A new study links hallucinogen-related emergency department visits to a 21-fold increased risk of schizophrenia compared to the general population. Even after accounting for other mental health disorders and substance use, individuals faced a 3.5-fold higher risk.AMD has confirmed that it’s laying off 4% of its workforce to focus on “large growth opportunities.” It’s unclear how many workers have been impacted by the reduction — and which divisions. AMD had roughly 26,000 employees as of last year, according to the company’s annual 10-K filing. Four percent would translate to approximately 1,000. […]
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Dapr, the Microsoft-incubated open source runtime for helping developers build secure and resilient distributed applications, has graduated from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s (CNCF) pool of incubating projects to become a top-level project at the same level of projects like Kubernetes, Prometheus, Istio, and Vitess. To graduate to this level, a project has to be […]
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On Tuesday, Elwood Edwards, the voice behind the online service America Online's iconic "You've got mail" greeting, died at age 74, one day before his 75th birthday, according to Cleveland's WKYC Studios, where he worked for many years. The greeting became a cultural touchstone in the 1990s and early 2000s in the early Internet era; it was heard by hundreds of millions of users when they logged in to the service and new email was waiting for them.
The story of Edwards' famous recording began in 1989 when Steve Case, CEO of Quantum Computer Services (which later became America Online—or AOL for short), wanted to add a human voice to the company's Quantum Link online service. Karen Edwards, who worked as a customer service representative, heard Case discussing the plan and suggested her husband Elwood, a professional broadcaster.
Edwards recorded the famous phrase (and several others) into a cassette recorder in his living room in 1989 and was paid $200 for the service. His voice recordings of "Welcome," "You've got mail," "File's done," and "Goodbye" went on to reach millions of users during AOL's rise to dominance in the 1990s online landscape.
Yelp, which made a name for itself giving restaurant recs, just bought an auto services website. In the company’s earnings report on Thursday, Yelp revealed that it agreed to buy RepairPal, a site for car repair estimates, for $80 million in cash. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of the year, subject […]
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If you've been wanting an electric car but everything seems too expensive, there's some good news on the horizon. A whole lot of EV leases are due to expire in 2026, which should lead to something of a glut, according to data analyzed by JD Power.
We have the revised IRS clean vehicle tax credit to thank. This was revamped under the Inflation Reduction Act, and while tough new battery sourcing rules and a requirement for final assembly in North America have meant many fewer EVs are eligible for the tax credit when bought new, a loophole that considers a leased vehicle to be a commercial sale means any leased EV is eligible for the $7,500 incentive, which can now be subtracted from the price of the EV at the time of sale or leasing.
Since there's also no price cap on the EV or income cap on the buyer, leasing is often a better idea than purchasing outright when it comes to new EVs, particularly for people who are worried about long-term battery degradation. (In fact, this is an overblown fear that is not backed up by data from older EVs, other than the early Nissan Leaf, which does not have active battery cooling.)
© Getty Images
A product leader for a major edtech shares her unique perspective—and a significant opportunity for schools today.
GUEST COLUMN | by Shivani Stumpf
Supporting students in navigating the complex landscape of career options and the various pathways to turn their dreams to reality remains a significant opportunity for schools today. According to a recent survey from the ECMC Group, only 13% of students feel fully prepared to choose their path after high school.
‘…only 13% of students feel fully prepared to choose their path after high school. …How can we help students understand the spectrum of relevant postsecondary choices and empower every learner to choose their best path?‘
This is particularly crucial now, as school counselors are managing an average caseload of over 400 students. Burdened by administrative duties and critical responsibilities like behavioral and mental health interventions, today’s counselors have less time to provide one-on-one college and career guidance.
How can we help students understand the spectrum of relevant postsecondary choices and empower every learner to choose their best path? Moreover, how can we equip school counselors with the resources to enhance their efforts?
A new wave of generative AI assistants is emerging to tackle these challenges. Natural language AI tools, built responsibly, can significantly empower students to make informed decisions about their futures in a way that is personalized to their individual circumstances and actionable—while allowing counselors to concentrate on providing high-impact support.
Studies have shown that exposing young people to a broader range of career options can help students overcome self-limiting beliefs and solidify the connection between academic achievement and future endeavors. By introducing career literacy early in a student’s education, we can maintain and even boost student engagement.
Today’s AI tools, when developed using Responsible AI guidelines, can significantly enhance this process. For elementary school students, engaging in play-based interactions allows them to explore careers while accessing age-appropriate assessments that help identify their interests. Additionally, when teachers incorporate career information into classroom activities, it not only increases students’ awareness of how their learning connects to future careers but also boosts the effectiveness of this exposure, ultimately enhancing academic achievement. Understanding the relevance of what they learn is key to helping students see how it will benefit them in their careers.
As students advance through middle and high school, ongoing exploration of career pathways and participation in work-based learning opportunities, such as internships and career fairs, can help keep them on track. With an on-demand, personalized AI assistant, whenever they encounter a new career of interest, they can interact with the tool to gain a better understanding of the role, including its responsibilities, salary, demand, and advice on how to pursue that career path.
These tools not only assist students in discovering potential careers and colleges, but also empower them to apply for financial aid and identify scholarships that align with their achievements and aspirations.
For instance, PowerBuddy for College and Career, the responsibly-built generative AI assistant integrated within college, career, and life readiness solution, Naviance — one of the most widely used CCLR solutions in the country— provides students with personalized guidance based on a multitude of factors. These factors include GPA, assessments, career interests, location preferences, aptitudes, personal goals, military interests, and scholarship qualifications. With PowerBuddy, students can craft a personalized postsecondary plan that highlights their ideal careers, the necessary skills, certifications, trainings, and education, and specific pathways to achieve their goals. This comprehensive support not only enhances decision-making but also paves the way for their future success.
AI is redefining how districts interact with their communities and stakeholders. Today’s AI tools can easily integrate into a district or school website, including parent portals, communication platforms, student information systems, e-learning platforms, analytics tools, and community engagement sites. AI assistants can help students and caregivers find information about policies, athletic schedules, after-school programs, student handbooks, school calendars, lunch menus, job postings and more.
