 5","pages":"24-52"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143918572","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 : 2025-03-07DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10991977
Harry Goldstein
{"title":"Bot Milk?: Lely's Robots Make the Cows Comfy and the Workplace Safer for Their Human Caretakers","authors":"Harry Goldstein","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10991977","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10991977","url":null,"abstract":"I come from dairy-farming stock. My grandfather, the original Harry Goldstein, owned a herd of dairy cows and a creamery in Louisville, Ky., that bore the family name. One fateful day in early April 1944, Harry was milking his cows when a heavy metallic part of his homemade milking contraption—likely some version of the then-popular Surge Bucket Milker—struck him in the abdomen, causing a blood clot that ultimately led to cardiac arrest and his subsequent demise a few days later, at the age of 48.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"62 5","pages":"2-2"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10991977","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143918710","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 : 2025-03-07DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10991972
Evan Ackerman
{"title":"Robots for Cows (and Their Humans): Everyone's Happier When Robots Handle Milking, Feeding, and Ear Scritching","authors":"Evan Ackerman","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10991972","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10991972","url":null,"abstract":"This dairy barn is full of cows, as you might expect. Cows are being milked, cows are being fed, cows are being cleaned up after, and a few very happy cows are even getting vigorously scratched behind the ears. “I wonder where the farmer is,” remarks my guide, Jan Jacobs. Jacobs doesn't seem especially worried, though—the several hundred cows in this barn are being well cared for by a small fleet of fully autonomous robots, and the farmer might not be back for hours. The robots will let him know if anything goes wrong.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"62 5","pages":"38-54"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143918792","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 : 2025-02-06DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10876760
Harry Goldstein
{"title":"“Hey, There's a Problem Here!”: Deepak Divan's Clarion Call to Modernize the Grid","authors":"Harry Goldstein","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10876760","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10876760","url":null,"abstract":"I first became aware of the looming transformer crisis in 2022, when IEEE Spectrum contributing editor Robert N. Charette was reporting on the infrastructure improvements required to make the transition to electric vehicles possible. Modern power grids can't run without transformers, which step voltages up and down for distribution from power plants to power stations and on to homes and businesses. And yet, Charette wrote, “most of the millions of U.S. transformers are approaching the end of their useful lives.”","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"62 2","pages":"2-2"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10876760","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143361329","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 : 2025-02-06DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10876448
Allison Marsh
{"title":"Slow and Steady Wins the Race","authors":"Allison Marsh","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10876448","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2025.10876448","url":null,"abstract":"On 8 October 2005, Stanley, an autonomous vehicle developed by the Stanford Racing Team, eked out a first-place victory in the second DARPA Grand Challenge. The modified Volkswagen Touareg averaged a leisurely 31 kilometers per hour to complete the 212-kilometer off-road course in 6 hours, 54 minutes. Along the way, it overtook the expected winner, Carnegie Mellon's H1ghlander, which had been well in the lead before suffering a mysterious engine glitch. The fact that any vehicle made it across the finish line at all was a testament to the massive improvements in autonomous driving that had taken place in just a year and a half. At the first Grand Challenge, held in March 2004, the lead vehicle completed just 12 km, and many didn't make it out of the parking lot.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":"62 2","pages":"48-48"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2025-02-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10876448","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143361269","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}