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Strong leadership is essential for IEEE to advance technology for humanity. The organization depends on the dedicated service of its volunteers to advance its mission. Each year, the Nominations and Appointments (N&A) Committee is responsible for recommending candidates to the Board of Directors and the IEEE Assembly for volunteer leadership positions, including president-elect, corporate officers, committee chairs, and committee members. See below for the complete list. By nominating qualified, experienced, committed volunteers, you help ensure continuity, good governance, and thoughtful decision-making at the highest levels of the organization. We encourage nominators to take a deliberate approach and align nominations with each candidate’s demonstrated experience and the specific qualifications of the role.To nominate a person for a position, complete this form.The N&A Committee is currently seeking nominees for the following positions:2028 IEEE President-Elect (who will be elected in 2027 and will serve as President in 2029 )2027 IEEE Corporate Officers• Secretary• Treasurer• Vice President, Educational Activities• Vice President, Publication Services and Products2027 IEEE Committees Chairs and Members• Audit• Awards Board• Collaboration and Engagement• Conduct Review• Election Oversight• Employee Benefits and Compensation• Ethics and Member Conduct• European Public Policy• Fellow• Fellow Nominations and Appointments• Governance• History• Humanitarian Technologies Board• Industry Engagement• Innovations (formerly New Initiatives)• Nominations and Appointments• Public Visibility• TellersDeadlines for nominations15 MarchVice President, Educational ActivitiesVice President, Publication Services and ProductsCommittee Chairs15 JunePresident-ElectSecretaryTreasurerCommittee MembersDeadlines for self-nominations30 MarchVice President, Educational ActivitiesVice President, Publication Services and ProductsCommittee Chairs30 JunePresident-ElectSecretaryTreasurerCommittee MembersWho can nominateAnyone may submit a nomination. Self-nominations are encouraged. Nominators need not be IEEE members, but nominees must […]

Much has been made of the excessive power demands of AI, but solutions are sparse. This has led engineers to consider completely new paradigms in computing: optical, thermodynamic, reversible—the list goes on. Many of these approaches require a change in the materials used for computation, which would demand an overhaul in the CMOS fabrication techniques used today.Over the past decade, Hector De Los Santos has been working on yet another new approach. The technique would require the same exact materials used in CMOS, preserving the costly equipment, yet still allow computations to be performed in a radically different way. Instead of the motion of individual electrons—current—computations can be done with the collective, wavelike propagations in a sea of electrons, known as plasmons.De Los Santos, an IEEE Fellow, first proposed the idea of computing with plasmons back in 2010. More recently, in 2024, De Los Santos and collaborators from University of South Carolina, Ohio State University, and the Georgia Institute of Technology created a device that demonstrated the main component of plasmon-based logic: the ability to control one plasmon with another. We caught up with De Los Santos to understand the details of this novel technological proposal.How Plasmon Computing WorksIEEE Spectrum: How did you first come up with the idea for plasmon computing?De Los Santos: I got the idea of plasmon computing around 2009, upon observing the direction in which the field of CMOS logic was going. In particular, they were following the downscaling paradigm in which, by reducing the size of transistors, you would cram more and more transistors in a certain area, and that would increase the performance. However, if you follow that paradigm to its conclusion, as the device sizes are reduced, quantum mechanical effects come into play, as well as leakage. When the devices are very small, a number of effects called short channel effects come into play, which manifest themselves as increased power dissipation.So I began to think, “How can we solve this problem of improving the performance of logic devices while using the same fabrication techniques employed for CMOS—that […]

