Radio Spectrum

Gabriel Steinberg, co-founder of the nonprofit Demining Research Community and the startup Safe Pro AI talks with Spectrum editor Eliza Strickland  about using machine learning to speed up demining operations in former Ukranian battlefields. 

Founder and CEO of Exeger, Giovanni Fili, talks with IEEE Spectrum editor Stephen Cass about Exeger's Powerfoyle flexible dye-based solar cells for consumer electronics, which can recharge devices even in indoor light, and how Exeger convinced major companies to incorporate its tech into their products.

The United Kingdom has created a new government agency, the Advanced Research and Invention Agency, or ARIA, similar to the United States' DARPA. ARIA's first foray is into creating new enabling technologies to make AI faster and more energy efficient, and the program lead, Suraj Bramhavar spoke with Spectrum editor Dina Genkina about some of areas, such as new ways to use noise, that ARIA would be helping investigate.

Zipline originally established itself delivering medical supplies in rural Africa. Now, Zipline cofounder and CTO Keenan Wyrobek talks with senior editor Stephen Cass about recent milestones in bringing commercial drone delivery to the United States, including the development of Platform 2 and its tethered mini-droid that makes precision drop-offs possible in urban areas. 

Governments in America and Europe are pushing the deployment of heat pumps to reduce the energy demands of home heating and cooling. Spectrum's power and energy editor Emily Waltz talks with Stephen Cass about her reporting on new advances that will let heat pumps work in colder climates than before, expanding their range considerably.

IEEE Spectrum's semiconductor expert, Samuel K. Moore, talks with Stephen Cass about his visit to one of the key conferences in emerging integrated circuit technology, ISSCC. We talk about Meta's new 3D chip-stacking tech for faster AR, faster AI through in-memory computation, and security technology that can cause a chip to self-destruct if anyone tries to hack it.

In this March roundup, IEEE Spectrum's editor-in-chief Harry Goldstein and senior editor Stephen Cass talk about some of the highlights of Spectrum's recent coverage, including a plea for programmers to stop producing bloated programs, a new transistor that could help make how we handle electrical power smarter, and the potential return of optical discs as a high-density date storage medium. 

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) recently released the open-source ARES_OS, a key software component of their Autonomous Research System. ARES_OS allows relatively simple robots to perform experiments, and develop new experiments based on the results. The AFRL's Benji Maruyama talks with IEEE Spectrum associate editor Dina Genkina about how he hopes the system becomes not just an invaluable helper for grad students, but opens up research to many more people outside traditional labs and enables progress in tackling hard problems like climate change. 

The semiconductor industry is in the midst of a major expansion driven by the seemingly insatiable demands of AI, the addition of more intelligence in transportation, and national security concerns, among many other things. What this expansion might mean for chip-making's carbon footprint? Can we make everything in our world smarter without worsening climate change? Lizzie Boakes is a lifecycle analyst at IMEC, the Belgium-based nanotech research organisation, and she speaks with senior editor Samuel K. Moore about her work on this problem.

We've all seen impressive demos of prototype brain implants being used by paralyzed patients to interface with computers, but none of those implants have entered general clinical use. Biomedical device company Synchron is close to actually coming to market with its stentrode technology, promising less spectacular results than some of its competitors, but making up for that with ease of use and implant longevity. Synchron's co-founder Tom Oxley talks with IEEE Spectrum senior editor Eliza Strickland about the new tech, and you can read more in our January issue article by Emily Waltz.

The EU Sustronics program aims to make creating, maintaining, and recycling electronics more sustainable. Liisa Hakola is a senior scientist and project manager at the VTT Technical Research Center in Finland. She talks with IEEE Spectrum senior editor Stephen Cass about VTT's role in the EU's program, helping manufacturers to develop flexible, printed—and even compostable—electronics. 

