IEEE SpectrumPub Date : 2024-03-08DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10522930
Jasper Baur
{"title":"Ukraine is Riddled with Land Mines: Drones and AI Can Help","authors":"Jasper Baur","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10522930","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10522930","url":null,"abstract":"EARLY ON A JUNE MORNING in 2023, my colleagues and I drove down a bumpy dirt road north of Kyiv in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Armed Forces were conducting training exercises nearby, and mortar shells arced through the sky. We arrived at a vast field for a technology demonstration set up by the United Nations. Across the 25-hectare field—that's about the size of 62 American football fields—the U.N. workers had scattered 50 to 100 inert mines and other ordnance. Our task was to fly our drone over the area and use our machine learning software to detect as many as possible. And we had to turn in our results within 72 hours.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140895046","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 : 2024-03-08DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10523016
Robert Kahn;Tekla S. Perry
{"title":"The Great Interconnector","authors":"Robert Kahn;Tekla S. Perry","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10523016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10523016","url":null,"abstract":"IN THE MID-1960s, Robert Kahn began thinking about how computers with different operating systems could talk to each other across a network. He didn't think much about what they would say to one another, though. He was a theoretical guy, on leave from the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a stint at the nearby research-and-development company Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN). He simply found the problem interesting.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140895045","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 : 2024-03-08DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10523015
Dina Genkina
{"title":"Don't Start a Career as an AI Prompt Engineer AI will Take Your Job","authors":"Dina Genkina","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10523015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10523015","url":null,"abstract":"Since ChatGPT dropped in the fall of 2022, everyone and their donkey has tried their hand at prompt engineering—finding a clever way to phrase their query to a large language model (LLM) or AI art or video generator to get the best results (or sidestep protections). The Internet is replete with prompt-engineering guides, cheat sheets, and advice threads to help you get the most out of an LLM.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140895047","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 : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10458089
{"title":"A Mouse's-Eye View","authors":"","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10458089","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10458089","url":null,"abstract":"In nature, there are no second takes. Nor are there safe spaces that small creatures like rodents can inhabit while they refine their predator-avoidance techniques. But researchers at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Ill., have developed mouse-size virtual-reality goggles that let the critters in their lab gain experience with life-or-death situations without the actual threat of becoming an owl's snack or main course. These virtual-reality experiments benefit humans, too. Discovering the finer details of how mice see the world could lead to better brain-machine interfaces, as well as improvements in the diagnosis and treatment of neurological ailments.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10458089","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140014834","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 : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10458091
Rob Carlson
{"title":"The World is Running Out of Data Storage. Here's How DNA Can Save US","authors":"Rob Carlson","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10458091","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10458091","url":null,"abstract":"Every day we produce more data, including emails, texts, photos, and social media posts. Though much of this content is forgettable, every day we implicitly decide not to get rid of that data. We keep it somewhere, be it in on a phone, on a computer's hard drive, or in the cloud, where it is eventually archived, in most cases on magnetic tape. Consider further the many varied devices and sensors now streaming data onto the Web, and the cars, airplanes, and other vehicles that store trip data for later use. All those billions of things on the Internet of Things produce data, and all that information also needs to be stored somewhere.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140014840","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 : 2024-03-01DOI: 10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10458070
Allison Marsh
{"title":"Past Forward","authors":"Allison Marsh","doi":"10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10458070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/MSPEC.2024.10458070","url":null,"abstract":"On 23 October 1916, an engineer named Henry E. Warren quietly revolutionized power transmission by installing an electric clock in the L Street generating station of Boston's Edison Electric Illuminating Co. This master station clock kept a very particular type of time: It used a synchronous self-starting motor in conjunction with a pendulum to maintain the station's AC electricity at a steady 60-cycle-per-second frequency. As more power stations adopted the clocks, frequency regulation allowed them to share electricity and create an interconnected power grid. Until the late 1940s, station clocks from the Warren Telechron Co. regulated over 95 percent of all U.S. electricity lines. The Telechron Model Type E at left is from the 1930s and was used at the Tennessee Valley Authority. Beginning in the 1950s, advanced electronics began displacing electromechanical master station clocks. Today, power-grid frequency is regulated by atomic clocks, although it still has to be tweaked to stay on target.","PeriodicalId":13249,"journal":{"name":"IEEE Spectrum","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.1,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/stamp/stamp.jsp?tp=&arnumber=10458070","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140014801","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}