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Like many engineers, Sarah Downs says she knew she wanted to pursue a STEM career from a young age. As a teenager, she discovered robotics through her Tulsa, Okla., middle school’s First Lego League team, and she fell in love with the field, she says. Downs participated in the international robotics program from 2014 to 2016.Watching PBS specials on NASA Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity, and seeing the live broadcast of the Curiosity rover launch in 2011, inspired the teen to dream of a career working with NASA.Sarah DownsMEMBER GRADEGraduate student memberUNIVERSITY Texas A&M University in College StationMAJOR Electric engineeringThis year the IEEE graduate student member achieved that dream. For her final project as a master’s degree candidate in electrical engineering at the University of Tulsa, she worked on an algorithm in collaboration with NASA and the U.S. Air Force.The algorithm she developed enables a robot assembling satellites in space to insert an antenna into the correct spot, addressing robotics’s classic peg-in-hole problem of inserting an object into its corresponding hole.Now a Ph.D. student in electrical engineering at Texas A&M University in College Station, Downs is continuing her research on satellite assembly and manipulation “but on a much larger scale,” she says.Following a childhood passionDowns grew up in the Tulsa area. Her father, who died from a heart attack in 2015 when she was 13, was a safety advisor in the oil and gas industry. Her mother stayed home to take care of her brother, who has autism. After her father died, her mother went back to college to earn a bachelor’s degree in business so she could support the family.“We didn’t have much income, and my mom was always worried about money,” Downs says. “That made me more aware of having a successful career, in a monetary sense.”From then on, whenever she considered her future career, having a decent salary to support the family was high on her list.By pursuing a career in robotics, she says, she can follow her passion while obtaining financial security.In high school, Downs joined the First robotics club, where she found herself drawn to the […]

In the eastern Indian Ocean, south of Java in the vast sea stretching toward Australia, a fishing vessel slightly alters its course while operating near the boundary of its authorized fishing ground. Nothing appears unusual on deck. Nets remain in the water. Engines maintain a steady speed. To the crew, it is an ordinary day at sea.Yet hundreds of kilometers above, satellites continuously record the vessel’s position. At Indonesia’s Marine and Fisheries Resources Surveillance Station, in Cilacap, where I work, a monitoring platform receives the signal and automatically compares it against fishing permits, designated fishing grounds, vessel characteristics, and historical movement patterns. Within minutes, the system identifies a potential violation. Before any patrol vessel leaves port, before any inspector boards a vessel, and before any warning is issued, we have begun enforcement.This transformation reflects a profound shift in maritime governance. The ocean has historically been opaque to regulators. States could only enforce laws where patrol vessels happened to be present. Today, however, integrated systems combining data from vessel monitoring systems (VMS), satellite remote sensing, geospatial analytics, and increasingly sophisticated data-processing tools are making marine activity visible at an unprecedented scale. Global Fishing Watch alone tracks hundreds of thousands of vessels worldwide, generating a near real-time picture of fishing activity across the world’s oceans.Indonesia has emerged as one of the most ambitious examples of this transition. As the world’s largest archipelagic state, managing more than 6 million square kilometers of maritime space, Indonesia faces a challenge familiar to many coastal nations: There are never enough patrol vessels. Digital surveillance is a practical necessity that makes my job possible, even as it creates new challenges.The Law of the Sea Meets Digital RealityThe international legal framework governing the oceans was designed in an era when maritime enforcement depended almost entirely on physical presence. The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), adopted in 1982, assumes that […]

This article is crossposted from IEEE Spectrum’s careers newsletter. Sign up now to get insider tips, expert advice, and practical strategies, written in partnership with tech career development company Parsity and delivered to your inbox for free!Before we get into this week’s article, I’d love to hear from you. If you have a question about your career or an upcoming decision that you want advice about, you can ask it here. I’ll be reading through your responses and picking questions to answer on a regular basis. Now back to our regularly scheduled program.The Safest Career Move Is Often the RiskiestSoftware engineers have some of the shortest tenures of any white-collar profession. The average software engineer stays at a company for roughly two years, about half as long as workers in most other knowledge professions. The layoffs of the past few years have certainly highlighted this instability, but it was already there.This isn’t an essay about a broken job market though. Rather, it’s about how to turn that instability to your advantage, which is something I’ve spent the last decade doing on purpose.Playing It Safe Was the Riskiest OptionI switched careers into software in my 30s. I had a stable job at a community college, complete with a union and a pension. It was about as secure as a career gets, and I learned to program on the side.Then I did something nearly everyone in my life considered reckless: I quit, leaving the secure job to become a junior developer at 31. My own mother was skeptical. I took the riskier job anyway, for two reasons: It was the work I actually wanted, and I could see potential.My first development job was at a grocery retailer. Good people and a company I liked. But I kept meeting engineers earning twice my salary for the same work. In the San Francisco Bay Area, surrounded by some of the best engineering talent in the world, I realized my skills were stagnating.So I left for a small startup. I learned more in nine months than I had in the previous two years, and my salary doubled.Over the years I’ve come to treat career risk as something to manage deliberately. It falls into two categories.Take Risks With Your […]

As of 21 June 2026, a Level 1 Expulsion has been imposed on IEEE Member Dr. Fei-Yue Wang, former editor-in-chief of the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Vehicles. In accordance with IEEE Bylaw I-110.5(D)(i), Dr. Wang is no longer a member of IEEE, and is permanently banned from any type of membership in any IEEE organizational unit or participation in any IEEE activity. The Board of Directors also determined this notice to IEEE membership should be made.

ELIZA is remembered as the world’s first AI star, a kindly therapist in chatbot form that gently probed users’ worries. Even its creator, Joseph Weizenbaum, was surprised by the warm reception given to his experiment in human-machine interaction. For some, it heralded an age of automated psychotherapy, while others believed the program demonstrated sentience, a fallacy soon known as the “ELIZA effect.” Based on published descriptions, ELIZA has been implemented on many different computers, but only recently has the actual source code been unearthed from MIT’s archives. In Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI, just published by MIT Press, a squad of researchers analyze the code and reveal a complex program capable of much more than faking psychiatry. In fact, it could assume several different personas. The authors have also created a faithful emulation of the therapist persona that you can try yourself after reading the book excerpt below.When it debuted in the mid-1960s, the ELIZA software program transformed the way people thought about interacting with computers. As the first chatbot, ELIZA demonstrated how a calculation machine might engage in conversation, ushering in a host of social and technical questions that still resonate today. Now we don’t think twice about interacting with a machine in real time, conversing over text, or even speaking into the air to ask about the weather. In many ways, ELIZA shaped not only the way we think about interacting with computers but also how we think about them. It began to give a reality to the science fiction stories of how we expect computers to work. This article is adapted from the new book “Inventing ELIZA: How the First Chatbot Shaped the Future of AI“ (MIT Press, 2026).Although ELIZA was far from a faultless conversation partner, it astonished its users. The recent discovery and archaeology of the original ELIZA source code represents a significant intervention in the history of computing. By examining the actual implementation of ELIZA rather than relying on later reconstructions and reimplementations, we challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about this key software […]