These tools represent a significant leap in empowering people with efficient, secure, and personalized access to critical information. Through natural language interactions, they can eliminate what has traditionally been a cumbersome barrier for students and families — time-consuming searches sifting through information online, or phone calls that tie up school staff.
AI also offers accommodations such as speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and speech-to-speech functionality — and the ability to operate in dozens of languages — which can help schools provide equitable access for all users.
One of our recent survey findings revealed that families, particularly mothers, play a significant role in their children’s post-secondary decisions. AI tools can increase access to the information available to parents, aiding them as they guide their children through various options. Furthermore, the capability of AI to provide this information in the languages spoken at home is crucial for increasing access and support.
Achieving any goal is rarely a straightforward journey. When students are informed about a variety of career opportunities, they can pivot and explore different paths to discover the best fit for themselves. With an AI assistant that comprehends their specific educational and career journeys, students will receive enhanced, personalized support in evaluating their options and making informed decisions about their futures.
The power of AI is already making its way into schools as leaders realize its potential. According to our own 2024 Education Focus Report, 70% of district leaders now believe AI can enhance teaching and learning — up from 53% in 2023 — and 60% of school leaders and educators believe AI can enhance teacher practice and development.
These tools, when developed and used responsibly, hold remarkable potential to help young learners reach their goals—and often inspire them to aim even higher. In this sense, AI is not merely an accessory for a progressive school district; it is a fundamental element in improving educational outcomes and fostering meaningful engagement for everyone.
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Shivani Stumpf is Chief Product and Innovation Officer at PowerSchool. Connect with Shivani on LinkedIn.
The post AI Can Assist Students in Creating a Plan for their Future After High School. Here’s How. appeared first on EdTech Digest.
On Monday, Microsoft came out guns blazing, posting a blog accusing Google of "dishonestly" funding groups conducting allegedly biased studies to discredit Microsoft and mislead antitrust enforcers and the public.
In the blog, Microsoft lawyer Rima Alaily alleged that an astroturf group called the Open Cloud Coalition will launch this week and will appear to be led by "a handful of European cloud providers." In actuality, however, those smaller companies were secretly recruited by Google, which allegedly pays them "to serve as the public face" and "obfuscate" Google's involvement, Microsoft's blog said. In return, Google likely offered the cloud providers cash or discounts to join, Alaily alleged.
The Open Cloud Coalition is just one part of a "pattern of shadowy campaigns" that Google has funded, both "directly and indirectly," to muddy the antitrust waters, Alaily alleged. The only other named example that Alaily gives while documenting this supposed pattern is the US-based Coalition for Fair Software Licensing (CFSL), which Alaily said has attacked Microsoft's cloud computing business in the US, the United Kingdom, and the European Union.
© lcva2 | iStock Editorial / Getty Images Plus
Considerations on a conduit for creating dynamic, engaging learning environments.
GUEST COLUMN | by Justin Louder
The ongoing debate about the role of mobile phones in educational settings is multifaceted. Critics often highlight the potential for distraction, citing the fact that an overwhelming 92% of college students admit to texting during classes. This concern is real, as smartphones can certainly pull attention away from the lesson. But focusing only on distractions misses the bigger picture. Mobile technology holds real promise for education, especially outside the classroom. In today’s fast-paced world, where students frequently balance academic pursuits with work and family responsibilities, integrating mobile phones as learning tools isn’t just helpful—it’s necessary.
‘Mobile technology holds real promise for education, especially outside the classroom.’
Properly harnessed, mobile phones are more than just a potential distraction—they are a conduit for creating dynamic, engaging learning environments. In an era where digital literacy is just as important as traditional literacy, having mobile technology in the classroom is invaluable.
Educators continually seek strategies to capture and maintain student attention in lectures that can last upwards of two hours. Mobile phones, used strategically, offer a solution to this challenge. They facilitate the incorporation of instant quizzes, interactive activities, and other engagement tools that break the monotony of traditional lectures. This not only enlivens the learning experience but also fosters better retention and comprehension of course material, transforming students from passive listeners to active participants.
Furthermore, instant access to course materials via mobile phones supports any time any place learning, allowing students to draw connections within their curriculum and focus on core aspects of their studies with clarity and depth. This accessibility is a step towards accommodating diverse learning preferences and leveraging technology to fortify educational outcomes. Consequently, educational institutions should prioritize optimizing course materials for mobile platforms to support varied learning needs and amplify the effectiveness of education through technology.
Beyond their utility as in-class tools, mobile phones are indispensable for supporting students’ learning needs outside the walls of a traditional educational environment. For students juggling jobs, caregiving, family responsibilities, and coursework, having access to educational content on their phones turns downtime into productive learning time.
The importance of mobile accessibility is underscored by a 2023 Anthology survey, which collected insights from over 2,700 students around the world on educational access challenges. The survey revealed that 55% of respondents relied on mobile devices for their studies, highlighting the significance of smartphones as educational tools. Surprisingly, it also found that 29% of students did not own a laptop, and 57% were without a desktop computer, pointing to mobile devices as a critical bridge to learning resources for many.
Students lacking access to traditional computing devices face heightened risks of educational discontinuation. Challenges in accessing course materials or completing assignments can have severe implications for mental well-being and increase dropout risks. What might seem like minor inconveniences are, for many students, daily hurdles magnified by broader challenges, emphasizing the need for educational institutions to ensure their systems and materials are universally accessible.
In response to these realities, it’s incumbent upon educational institutions to meet students where they are—on their mobile devices. Rather than viewing smartphones merely as potential distractions, it’s crucial to recognize them as indispensable educational tools. By doing so, institutions can ensure they provide a more inclusive, engaging, and effective learning environment for all students.
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Justin Louder is an experienced higher education and K-12 administrator and innovator focusing on online learning, student success, and pedagogy. He serves as Associate VP for Academic Innovation at Anthology. Justin earned a Doctorate in Education from Texas Tech University. Connect with Justin on LinkedIn.
The post Mobile Phones: A Distraction or a Key Resource? appeared first on EdTech Digest.
A new study that examined filings with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by the 50 top-patenting companies cited IEEE nearly three times more than any other technical-literature publisher including ACM, Elsevier, and Springer.