Security researchers Bruce Schneier and Barath Raghavan believe it's time to stop trusting our data to the cloud, where it can be exposed by greed, accident, or crime. In the December issue of IEEE Spectrum, they proposed a plan for "data decoupling" that would protect our data without sacrificing ease of use, and in this episode Raghavan talks through the highlights of the plan with Spectrum editor Stephen Cass.

Co-CEO's of Silmach, Pierre-Francois Louvigne and Jean-Baptiste Carnet, talk about their new MEMS technology with IEEE Spectrum editor Glenn Zorpette. The tech has been used to create the first major upgrade to the movement of quartz watches in decades, a power efficient motor that is 50 percent smaller, allows fluid forward-and-back motion of the hand, and requires so little power a watch can run for over a decade before it needs a new battery. Louvigne talk about their new hybrid watch, which combine smartwatch electronics with analog faces, and partnerships with manufacturers such as Timex.

Alan Clark of SUSE talks with IEEE Spectrum editor Stephen Cass about the disruption in the enterprise Linux community caused by recent announcements by Red Hat over open source access to its codebase, and the formation of the Open Enterprise Linux Alliance (Open ELA) by SUSE, Oracle and CIQ in response.

Justine Bateman is an author and filmmaker. She also holds a degree in computer science from UCLA and is the AI advisor to SAG-AFTRA, the actors' union currently striking against movie and television studios. In this episode, Bateman talks with IEEE Spectrum senior editor Stephen Cass about actors' demands for control and compensation over digital avatars created in their likeness, and the destructive potential of generative AI in Hollywood.

Wendy H. Wong is a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia, and author of the just released book, We, The Data: Human Rights in the Digital Age. An excerpt from the book regarding the emerging prospect of digitally reanimating the departed is available on IEEE Spectrum's website. In this episode of Fixing The Future, Wong talks with senior editor Eliza Strickland about how the increasing datification of our lives could make this prospect possible—with or without our consent. 

IEEE Spectrum's resident semiconductor expert Samuel K. Moore talks with host Stephen Cass about ASML's enormous machine that's at the heart of chip manufacturing and explain the latest tricks with extreme ultraviolet that will keep Moore's Law going. In addition, new technologies from Edwards and Nvidia should make manufacturing chips greener and faster respectively. 

Reducing our global carbon footprint by switching to electric vehicles means we need a lot more batteries. And that means we need a lot more copper, nickel, cobalt, and lithium to make those batteries. Josh Goldman of KoBold Metals talks to senior editor Eliza Strickland about using AI to decipher geological formations and find new deposits of these minerals, and you can read more in his recent feature for IEEE Spectrum.    

IEEE Spectrum's Stephen Cass talks with Arun Gupta, vice president and general manager of Open Ecosystem Initiatives at Intel and chair of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, about Intel's contributions to open source software projects and efforts to make open source greener and more secure.

Around the world, legislators are grappling with generative AI's potential for both innovation and destruction. Russell Wald is the Director of Policy for Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. In this episode, he talks with IEEE Spectrum senior editor Eliza Strickland about creating humane regulations that are able to cope with a rapidly evolving technology.

Scott Shapiro is the author of Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age in Five Extraordinary Hacks. You can read an excerpt of Fancy Bear at IEEE Spectrum, but in today's episode of Fixing the Future, Shapiro talks with Spectrum editor David Schneider about why cybersecurity can't be fixed with purely technical solutions, why the threat of cyberwarfare tends to be exaggerated, and why cyberespionage will always be with us.

As large language models like GPT4 and Bard continue to take the world by storm, one of their most high-profile applications is their most unexpected: writing code. AI programming systems like Github Copilot are primarily used by software developers as a writing partner, but no-code programming tools can also help non-programmers find new ways to use data. AI-watcher Craig Smith talks to Gina Genkina and explains how this programming ability caught researchers by surprise and how anyone can start leveraging these tools. 

Sally Adee's new book, We Are Electric: The New Science of Our Body's Electrome, exams the centuries-long quest to understand how the body uses electricity. Beyond just how neurons send electrical signals, new research is showing how ancient biological mechanisms use electricity to heal our bodies and dictate how cells behave. Adee, a former editor at IEEE Spectrum, talks with host Stephen Cass about this research and how it may even open the door to regenerative technologies that are currently science fiction.

