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The transition from a purely technical expert or individual contributor position to a broader leadership role is one of the most challenging phases in a STEM career. It requires moving away from relying solely on technical excellence toward mastering systems thinking, adaptive leadership, and team alignment.To help mid-career professionals navigate the shift, the inaugural IEEE International Leadership Conference is designed to provide attendees with practical tools to step into broader responsibility and champion an entrepreneurial mindset.The ILC event is scheduled for 3 and 4 October in Budapest. Registration is open.Thinking beyond technical contributionsTo successfully step into a leadership role, technical professionals need to look beyond their individual output and focus on “understanding the larger system, and championing innovation by building trust and aligning new ideas with organizational goals,” says IEEE Life Senior Member Daniel Sniezek, cochair of the ILC program committee.Because engineering decisions don’t exist in a vacuum, navigating the larger system requires recognizing how technical choices intersect with the organization’s broader business, operational, and ethical realities, Sniezek says.By letting go of the need to be the sole technical expert and focusing instead on collaborative empowerment, he says, engineers can pivot into transformational leaders who align new initiatives with the organization’s strategic vision.Ultimately, over the span of a career, an individual’s leadership journey evolves far beyond personal advancement to “creating a lasting legacy through the people you develop, the knowledge you share, and the innovations you inspire,” he says.Solving the intrapreneur’s dilemmaChampioning disruptive ideas within established corporate structures—sometimes called the intrapreneur’s dilemma—does not mean working against the organization. Rather, it requires emerging leaders to act like business owners instead of passive task-takers.To begin thinking like an entrepreneur from within, professionals should shift their focus from merely executing assigned work to proactively identifying hidden areas that […]

The history of networking is full of tools that repurposed solutions to very different kinds of problems first. Wi-Fi’s origins trace back, in part, to a team of Australian radio astronomers trying to detect signals from evaporating black holes. But the data-processing tools they’d developed also proved capable at extracting clean messages from any chaotic, echoing signal environment. Echoes are echoes, after all, whether from distant star systems or from the far corner of the house.I research vehicle communications networks, connecting cars to cars and to transportation infrastructure like traffic lights—for tomorrow’s vehicle-to-everthing (V2X) networks. V2X research has long relied on models that assume “perfect” or “ideal” network conditions, which is a simplifying assumption that makes the math tractable. But this assumption doesn’t reflect how real wireless signals behave in a moving, obstructed, high-density environment. That gap is exactly the kind of real-world unpredictability that open radio access networks (a.k.a. O-RAN)—an open, programmable architecture behind some 4G and 5G cellular networks—were built to manage.So why has the O-RAN standard—which is open and available to be applied well beyond 5G telecom—never been used for vehicle communications?Solutions to the vehicle-to-everything (V2X) problem have to date relied on new networking protocols built from scratch—only to discover chicken-and-egg problems, thorny standards wars, and real signal congestion challenges at scale. By contrast, O-RAN allows V2X engineers to reuse the networking protocols already developed for cellular communications. O-RAN was developed assuming cellphone towers are generally fixed in place. But, as can be seen below, O-RAN accommodates mobile “towers”—cars and trucks, in this case—with little additional effort.Imagining a New Way to Connect VehiclesSelf-driving vehicle technology has largely been an each-car-for-itself endeavor. Tesla’s approach, for instance, relies heavily on powerful on-board banks of computers and suites of sensors spread around the car.However, as an alternative to the “data center on wheels” model, this […]

Today’s U.S. electrical grid, among the largest, most complex systems ever built, is operating at its limit. The combination of rapid industrial growth, more frequent extreme weather, and a record surge in electricity use has pushed the grid to its breaking point, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.Built decades ago for a more predictable world in which power came mostly from centralized coal or gas plants and electricity use grew at a steady pace, the grid faces unanticipated strain due in part to growing demand from data centers. The jobs of professionals managing the infrastructure have evolved from traditional engineering tasks to complex, fast-moving challenges.Industry reports show that millions of modern digital sensors, smart meters, and grid monitors are generating nonstop waves of information. The sheer volume of data requires instant, automated computer analysis because human operators cannot process it fast enough.Pressure on utilities stems from two sources: a spike in electricity demand and a shift in how power is generated.An example of the operational strain can be seen at the regional level. With the recent deployment of artificial intelligence tools and high-performance computing, data centers require immense amounts of energy to operate. The largest power transmission utility in Texas recently reported a staggering 220 gigawatts of new connection requests, driven largely by a surge in AI and cloud-computing facilities, according to a CNBC report.Alongside the rise in regional demand, global energy networks are absorbing an unpredictable variety of weather-dependent renewable energy such as wind and solar. The switch creates a volatile operating environment wherein supply and demand are balanced, second by second, to prevent blackouts.The challenges are compounded by the vulnerability of the grid’s physical and digital framework.More-frequent severe weather events cause costly disruptions, such as the devastating winter freeze that crippled the Texas grid and record-breaking heat waves that have overloaded transformers.Simultaneously, the energy networks’ digital architecture faces threats. As utilities replace outdated analog […]

This report examines R&D waste and how AI adoption has outpaced the intelligence needed to make consequential decisions well.What Attendees will LearnWhere R&D budget is lost. More than a third of organizations spend 25 to 40 percent of their R&D budget on projects that never reach market.Why projects fail late. Almost half of teams estimate over one million dollars in wasted investment for each project killed during development or testing.Why AI adoption has not closed the gap. Most organizations apply AI to execution tasks such as data analysis and modeling rather than to decision support.Where intelligence matters most. Respondents say better access to intelligence has the greatest value at early ideation and feasibility before significant investment is committed.Download this free whitepaper now!

Most hospitals and health care providers use electronic health records instead of paper charts to note patient vaccinations, diagnoses, and procedures. AthenaOne, Epic, and Oracle Health are some of the systems employed around the world. Many patients can access their electronic medical records from home.The platforms exist thanks to pioneering efforts such as the Medical Information System (MIS-I). The first hospital-wide computer system, it was developed in the 1960s by Lockheed Martin (then known as Lockheed Missiles and Space Co.) in partnership with El Camino Hospital, in Mountain View, Calif. Doctors and nurses used MIS-I (pronounced miss-ONE) to admit patients, order lab work and imaging, schedule follow-up appointments, and issue hospital bills, according to a 1973 article published by Datamation.Although many people now know how to type on a keyboard, in the 1960s, most did not. Therefore, MIS-I included a light pen, which worked like a stylus for today’s touchscreens.MIS-I was recognized as an IEEE Milestone during a ceremony on 14 May at El Camino Hospital. The IEEE Santa Clara Valley Section sponsored the Milestone.“The medical information system was more than a technological breakthrough; it was proof of what can happen when clinicians, engineers, administrators, and community leaders unite around a common goal: improving care for patients,” Dan Woods said at the event. He is chief executive of El Camino Health, the nonprofit organization that maintains the hospital.“This pioneering work helped establish the foundation for the modern medical informatics industry,” Woods said. “The legacy of Lockheed’s innovation continues to benefit patients and health care providers around the world, making this achievement truly worthy of lasting recognition.”Bringing technology into clinical carePrior to Lockheed’s effort, health records remained paper-based. They often were stored in dedicated rooms within the hospital. Files were kept in heavy-duty manila folders organized on mechanized open-shelf filing systems, revolving rotary files, or locked steel filing cabinets, according to EO Johnson Business Technologies. The process of retrieving a […]