The organizations with the highest number of patents granted—including Amazon, Apple, IBM, Microsoft, Qualcomm, Samsung, and TSMC—referenced IEEE journals, standards, and conference proceedings in their patents more than 682,000 times during the past 20 years, according to the “Analysis of Patent Referencing to IEEE Papers, Conferences, and Standards 2004–2023” report. Prepared by intellectual property evaluation company 1790 Analytics, the report was released in June.
When broken down by technical discipline, IEEE is the most-referenced publisher in the following categories: artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, computer hardware, software, cybersecurity, the IoT, power systems, semiconductors, renewable energy, and telecommunications.
“Not only do IEEE publications frequently provide the science base for new inventions, inventions that build upon IEEE publications are more likely to be valuable in the future than inventions that do not build upon IEEE.”
Patenting AI and machine learning technologies has increased tenfold in the past 10 years, but IEEE has been able to keep pace, according to the study. More than 30 percent of AI-related patents reference IEEE publications.
The report notes that in emerging markets such as blockchain, cybersecurity, and virtual and augmented reality, IEEE receives the most references.
In the robotics and intelligent manufacturing category, more than 35 percent of patent references are to IEEE literature.
This chart shows that IEEE is cited nearly three times more than any other technical-literature publisher.1790 Analytics LLC
At 30 percent, the organization also leads in citations for patents on broadcasting technologies. IEEE registered more than twice the broadcasting citations of the nearest competitor.
For autonomous vehicles, IEEE is cited 10 times more than the next publisher.
Other areas where IEEE leads in citations include measuring, testing, and control as well as transmission.
The study also found that patents referencing IEEE papers are cited more often.
“This was shown to be true for each of the 20 technology categories we examined,” the report concludes. “This suggests that not only do IEEE publications frequently provide the science base for new inventions but that inventions that build upon IEEE publications are more likely to be valuable in the future than inventions that do not build upon IEEE.”
To download the full report or for more information, visit this website.
Happy IEEE Day!
IEEE Day commemorates the first gathering of IEEE members to share their technical ideas in 1884.
First celebrated in 2009, IEEE Day marks its 15th anniversary this year.
Worldwide celebrations demonstrate the ways thousands of IEEE members in local communities join together to collaborate on ideas that leverage technology for a better tomorrow.
Celebrate IEEE Day with colleagues from IEEE Sections, Student Branches, Affinity groups, and Society Chapters. Events happen both virtually and in person all around the world.
Every year, IEEE members from IEEE Sections, Student Branches, Affinity groups, and Society Chapters join hands to celebrate IEEE Day. Events happen both virtually and in person. IEEE Day celebrates the first time in history when engineers worldwide gathered to share their technical ideas in 1884.
Check out our special offers and activities for IEEE members and future members. And share these with your friends and colleagues.
Have some fun and compete in the photo and video contests. Get your phone and camera ready when you attend one of the events. This year we will have both Photo and Video Contests. You can submit your entries in STEM, technical, humanitarian and social categories.
Imagine if your boss called a meeting in May to announce that he’s committing 10 percent of the company’s revenue to the development of a brand-new mass-market consumer product, made with a not-yet-ready-for-mass-production component. Oh, and he wants it on store shelves in less than six months, in time for the holiday shopping season. Ambitious, yes. Kind of nuts, also yes.
But that’s pretty much what Pat Haggerty, vice president of Texas Instruments, did in 1954. The result was the Regency TR-1, the world’s first commercial transistor radio, which debuted 70 years ago this month. The engineers delivered on Haggerty’s audacious goal, and I certainly hope they received a substantial year-end bonus.
But how did Texas Instruments come to make a transistor radio in the first place? TI traces its roots to a company called Geophysical Service Inc. (GSI), which made seismic instrumentation for the oil industry as well as electronics for the military. In 1945, GSI hired Patrick E. Haggerty as the general manager of its laboratory and manufacturing division and its electronics work. By 1951, Haggerty’s division was significantly outpacing GSI’s geophysical division, and so the Dallas-based company reorganized as Texas Instruments to focus on electronics.
Meanwhile, on 30 June 1948, Bell Labs announced John Bardeen and Walter Brattain’s game-changing invention of the transistor. No longer would electronics be dependent on large, hot vacuum tubes. The U.S. government chose not to classify the technology because of its potentially broad applications. In 1951, Bell Labs began licensing the transistor for US $25,000 through the Western Electric Co.; Haggerty bought a license for TI the following year.
The engineers delivered on Haggerty’s audacious goal, and I certainly hope they received a substantial year-end bonus.
TI was still a small company, with not much in the way of R&D capacity. But Haggerty and the other founders wanted it to become a big and profitable company. And so they established research labs to focus on semiconductor materials and a project-engineering group to develop marketable products.
The TR-1 was the first transistor radio, and it ignited a desire for portable gadgets that continues to this day.
Bettmann/Getty Images
Haggerty made a good investment when he hired Gordon Teal, a 22-year veteran of Bell Labs. Although Teal wasn’t part of the team that invented the germanium transistor, he recognized that it could be improved by using a single grown crystal, such as silicon. Haggerty was familiar with Teal’s work from a 1951 Bell Labs symposium on transistor technology. Teal happened to be homesick for his native Texas, so when TI advertised for a research director in the New York Times, he applied, and Haggerty offered him the job of assistant vice president instead. Teal started at TI on 1 January 1953.
Fifteen months later, Teal gave Haggerty a demonstration of the first silicon transistor, and he presented his findings three and a half weeks later at the Institute of Radio Engineers’ National Conference on Airborne Electronics, in Dayton, Ohio. His innocuously titled paper, “Some Recent Developments in Silicon and Germanium Materials and Devices,” completely understated the magnitude of the announcement. The audience was astounded to hear that TI had not just one but three types of silicon transistors already in production, as Michael Riordan recounts in his excellent article “The Lost History of the Transistor” (IEEE Spectrum, October 2004).
And fun fact: The TR-1 shown at top once belonged to Willis Adcock, a physical chemist hired by Teal to perfect TI’s silicon transistors as well as transistors for the TR-1. (The radio is now in the collections of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.)