Samuel K. Moore, IEEE Spectrum's senior editor and semiconductor beat reporter, talks about the competing technologies that hope to dramatically speed up computing, especially for machine learning. 

Charles Scalfini, the CTO of Panoramic Software, makes the case for why programmers should make the leap to functional programming, which promises more maintainable code, and eliminates some of the problems inherent to conventional languages. 

Nick Brown, vice-president of product at Truepic, describes how the company's technology and standards developed by the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity is fighting fakes and other forms of image tampering, by securing data from the camera lens to the users' screens. 

Patients who have traumatic nerve injuries can face significant paralysis, including paraplegia and quadriplegia. Chad Bouton's research is on developing devices that can decode and recode the electrical signals that normally flow between a limb and the brain, allowing damage to be bypassed. 

One potential path to tackling climate change due to rising carbon dioxide levels is to lock the carbon dioxide away in geological reservoirs deep underground. Deep learning AI technologies can produce better models of these reservoirs, essential if they are to be used at a big enough scale to make a difference.

Britt S. Young talks with IEEE Spectrum senior editor Stephen Cass about her investigation into high-tech prosthetic hand design: "We are caught in a bionic-hand arms race. But are we making real progress? It's time to ask who prostheses are really for, and what we hope they will actually accomplish. Each new multigrasping bionic hand tends to be more sophisticated but also more expensive than the last and less likely to be covered (even in part) by insurance. And as recent research concludes, much simpler and far less expensive prosthetic devices can perform many tasks equally well."

Silver Lining's executive direction Kelly Wanser explains why rising temperatures are behind the push to geoengineer the world's climate, the most plausible technologies, and why we need a lot more research to find out if it's a good idea, and if so, how to do it on a global scale. Hosted by IEEE Spectrum editor Eliza Strickland.

Hospitals are where we go to get cured of infections and diseases, but sadly, sometimes tragically, and ironically, they are also places we go to get them. According to the Centers for Disease Control, “On any given day, about one in 31 hospital patients has at least one healthcare-associated infection.” Yet, according to Dr Lee Harrison, “The current method used by hospitals to find and stop infectious disease transmission among patients is antiquated. These practices haven't changed significantly in over a century.” Until perhaps now. Doctors at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center have developed a new method that uses three distinct, relatively new, technologies, whole-genome sequencing surveillance, and machine learning, and electronic health records to identify undetected outbreaks and their transmission routes. Dr Lee Harrison is a Professor at the University of Pittsburgh, where he's the Associate Chief of Epidemiology and Education and, more to our point today, the head of its Infectious Diseases Epidemiology Research Unit. He's the corresponding author of a new paper that describes the new methodology and he's my guest today. Fixing the Future is the weekly podcast of @IEEE Spectrum and is sponsored by @COMSOL

Rare diseases are, well, rare. In two not unrelated ways. By definition, they're diseases that afflict fewer than 200,000 people. But because, in the world of big business, in particular big pharma, that's not enough to bother with, that is, it's not profitable enough to bother with, rare diseases are rarely worked, to say nothing of cured.  For example, hypertryptophanemia is a rare condition that likely occurs due to abnormalities in the body's ability to process the amino acid, tryptophan. How rare? I don't know. A Google search didn't yield an answer to that question. In fact, it's rare enough that Google didn't even autocomplete the word even with 15 of its 19 letters typed in. Paradoxically, big data has the potential to change that. Because 200,000 is, after all, a lot of data points. But it presents problems of its own. There isn't one giant pool of 200,000 data points. So the first challenge is to aggregate all the potential data that's out there. And the big challenge there is that a lot of the data is contained, not in beautifully homogeneous, joinable, relatable databases. It's buried deep in documents like PubMed articles and patent filings.  Deep Learning can help researchers pull that data out of those documents. At least, that's the strategy of a startup called Vyasa. Here to explain it is Vyasa's CEO and founder, Christopher Bouton.

