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In collaboration with the Kingdom of Bhutan government, IEEE recently introduced its Engineering Education, Research, and Innovation Summit.Held on 9 and 10 June in Paro, in the eastern Himalayas, the event was designed to help Bhutan navigate its digital transformation by focusing on the critical intersection of digital transformation, engineering education, and sustainable development.The summit brought together global academic leaders, technology experts, and Bhutanese government officials to discuss how modern engineering curricula can evolve from theory-centric models into application- and skills-based frameworks. Discussions focused on how to build high-value research capabilities in the country, integrate artificial intelligence into higher education, and address foundational infrastructure challenges to ensure equitable, nationwide digital readiness.“IEEE is proud to collaborate as a catalyst for progress in higher education as AI shifts the technology landscape and Bhutan prepares for its next era of innovation and resilience,” Mary Ellen Randall, 2026 IEEE president and CEO, said at the event. “Our goal is to support local universities and students as they develop trusted, future-ready technology that honors the nation’s commitment to sustainability and human well-being.”The event featured an address by Bhutanese Princess Chimi Yangzom Wangchuck, who emphasized the importance of aligning technological innovation with the nation’s philosophy of gross national happiness (GNH), which prioritizes well-being, sustainability, and ethics.“The question before us is not whether technology will shape the future; it certainly will,” the princess said. “The more pressing question is whether we can shape technology according to our values.” A blueprint for Bhutan’s futureThe summit helped establish a collaborative blueprint for a high-value knowledge economy in Bhutan through several key focus areas: Workforce readiness: designing industry-driven curriculum modernization and cocreating skills programs to equip graduates with practical, technical competencies.AI and research infrastructure: strengthening open science, trusted regional […]

In a tranquil Boston suburb, on the far edge of a horse farm, where pasture gives way to woods, a crane lowers an enormous electrode into a borehole. The electrode, a half-meter-long cylinder with copper-tipped arms to ensure good contact with the borehole walls, descends—deeper, deeper—through layers of spongy sandstone to the hard, marbled roots of an ancient mountain range hundreds of meters below ground. Here the rock is tight; there are few cracks for water or gases to flow. But that’s about to change.A stone’s throw away, a second electrode—a twin of the first—has been fixed in another borehole at the same depth. From above ground, a pair of high-voltage generators cabled to the two electrodes fires a series of pulses.Tsss!…Tsss!…Tsss!…Tsss!…Tsss!….Each discharge, heard faintly at the surface, is like a miniature, subterranean lightning strike. The rock between the electrodes heats. Pressure builds. Then, suddenly, the rock splits into a spiderweb of fractures. On a horse farm outside of Boston, a worker sets up the well where Eden’s electrode will be lowered with a winch.Bob O’ConnorEden GeoPower, the Massachusetts-based startup performing this peculiar field test, calls the technology electrical reservoir stimulation. The company’s tagline: “We break rocks with electricity.”Eden’s researchers hope their rock-breaking technique will someday aid mineral mining, tap geothermal heat, or create geologic storage areas for carbon. But there’s an even more intriguing use that could create a whole new category of energy production: generating hydrogen underground.The dream of a hydrogen-powered economy dates back to the 1970s, when petroleum shortages and rising concerns about pollution from fossil fuels sparked visions of cars, ships, planes, and industrial machines running on hydrogen instead of carbon. Hydrogen is often touted as a clean fuel because when it’s burned or consumed in fuel cells, it emits only water and heat. However, it currently takes more energy to make than it yields, and the cheapest and most common way is by reacting steam with methane, a potent greenhouse gas.How to Break Rocks With ElectricityIt’s […]

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 […]