This advancement in silicon put TI on the map as a major player in the transistor industry, but Haggerty was impatient. He wanted a transistorized commercial product now, even if that meant using germanium transistors. On 21 May 1954, Haggerty challenged a research group at TI to have a working prototype of a transistor radio by the following week; four days later, the team came through, with a breadboard containing eight transistors. Haggerty decided that was good enough to commit $2 million—just under 10 percent of TI’s revenue—to commercializing the radio.
Of course, a working prototype is not the same as a mass-production product, and Haggerty knew TI needed a partner to help manufacture the radio. That partner turned out to be Industrial Development Engineering Associates (IDEA), a small company out of Indianapolis that specialized in antenna boosters and other electronic goods. They signed an agreement in June 1954 with the goal of announcing the new radio in October. TI would provide the components, and IDEA would manufacture the radio under its Regency brand.
Germanium transistors at the time cost $10 to $15 apiece. With eight transistors, the radio was too expensive to be marketed at the desired price point of $50 (more than $580 today, which is coincidentally about what it’ll cost you to buy one in good condition on eBay). Vacuum-tube radios were selling for less, but TI and IDEA figured early adopters would pay that much to try out a new technology. Part of Haggerty’s strategy was to increase the volume of transistor production to eventually lower the per-transistor cost, which he managed to push down to about $2.50.
By the time TI met with IDEA, the breadboard was down to six transistors. It was IDEA’s challenge to figure out how to make the transistorized radio at a profit. According to an oral history with Richard Koch, IDEA’s chief engineer on the project, TI’s real goal was to make transistors, and the radio was simply the gimmick to get there. In fact, part of the TI–IDEA agreement was that any patents that came out of the project would be in the public domain so that TI was free to sell more transistors to other buyers.
At the initial meeting, Koch, who had never seen a transistor before in real life, suggested substituting a germanium diode for the detector (which extracted the audio signal from the desired radio frequency), bringing the transistor count down to five. After thinking about the configuration a bit more, Koch eliminated another transistor by using a single transistor for the oscillator/mixer circuit.
TI’s original prototype used eight germanium transistors, which engineers reduced to six and, ultimately, four for the production model.Division of Work and Industry/National Museum of American History/Smithsonian Institution
The final design was four transistors set in a superheterodyne design, a type of receiver that combines two frequencies to produce an intermediate frequency that can be easily amplified, thereby boosting a weak signal and decreasing the required antenna size. The TR-1 had two transistors as intermediate-frequency amplifiers and one as an audio amplifier, plus the oscillator/mixer. Koch applied for a patent for the circuitry the following year.
The radio ran on a 22.5-volt battery, which offered a playing life of 20 to 30 hours and cost about $1.25. (Such batteries were also used in the external power and electronics pack for hearing aids, the only other consumer product to use transistors up until this point.)
While IDEA’s team was working on the circuitry, they outsourced the design of the TR-1’s packaging to the Chicago firm of Painter, Teague, and Petertil. Their first design didn’t work because the components didn’t fit. Would their second design be better? As Koch later recalled, IDEA’s purchasing agent, Floyd Hayhurst, picked up the molding dies for the radio cases in Chicago and rushed them back to Indianapolis. He arrived at 2:00 in the morning, and the team got to work. Fortunately, everything fit this time. The plastic case was a little warped, but that was simple to fix: They slapped a wooden piece on each case as it came off the line so it wouldn’t twist as it cooled.
This video shows how each radio was assembled by hand:
On 18 October 1954, Texas Instruments announced the first commercial transistorized radio. It would be available in select outlets in New York and Los Angeles beginning 1 November, with wider distribution once production ramped up. The Regency TR-1 Transistor Pocket Radio initially came in black, gray, red, and ivory. They later added green and mahogany, as well as a run of pearlescents and translucents: lavender, pearl white, meridian blue, powder pink, and lime.
Consumer Reports was not enthusiastic about the Regency TR-1. In its April 1955 review, it found that transmission of speech was “adequate” under good conditions, but music transmission was unsatisfactory under any conditions, especially on a noisy street or crowded beach. The magazine used adjectives such as whistle, squeal, thin, tinny, and high-pitched to describe various sounds—not exactly high praise for a radio. It also found fault with the on/off switch. Their recommendation: Wait for further refinement before buying one.
More than 100,000 TR-1s were sold in its first year, but the radio was never very profitable.Archive PL/Alamy
The engineers at TI and IDEA didn’t necessarily disagree. They knew they were making a sound-quality trade-off by going with just four transistors. They also had quality-control problems with the transistors and other components, with initial failure rates up to 50 percent. Eventually, IDEA got the failure rate down to 12 to 15 percent.
Unbeknownst to TI or IDEA, Raytheon was also working on a transistorized radio—a tabletop model rather than a pocket-size one. That gave them the space to use six transistors, which significantly upped the sound quality. Raytheon’s radio came out in February 1955. Priced at $79.95, it weighed 2 kilograms and ran on four D-cell batteries. That August, a small Japanese company called Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering Corp. released its first transistor radio, the TR-55. A few years later, the company changed its name to Sony and went on to dominate the world’s consumer radio market.
The Regency TR-1 was a success by many measures: It sold 100,000 in its first year, and it helped jump-start the transistor market. But the radio was never very profitable. Within a few years, both Texas Instruments and IDEA left the commercial AM radio business, TI to focus on semiconductors, and IDEA to concentrate on citizens band radios. Yet Pat Haggerty estimated that this little pocket radio pushed the market in transistorized consumer goods ahead by two years. It was a leap of faith that worked out, thanks to some hardworking engineers with a vision.
Part of a continuing series looking at historical artifacts that embrace the boundless potential of technology.
An abridged version of this article appears in the October 2024 print issue as “The First Transistor Radio.”
In 1984, Michael Wolff conducted oral histories with IDEA’s lead engineer Richard Koch and purchasing agent Floyd Hayhurst. Wolff subsequently used them the following year in his IEEE Spectrum article “The Secret Six-Month Project,” which includes some great references at the end.