Like a lot of people, you may be thinking about trading in your car. Me too. The case, morally and even financially, for an all-electric car is becoming stronger and stronger. And yet, what about recharging? What's it like going from, say Pittsburgh to New York's Hudson Valley—a trip that doesn't even have a solid cellular connection? What about a road trip my partner to Yosemite and back? And even locally, how do you charge up if you live in a townhouse or apartment? Without a driveway and a garage, can you set up charging at home? Will we have a universal standard for charging? What exactly is fast charging? Basically, if you're like me, you're a bundle of questions. Fortunately, a fellow IEEE Spectrum contributing editor is a bundle of answers.John Voelcker has been reporting on cars and the automotive industry for almost as long as he's been driving. He's also a contributing editor to Car and Driver, and is the editor of Green Car Reports. His work has also been featured in Wired, Popular Science, and elsewhere. He's an actual engineer, with a B.S. in Industrial Engineering from Stanford. And he's our guest today.

IBM is a remarkable company, known for many things—the tabulating machines that calculated the 1890 U.S. Census, the mainframe computer, legitimizing the person computer, and developing the software that beat the best in the world at chess and then Jeopardy. The company is, though, even more remarkable for the businesses it departed—often while they were still highly profitable—and pivoting to new ones before their profitability was obvious or assured.  The pivot that people are most familiar with is the one into the PC market in the 1980s and then out of it in the 2000s. In fact, August 2020 marks the 40th anniversary of the introduction of the IBM PC. Joining me to talk about it—and IBM's other pivots, past and future—is a person uniquely qualified to do so.  James Cortada is both a Ph.D. historian and a 38-year veteran of IBM. He's currently a senior research fellow at the University of Minnesota'sCharles Babbage Institute, where he specializes in the history of technology. He was therefore perfectly positioned to be the author of the definitive corporate history of the company he used to work for, in a book entitled IBM: The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon, which was published in 2019 by MIT Press. 

There's no question that computers don't understand sarcasm—or didn't, until some researchers at the University of Central Florida starting them on a path to learning it.Software engineers have been working on various flavors of sentiment analysis for quite some time. Back in 2005, I wrote an article in Spectrum about call centers automatically scanning conversations for anger—either by the caller or the service operator—one of the early use-cases behind messages like “This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes.” Since then, software has been getting better and batter at detecting joy, fear, sadness, and confidence, and now, finally, sarcasm.My guest today, Ramya Akula, is a Ph.D. student and a Graduate Research Assistant at the University of Central Florida's Complex Adaptive Systems Laboratory.

The most honest and inadvertently funny marketing message I ever saw was at a gas station that was closed for remodeling; it had been an Amaco station before that company was bought by BP. The sign said, “Rebranding, to serve you better.”  I'm afraid we're a bit guilty of that here at Spectrum. This is the 30th episode of IEEE Spectrum's relaunched podcast series, but the first under a new name, “Fixing the Future.”  We've changed the name partly for marketing and searchability reasons. But it also signals our intention to focus more intently on ways that technology is being deployed to improve our lives, specifically in three—to be sure overlapping—areas: climate change; machine learning and other smart technologies; and the effects of automation on the nature of work and the future of jobs. I'm hard-pressed to imagine a more on-point guest to help me usher in this change than Myriam Sbeiti. She's the CEO and co-founder of Sunthetics, a startup that's reinventing the industrial processes by which we make nylon by replacing a thermal operation with an electrical one, and has both grown that business and pivoted toward other industrial processes as well. Fixing the Future is sponsored by COMSOL, makers of mathematical modeling software and a longtime supporter of IEEE Spectrum as a way to connect and communicate with engineers.