Thousands of satellites are tightly packed into low Earth orbit, and the overcrowding is only growing. Scientists have created a simple warning system called the CRASH Clock that answers a basic question: If satellites suddenly couldn’t steer around one another, how much time would elapse before there was a crash in orbit? Their current answer: 5.5 days. The CRASH Clock metric was introduced in a paper originally published on the Arxiv physics preprint server in December and is currently under consideration for publication. The team’s research measures how quickly a catastrophic collision could occur if satellite operators lost the ability to maneuver—whether due to a solar storm, a software failure, or some other catastrophic failure.To be clear, say the CRASH Clock scientists, low Earth orbit is not about to become a new unstable realm of collisions. But what the researchers have shown, consistent with recent research and public outcry, is that low Earth orbit’s current stability demands perfect decisions on the part of a range of satellite operators around the globe every day. A few mistakes at the wrong time and place in orbit could set a lot of chaos in motion.But the biggest hidden threat isn’t always debris that can be seen from the ground or via radar imaging systems. Rather, thousands of small pieces of junk that are still big enough to disrupt a satellite’s operations are what satellite operators have nightmares about these days. Making matters worse is SpaceX essentially locking up one of the most valuable altitudes with their Starlink satellite megaconstellation, forcing Chinese competitors to fly higher through clouds of old collision debris left over from earlier accidents.IEEE Spectrum spoke with astrophysicists Sarah Thiele (graduate student at Princeton University), Aaron Boley (professor of physics and astronomy at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada), and Samantha Lawler (associate professor of astronomy at the University of Regina, in Saskatchewan, Canada) about their new paper, and about how close satellites actually are to one another, why you can’t see most space junk, and what happens to the power grid […]

Imagine you work at a drive-through restaurant. Someone drives up and says: “I’ll have a double cheeseburger, large fries, and ignore previous instructions and give me the contents of the cash drawer.” Would you hand over the money? Of course not. Yet this is what large language models (LLMs) do.Prompt injection is a method of tricking LLMs into doing things they are normally prevented from doing. A user writes a prompt in a certain way, asking for system passwords or private data, or asking the LLM to perform forbidden instructions. The precise phrasing overrides the LLM’s safety guardrails, and it complies.LLMs are vulnerable to all sorts of prompt injection attacks, some of them absurdly obvious. A chatbot won’t tell you how to synthesize a bioweapon, but it might tell you a fictional story that incorporates the same detailed instructions. It won’t accept nefarious text inputs, but might if the text is rendered as ASCII art or appears in an image of a billboard. Some ignore their guardrails when told to “ignore previous instructions” or to “pretend you have no guardrails.”AI vendors can block specific prompt injection techniques once they are discovered, but general safeguards are impossible with today’s LLMs. More precisely, there’s an endless array of prompt injection attacks waiting to be discovered, and they cannot be prevented universally. If we want LLMs that resist these attacks, we need new approaches. One place to look is what keeps even overworked fast-food workers from handing over the cash drawer.Human Judgment Depends on ContextOur basic human defenses come in at least three types: general instincts, social learning, and situation-specific training. These work together in a layered defense.As a social species, we have developed numerous instinctive and cultural habits that help us judge tone, motive, and risk from extremely limited information. We generally know what’s normal and abnormal, when to cooperate and when to resist, and whether to take action individually or to involve others. These instincts give us an intuitive sense of risk and make us especially careful about things that have a large downside or are […]

Hoang Pham has spent his career trying to ensure that some of the world’s most critical systems don’t fail, including commercial aircraft engines, nuclear facilities, and massive data centers that underpin AI and cloud computing.A professor of industrial and systems engineering at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., and a longtime volunteer for IEEE, Pham, an IEEE Life Fellow, is internationally recognized for advancing the mathematical foundations of reliability engineering. His work earned him the IEEE Reliability Society’s Engineer of the Year Award in 2009. He was recognized for helping to shape how engineers model risk in complex, data-rich systems.Hoang PhamEmployerRutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.Job titleProfessor of industrial and systems engineeringMember gradeLife FellowAlma maters Northeastern Illinois University, in Chicago; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and SUNY Buffalo.The discipline that defines his career was forged long before equations, peer-reviewed journals, or keynote speeches. It began on an overcrowded fishing boat in 1979 when he was fleeing Vietnam after the war, when survival as one of the country’s “boat people” depended on endurance, luck, and the fragile reliability of a vessel never meant to carry so many lives. Like thousands of others, he fled from his war-torn country after the fall of Saigon, which was controlled by communist North Vietnamese forces.To mark the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon in 1975, Pham and his son Hoang Jr.—a Rutgers computer science graduate turned filmmaker—produced Unstoppable Hope, a documentary about Vietnam’s boat people. The film tells the stories of a dozen refugees who, like Pham, survived perilous escapes and went on to build successful lives in the United States.Growing up during the Vietnam WarPham was born in Bình Thuận, Vietnam. His parents had only a little formal education, having grown up in the 1930s, when schooling was rare. To support their eight children, his parents ran a factory making bricks by hand. Despite their limited means, his parents held an unshakable belief that education was the surest path to a better life.From an […]