Robert J. Simcoe wrote “The Revolution in Your Pocket” for the fall 2004 issue of Invention and Technology to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Regency TR-1.
As with many collectibles, the Regency TR-1 has its champions who have gathered together many primary sources. For example, Steve Reyer, a professor of electrical engineering at the Milwaukee School of Engineering before he passed away in 2018, organized his efforts in a webpage that’s now hosted by https://www.collectornet.net.
Big-name makers of processors, especially those geared toward cloud-based AI, such as AMD and Nvidia, have been showing signs of wanting to own more of the business of computing, purchasing makers of software, interconnects, and servers. The hope is that control of the “full stack” will give them an edge in designing what their customers want.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) got there ahead of most of the competition, when they purchased chip designer Annapurna Labs in 2015 and proceeded to design CPUs, AI accelerators, servers, and data centers as a vertically-integrated operation. Ali Saidi, the technical lead for the Graviton series of CPUs, and Rami Sinno, director of engineering at Annapurna Labs, explained the advantage of vertically-integrated design and Amazon-scale and showed IEEE Spectrum around the company’s hardware testing labs in Austin, Tex., on 27 August.
Saidi and Sinno on:
What brought you to Amazon Web Services, Rami?
Rami SinnoAWS
Rami Sinno: Amazon is my first vertically integrated company. And that was on purpose. I was working at Arm, and I was looking for the next adventure, looking at where the industry is heading and what I want my legacy to be. I looked at two things:
One is vertically integrated companies, because this is where most of the innovation is—the interesting stuff is happening when you control the full hardware and software stack and deliver directly to customers.
And the second thing is, I realized that machine learning, AI in general, is going to be very, very big. I didn’t know exactly which direction it was going to take, but I knew that there is something that is going to be generational, and I wanted to be part of that. I already had that experience prior when I was part of the group that was building the chips that go into the Blackberries; that was a fundamental shift in the industry. That feeling was incredible, to be part of something so big, so fundamental. And I thought, “Okay, I have another chance to be part of something fundamental.”
Does working at a vertically-integrated company require a different kind of chip design engineer?
Sinno: Absolutely. When I hire people, the interview process is going after people that have that mindset. Let me give you a specific example: Say I need a signal integrity engineer. (Signal integrity makes sure a signal going from point A to point B, wherever it is in the system, makes it there correctly.) Typically, you hire signal integrity engineers that have a lot of experience in analysis for signal integrity, that understand layout impacts, can do measurements in the lab. Well, this is not sufficient for our group, because we want our signal integrity engineers also to be coders. We want them to be able to take a workload or a test that will run at the system level and be able to modify it or build a new one from scratch in order to look at the signal integrity impact at the system level under workload. This is where being trained to be flexible, to think outside of the little box has paid off huge dividends in the way that we do development and the way we serve our customers.
“By the time that we get the silicon back, the software’s done” —Ali Saidi, Annapurna Labs
At the end of the day, our responsibility is to deliver complete servers in the data center directly for our customers. And if you think from that perspective, you’ll be able to optimize and innovate across the full stack. A design engineer or a test engineer should be able to look at the full picture because that’s his or her job, deliver the complete server to the data center and look where best to do optimization. It might not be at the transistor level or at the substrate level or at the board level. It could be something completely different. It could be purely software. And having that knowledge, having that visibility, will allow the engineers to be significantly more productive and delivery to the customer significantly faster. We’re not going to bang our head against the wall to optimize the transistor where three lines of code downstream will solve these problems, right?
Do you feel like people are trained in that way these days?
Sinno: We’ve had very good luck with recent college grads. Recent college grads, especially the past couple of years, have been absolutely phenomenal. I’m very, very pleased with the way that the education system is graduating the engineers and the computer scientists that are interested in the type of jobs that we have for them.
The other place that we have been super successful in finding the right people is at startups. They know what it takes, because at a startup, by definition, you have to do so many different things. People who’ve done startups before completely understand the culture and the mindset that we have at Amazon.
What brought you to AWS, Ali?
Ali SaidiAWS
Ali Saidi: I’ve been here about seven and a half years. When I joined AWS, I joined a secret project at the time. I was told: “We’re going to build some Arm servers. Tell no one.”
We started with Graviton 1. Graviton 1 was really the vehicle for us to prove that we could offer the same experience in AWS with a different architecture.
The cloud gave us an ability for a customer to try it in a very low-cost, low barrier of entry way and say, “Does it work for my workload?” So Graviton 1 was really just the vehicle demonstrate that we could do this, and to start signaling to the world that we want software around ARM servers to grow and that they’re going to be more relevant.
Graviton 2—announced in 2019—was kind of our first… what we think is a market-leading device that’s targeting general-purpose workloads, web servers, and those types of things.
It’s done very well. We have people running databases, web servers, key-value stores, lots of applications... When customers adopt Graviton, they bring one workload, and they see the benefits of bringing that one workload. And then the next question they ask is, “Well, I want to bring some more workloads. What should I bring?” There were some where it wasn’t powerful enough effectively, particularly around things like media encoding, taking videos and encoding them or re-encoding them or encoding them to multiple streams. It’s a very math-heavy operation and required more [single-instruction multiple data] bandwidth. We need cores that could do more math.
We also wanted to enable the [high-performance computing] market. So we have an instance type called HPC 7G where we’ve got customers like Formula One. They do computational fluid dynamics of how this car is going to disturb the air and how that affects following cars. It’s really just expanding the portfolio of applications. We did the same thing when we went to Graviton 4, which has 96 cores versus Graviton 3’s 64.
How do you know what to improve from one generation to the next?
Saidi: Far and wide, most customers find great success when they adopt Graviton. Occasionally, they see performance that isn’t the same level as their other migrations. They might say “I moved these three apps, and I got 20 percent higher performance; that’s great. But I moved this app over here, and I didn’t get any performance improvement. Why?” It’s really great to see the 20 percent. But for me, in the kind of weird way I am, the 0 percent is actually more interesting, because it gives us something to go and explore with them.
Most of our customers are very open to those kinds of engagements. So we can understand what their application is and build some kind of proxy for it. Or if it’s an internal workload, then we could just use the original software. And then we can use that to kind of close the loop and work on what the next generation of Graviton will have and how we’re going to enable better performance there.