Today's startup invites us to rethink nuclear energy. Their plan? To put cheap, portable nuclear reactors onto barges and float them out to sea. What could go wrong? According to today's guest, basically nothing. The reactor design avoids the type of fuel rods that gave us the fictional meltdown in The China Syndrome and the real-life ones in Chernobyl and Fukushima. In fact, my guest will claim his reactor cannot meltdown or explode.  One of these reactors would be able to supply electricity, clean water, heating, and cooling to 200 000 households. All with a carbon footprint as low as any other technology—and there are co-generation opportunities that would seem to lower it even further.  The startup is Seaborg Technologies, based in Copenhagen, and we're lucky to have its co-founder and CEO, Troels Schönefeldt, with us today to explain how this isn't all too good to be true. 

A few months ago, we had on the show an economist who specialized in the energy sector. She noted that while the Trump administration had put drilling rights the Alaska Natural Wildlife Refuge, or ANWAR, on the block, there wasn't much interest from the oil industry, and, more generally, the Arctic and other cold climes, presented logistical—and therefore financial—problems for oil companies.  To be sure, oil companies have been drilling in the frigid North Sea for decades, but that doesn't mean it's been easy. For example, at BP's Valhall oil field in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea, drilling began in 1982, and the company is still pulling 8000 barrels per day, but losses are considerable—or have been until BP began working with a data science company. Yes, a data science company.  Further out, in the middle of the North Sea, another set of BP oil fields, known as Alvheim, has been rediscovered to have greater reserves than previously thought. There, the same data science company optimized a calibration process and in so doing reduced production losses and saved BP considerable money.  The data science company's work isn't limited to oil and gas. For example, it recently won a research contract with the California Energy Commission to use modeling and data analytics to help it improve production efficiencies in wind energy. The data science company is called Cognite, and my guest today is its Senior Director in charge of Energy Industry Transformation, Carolina Torres. 

When horses were replaced by engines, for work and transportation, we didn’t need to rethink our legal frameworks. So when a fixed-in-place factory machine is replaced by a free-standing AI robot, or when human truck driver is replaced by autonomous driving software, do we really need to make any fundamental changes to the law?  My guest today seems to think so. Or perhaps more accurately, he thinks that surprisingly, we do not; he says we need to change the laws less than we think. In case after case, he says, we just need to treat the robot more or less the same way we treat a person.  A year ago, he was giving presentations in which he argued that Ais can be patentholders. Since then, his views have advanced even further. And so last summer, Cambridge University Press published a short but powerful treatise, The Reasonable Robot: Artificial Intelligence and the Law. In it, he argues that the law more often than not should not discriminate between AI and human behavior. Ryan Abbott is a Professor of Law and Health Sciences at the University of Surrey and an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Medicine at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. He’s a licensed physician, and an attorney, and an acupuncturist in the United States, as well as a solicitor in England and Wales. His M.D. is from UC San Diego’s School of Medicine; his J.D. is from Yale Law School and his M.T.O.M.—Master of Traditional Oriental Medicine—degree is from Emperor's College.

As we begin to finally address climate change in a serious way, we need to look at our cities in a serious way. And not just first-tier cities like, well, New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Los Angeles, and not just flashy growing cities like Las Vegas, Austin, Atlanta, and Columbus. We need to look at cities like Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St Louis—cities that haven’t come back from the problems—deindustrialization, disinvestment, white flight—of 50 and 60 years ago.  These cities are at a crossroads, according to my guest today. They can, he says, enjoy a comeback, stagnate, or continue to decline. There is, in fact, a unique opportunity presented by the pandemic: as working remotely becomes more widely accepted, there could be a migration to cities such as these by people not ready to give up on city life, but looking for greater affordability.  Matthew Kahn is a Distinguished Professor of Economics and Business at Johns Hopkins University; he’s the Business Director of its 21st Century Cities Initiative; and he’s co-author of a new book that addresses these questions about these very cities, titled Unlocking the Potential of Post-Industrial Cities.