What’s different about designing chips at AWS?
Saidi: In chip design, there are many different competing optimization points. You have all of these conflicting requirements, you have cost, you have scheduling, you’ve got power consumption, you’ve got size, what DRAM technologies are available and when you’re going to intersect them… It ends up being this fun, multifaceted optimization problem to figure out what’s the best thing that you can build in a timeframe. And you need to get it right.
One thing that we’ve done very well is taken our initial silicon to production.
How?
Saidi: This might sound weird, but I’ve seen other places where the software and the hardware people effectively don’t talk. The hardware and software people in Annapurna and AWS work together from day one. The software people are writing the software that will ultimately be the production software and firmware while the hardware is being developed in cooperation with the hardware engineers. By working together, we’re closing that iteration loop. When you are carrying the piece of hardware over to the software engineer’s desk your iteration loop is years and years. Here, we are iterating constantly. We’re running virtual machines in our emulators before we have the silicon ready. We are taking an emulation of [a complete system] and running most of the software we’re going to run.
So by the time that we get to the silicon back [from the foundry], the software’s done. And we’ve seen most of the software work at this point. So we have very high confidence that it’s going to work.
The other piece of it, I think, is just being absolutely laser-focused on what we are going to deliver. You get a lot of ideas, but your design resources are approximately fixed. No matter how many ideas I put in the bucket, I’m not going to be able to hire that many more people, and my budget’s probably fixed. So every idea I throw in the bucket is going to use some resources. And if that feature isn’t really important to the success of the project, I’m risking the rest of the project. And I think that’s a mistake that people frequently make.
Are those decisions easier in a vertically integrated situation?
Saidi: Certainly. We know we’re going to build a motherboard and a server and put it in a rack, and we know what that looks like… So we know the features we need. We’re not trying to build a superset product that could allow us to go into multiple markets. We’re laser-focused into one.
What else is unique about the AWS chip design environment?
Saidi: One thing that’s very interesting for AWS is that we’re the cloud and we’re also developing these chips in the cloud. We were the first company to really push on running [electronic design automation (EDA)] in the cloud. We changed the model from “I’ve got 80 servers and this is what I use for EDA” to “Today, I have 80 servers. If I want, tomorrow I can have 300. The next day, I can have 1,000.”
We can compress some of the time by varying the resources that we use. At the beginning of the project, we don’t need as many resources. We can turn a lot of stuff off and not pay for it effectively. As we get to the end of the project, now we need many more resources. And instead of saying, “Well, I can’t iterate this fast, because I’ve got this one machine, and it’s busy.” I can change that and instead say, “Well, I don’t want one machine; I’ll have 10 machines today.”
Instead of my iteration cycle being two days for a big design like this, instead of being even one day, with these 10 machines I can bring it down to three or four hours. That’s huge.
How important is Amazon.com as a customer?
Saidi: They have a wealth of workloads, and we obviously are the same company, so we have access to some of those workloads in ways that with third parties, we don’t. But we also have very close relationships with other external customers.
So last Prime Day, we said that 2,600 Amazon.com services were running on Graviton processors. This Prime Day, that number more than doubled to 5,800 services running on Graviton. And the retail side of Amazon used over 250,000 Graviton CPUs in support of the retail website and the services around that for Prime Day.
The AI accelerator team is colocated with the labs that test everything from chips through racks of servers. Why?
Sinno: So Annapurna Labs has multiple labs in multiple locations as well. This location here is in Austin… is one of the smaller labs. But what’s so interesting about the lab here in Austin is that you have all of the hardware and many software development engineers for machine learning servers and for Trainium and Inferentia [AWS’s AI chips] effectively co-located on this floor. For hardware developers, engineers, having the labs co-located on the same floor has been very, very effective. It speeds execution and iteration for delivery to the customers. This lab is set up to be self-sufficient with anything that we need to do, at the chip level, at the server level, at the board level. Because again, as I convey to our teams, our job is not the chip; our job is not the board; our job is the full server to the customer.
How does vertical integration help you design and test chips for data-center-scale deployment?
Sinno: It’s relatively easy to create a bar-raising server. Something that’s very high-performance, very low-power. If we create 10 of them, 100 of them, maybe 1,000 of them, it’s easy. You can cherry pick this, you can fix this, you can fix that. But the scale that the AWS is at is significantly higher. We need to train models that require 100,000 of these chips. 100,000! And for training, it’s not run in five minutes. It’s run in hours or days or weeks even. Those 100,000 chips have to be up for the duration. Everything that we do here is to get to that point.
We start from a “what are all the things that can go wrong?” mindset. And we implement all the things that we know. But when you were talking about cloud scale, there are always things that you have not thought of that come up. These are the 0.001-percent type issues.
In this case, we do the debug first in the fleet. And in certain cases, we have to do debugs in the lab to find the root cause. And if we can fix it immediately, we fix it immediately. Being vertically integrated, in many cases we can do a software fix for it. We use our agility to rush a fix while at the same time making sure that the next generation has it already figured out from the get go.
IEEE Collabratec has made it easier for volunteers to display their IEEE positions. The online networking platform released a new benefit this year for its users: digital certificates for IEEE volunteering. They reflect contributions made to the organization, such as leading a committee or organizing an event.
Members can download the certificates and add them to their LinkedIn profile or résumé. Volunteers also can print their certificates to frame and display in their office.
Each individualized document includes the person’s name, the position they’ve held, and the years served. Every position held has its own certificate. The member’s list of roles is updated annually.
The feature is a result of a top recommendation to improve volunteer recognition made by delegates at the 2023 IEEE Sections Congress, according to Deepak Mathur. The senior member is vice president of IEEE Member and Geographic Activities. The new feature “respects the time and effort of our volunteers and is a testament to the power and versatility of the Collabratec platform,” Mathur said in an announcement.
Members can download their certificates by selecting the Certificates tab on their Collabratec page and scrolling to each of their positions.
To learn more about IEEE Collabratec, check out the user guide, FAQs, and users’ forum.
Educators working in Special Education have a new friend in this very cool tool. In axis3, Creatively Focused connects special education teams on one user-friendly platform to help simplify their workflows and enhance their access to training, education, and professional development resources. Educators know exactly what needs to be worked on, and when it needs to be completed by without having to search, wonder, or worry.
Within axis3, special educators understand exactly where they are at on crucial timelines and paperwork which leads to increased visibility and compliance. A combination of achievable tasks that are relevant to the students each educator serves, along with the paperwork needed and any associated learning are provided and customized by role.
Creatively Focused is empowering educators with the time and resources they need for a fulfilling, lifelong career. In axis3, educators can connect with the people who are going to support their role the best. Sometimes that might be a person within the district, or it might be a person from the Creatively Focused team. But ultimately, it’s a person who understands that educator’s workday changes quickly. This reduces the feeling of isolation, and an environment to learn in the flow of work on topics that are relevant.
“Creatively Focused embodies what it means to be a true partner,” says Sara Pratt, Director of Special Services at Northfield Public Schools. “The platform has been incredibly simple to both implement and use, making it easy for our staff to get up and running.” For these reasons and many more, axis3 by Creatively Focused was named “Best Workflow Management for Special Educators” as part of The EdTech Awards 2024 from EdTech Digest. Learn more.
The post axis3 by Creatively Focused appeared first on EdTech Digest.
IEEE TryEngineering has partnered with Keysight Technologies to develop lesson plans focused on electronics and power simulation. Keysight provides hardware, software, and services to a wide variety of industries, particularly in the area of electronic measurement.
IEEE TryEngineering, an IEEE Educational Activities program, empowers educators to foster the next generation of technology innovators through free, online access to culturally relevant, developmentally appropriate, and educationally sound instructional resources for teachers and community volunteers.
The lesson plans cover a variety of STEM topics, experience levels, and age ranges. Educators should be able to find an applicable topic for their students, regardless of their grade level or interests.
There are already a number of lesson plans available through the Keysight partnership that introduce students to electrical concepts, with more being developed. The most popular one thus far is Series and Parallel Circuits, which has been viewed more than 100 times each month. Teams of pupils predict the difference between a parallel and serial circuit design by building examples using wires, light bulbs, and batteries.
“TryEngineering is proud to be Keysight’s partner in attaining the ambitious goal of bringing engineering lessons to 1 million students in 2024.” —Debra Gulick
The newest of the Keysight-sponsored lesson plans, Light Up Name Badge, teaches the basics of circuitry, such as the components of a circuit, series and parallel circuits, and electronic component symbols. Students can apply their newfound knowledge in a design challenge wherein they create a light-up badge with their name.
“Keysight’s commitment to workforce development through preuniversity STEM outreach makes it an ideal partner for IEEE TryEngineering,” says Debra Gulick, director of student and academic education programs for IEEE Educational Activities.
In addition, Keysight’s corporate social responsibility vision to build a better planet by accelerating innovation to connect and secure the world while employing a global business framework of ethical, environmentally sustainable, and socially responsible operations makes it a suitable IEEE partner.
“TryEngineering is proud to be Keysight’s partner in attaining the ambitious goal of bringing engineering lessons to 1 million students in 2024,” Gulick says.
The IEEE STEM Summit, a three-day virtual event in October for IEEE volunteers and educators, is expected to include a session highlighting Keysight’s lesson plans.
Educators and volunteers engaged in outreach activities with students can learn more on the Keysight TryEngineering partnership page.
The arrangement with Keysight was made possible with support from the IEEE Foundation.
Archipel Academy was born as the Managed Learning Services business line of Schouten & Nelissen. As learning consultants, the people behind it become very familiar with the challenges in the Learning & Development community and in 2019 their founder and CEO Omar Fouab decided to make learning more personal, more impactful and more accessible.
That is how their Learning Management System with LXP capabilities (Learning tracks and skill management) and the biggest content marketplace in Europe was born. Since then, they kept adding features to keep their customers as well as employees everywhere fit for future: the “search & book” function is AI-driven, learners can access an AI-powered job coach that helps them further develop in their current role or grow towards a different position, engagement is kept high through the use of gamification and more recently they added in-real-time learning through the Archi chatbot.
All of these developments have at their core the company’s strong motivation to keep employees and organizations what they call “fit for future.”
Since becoming their customer, VodafoneZiggo has managed to achieve the following numbers:
• Employees followed an average of 2.3 trainings/ year/ per person, which is 4x more than before
• 31% decrease in voluntary resignation
• In 2022 savings of 1.5 milion euros on learning costs, excluding the 5 administrative FTEs that were repurposed to focus on high-level people strategy
• Becoming an employer of choice- with 1 in 3 people applying at VodafoneZiggo doing so because of the learning culture
• Filling 60% of vacancies from within and adressing knowledge gaps through learning
For these reasons and more, Archipel Academy was named “Best All-in-One Learning Platform” as part of The EdTech Awards 2024 from EdTech Digest. Learn more.
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When Amazon Web Services paid US $650 million in March for another data center to add to its armada, the tech giant thought it was buying a steady supply of nuclear energy to power it, too. The Susquehanna Steam Electric Station outside of Berick, Pennsylvania, which generates 2.5 gigawatts of nuclear power, sits adjacent to the humming data center and had been directly powering it since the center opened in 2023.
After striking the deal, Amazon wanted to change the terms of its original agreement to buy 180 megawatts of additional power directly from the nuclear plant. Susquehanna agreed to sell it. But third parties weren’t happy about that, and their deal has become bogged down in a regulatory battle that will likely set a precedent for data centers, cryptocurrency mining operations, and other computing facilities with voracious appetites for clean electricity.
Putting a data center right next to a power plant so that it can draw electricity from it directly, rather than from the grid, is becoming more common as data centers seek out cheap, steady, carbon-free power. Proposals for co-locating data centers next to nuclear power have popped up in New Jersey, Texas, Ohio, and elsewhere. Sweden is considering using small modular reactors to power future data centers.
However, co-location raises questions about equity and energy security, because directly-connected data centers can avoid paying fees that would otherwise help maintain grids. They also hog hundreds of megawatts that could be going elsewhere.