I suppose it’s elitist and maybe even nationalistic of me but I was surprised to hear the phrase “resource curse,” which I associate with the developing world, used recently in a webinar in the context of a region of the United States. The region is northern Appalachia, comprising 22 counties in eastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania, and northern West Virginia. And the curse is, as it so often is in the third world, a surfeit of oil and especially natural gas, in this case extractable largely through the relatively new process of fracking.  Here to explain how the resource curse is impoverishing communities in the middle of the U.S. in the middle of the 21st century is Sean O’Leary. He’s a senior researcher at the Ohio River Valley Institute and the author of its recent report, “Appalachia’s Natural Gas Counties: How dreams of jobs and prosperity turned into almost nothing.”

In the world of prosthetics, we’re still at the stage where a person has to instruct the prosthetic to first do one thing, then another, then another. As University of Waterloo Ph.D. researcher Brokoslaw Laschowski puts it, “Every time you want to perform a new locomotor activity, you have to stop, take out your smartphone and select the desired mode.”  But Laschowski and his fellow researchers have been developing a device that uses wearable cameras and deep learning to figure out the task that the exoskeleton-wearing person is engaged in, perhaps walking down a flight of stairs, or along a street, and gets them there, a bit like programming a destination in a self-driving car.  A @RadioSpectrum1 conversation. Available on Spotify and @IEEESpectrum. 

Has there been any technology more widely talked about and yet still less understood than 5G? Qualcomm’s Vice President of Engineering, Our guest, John Smee, holds dozens of patents in wireless technologies; his designs and innovations range from CDMA and LTE to Wi-Fi and now 5G. He’ll explain the challenges of 5G—and what 6G will be like. A full transcript of this and all Radio Spectrum conversations are available at https://spectrum.ieee.org/multimedia/podcasts.

If there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that the world is not only changing quickly, it’s changing at a faster rate than ever. Or does it just seem that way?  Surely we can all agree that the Industrial Revolution has changed everything. Or has it? One noted economist says there in fact were three industrial revolutions, and only one of them—the second one, from about 1870 to 1914, was important. In fact he largely discounts what we call the information revolution as insubstantial. If you wanted to study the great trends and transitions of civilization—not just Western Civilization, but all of it—and break it down into epochs, and choose from the various transitions the five or seven most significant ones, and study the interplays of these transitions—which are causes of the others, and to what degree, and why some occur quickly and others—like the electric car—are postponed for a hundred years; if you wanted to do all that, it would take a lifetime of study.  In fact, you’d have to write ten or thirty books each one of which looks at some aspect of our world from a height of 30,000 feet, and then write an eleventh or thirty-first book that was the encapsulation of all that wisdom. That certainly seems impossible. The last true Renaissance person, someone who knew pretty much all that was known at the time, might have been Aristotle, with asterisks for Franklin and Diderot, and maybe Bertrand Russell. And yet, my guest today—who doesn’t know all that is currently known, but knows quite a bit about almost everything about technology, and the social and cultural changes that technologies have wrought, and what causes technological change itself, has done just that.  Václav Smil is a Czech-born Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba, a part of the world we don’t always associate with the Renaissance. He’s the author of more than 40 books in an enormously wide range of fields that includes energy and food production, environmental and population change, risk and public policy, and the history of technology and innovation. He’s also a contributing editor at IEEE Spectrum. His new book, which in some sense encapsulates all his prior scholarship, is Grand Transitions:How the Modern World Was Made, published March 1st by Oxford University Press.

Can nation-states defend themselves from hackers and one another?

A mathematician uses statistical science to prove gerrymandering, and courts are sometimes convinced

A startup founded by two economists thinks direct air capture of carbon can be made cost-effective

The energy economy is changing faster than ever. Economist Kathy Hipple surveys the landscape

Argonne National Lab’s new ability to look inside a battery will lead to better, lighter, quicker-charging batteries, from phones to cars

Are politics and medicine itself keeping health care from being evidence-based? A conversation with Eric Patashnik, co-author of "Unhealthy Politics: The Battle Over Evidence-Based Medicine"

Who will gain in the FCC’s next big spectrum auction? How will consumers gain, and what will we lose?