“They’re effectively going behind the meter and taking that capacity off of the grid that would otherwise serve all customers,” says Tony Clark, a senior advisor at the law firm Wilkinson Barker Knauer and a former commissioner at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), who has testified to a U.S. House subcommittee on the subject.
The dust-up over the Amazon-Susquehanna agreement started in June, after Amazon subsidiary Amazon Web Services filed a notice to change its interconnection service agreement (ISA) in order to buy more nuclear power from Susquehanna’s parent company, Talen Energy. Amazon wanted to increase the amount of behind-the-meter power it buys from the plant from 300 MW to 480 MW. Shortly after it requested the change, utility giants Exelon and American Electric Power (AEP), filed a protest against the agreement and asked FERC to hold a hearing on the matter.
Their complaint: the deal between Amazon and the nuclear plant would hurt a third party, namely all the customers who buy power from AEP or Exelon utilities. The protest document argues that the arrangement would shift up to $140 million in extra costs onto the people of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and other states served by PJM, a regional transmission organization that oversees the grid in those areas. “Multiplied by the many similar projects on the drawing board, it is apparent that this unsupported filing has huge financial consequences that should not be imposed on ratepayers without sufficient process to determine and evaluate what is really going on,” their complaint says.
Susquehanna dismissed the argument, effectively saying that its deal with Amazon is none of AEP and Exelon’s business. “It is an unlawful attempt to hijack this limited [ISA] amendment proceeding that they have no stake in and turn it into an ad hoc national referendum on the future of data center load,” Susquehanna’s statement said. (AEP, Exelon, Talen/Susquehanna, and Amazon all declined to comment for this story.)
More disputes like this will likely follow as more data centers co-locate with clean energy. Kevin Schneider, a power system expert at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and research professor at Washington State University, says it’s only natural that data center operators want the constant, consistent nature of nuclear power. “If you look at the base load nature of nuclear, you basically run it up to a power level and leave it there. It can be well aligned with a server farm.”
Data center operators are also exploring energy options from solar and wind, but these energy sources would have a difficult time matching the constancy of nuclear, even with grid storage to help even out their supply. So giant tech firms look to nuclear to keep their servers running without burning fossil fuels, and use that to trumpet their carbon-free achievements, as Amazon did when it bought the data center in Pennsylvania. “Whether you’re talking about Google or Apple or Microsoft or any of those companies, they tend to have corporate sustainability goals. Being served by a nuclear unit looks great on their corporate carbon balance sheet,” Clark says.
Yet such arrangements could have major consequences for other energy customers, Clark argues. For one, directing all the energy from a nuclear plant to a data center is, fundamentally, no different than retiring that plant and taking it offline. “It’s just a huge chunk of capacity leaving the system,” he says, resulting in higher prices and less energy supply for everyone else.
Another issue is the “behind-the-meter” aspect of these kinds of deals. A data center could just connect to the grid and draw from the same supply as everyone else, Clark says. But by connecting directly to the power plant, the center’s owner avoids paying the administrative fees that are used to maintain the grid and grow its infrastructure. Those costs could then get passed on to businesses and residents who have to buy power from the grid. “There’s just a whole list of charges that get assessed through the network service that if you don’t connect through the network, you don’t have to pay,” Clark says. “And those charges are the part of the bill that will go up” for everyone else.
Even the “carbon-free” public relations talking points that come with co-location may be suspect in some cases. In Washington State, where Schneider works, new data centers are being planted next to the region’s abundant hydropower stations, and they’re using so much of that energy that parts of the state are considering adding more fossil fuel capacity to make ends meet. This results in a “zero-emissions shell game,” Clark wrote in a white paper on the subject.
These early cases are likely only the beginning. A report posted in May from the Electric Power Research Institute predicts energy demand from data centers will double by 2030, a leap driven by the fact that AI queries need ten times more energy than traditional internet searches. The International Energy Agency puts the timeline for doubling sooner–in 2026. Data centers, AI, and the cryptocurrency sector consumed an estimated 460 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2022, and could reach more than 1000 TWh in 2026, the agency predicts.
New data centers can be built in a matter of months, but it takes years to build utility-scale power projects, says Poorvi Patel, manager of strategic insights at Electric Power Research Institute and contributor to the report. The potential for unsustainable growth in electricity needs has put grid operators on alert, and in some cases has sent them sounding the alarm. Eirgrid, a state-owned transmission operator in Ireland, last week warned of a “mass exodus” of data centers in Ireland if it can’t connect new sources of energy.
There’s only so much existing nuclear power to go around, and enormous logistical and regulatory roadblocks to building more. So data center operators and tech giants are looking for creative solutions. Some are considering small modular reactors (SMRs)–which are advanced nuclear reactors with much smaller operating capacities than conventional reactors. Nano Nuclear Energy, which is developing microreactors–a particularly small type of SMR–last month announced an agreement with Blockfusion to explore the possibility of powering a currently defunct cryptomining facility in Niagara Falls, New York.
“To me, it does seem like a space where, if big tech has a voracious electric power needs and they really want that 24/7, carbon-free power, nuclear does seem to be the answer,” Clark says. “They also have the balance sheets to be able to do some of the risk mitigation that might make it attractive to get an SMR up and running.”
Author and leadership expert John C. Maxwell famously said, “The single biggest way to impact an organization is to focus on leadership development. There is almost no limit to the potential of an organization that recruits good people, raises them up as leaders, and continually develops them.”
Experts confirm that there are clear benefits to fostering leadership by encouraging employees’ professional growth and nurturing and developing company leaders. A culture of leadership development and innovation boosts employee engagement by 20 percent to 25 percent, according to an analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology. Companies are 22 percent more profitable, on average, when they engage their employees by building a culture of leadership, innovation, and recognition, according to Zippia research.
Developing professionals into strong leaders can have a lasting impact on a company, and the IEEE Professional Development Suite can help make it possible. The training programs in the suite help aspiring technology leaders who want to develop their essential business and management skills. Programs include IEEE Leading Technical Teams, the IEEE | Rutgers Online Mini-MBA for Engineers and Technical Professionals, and the Intensive Wireless Communications and Advanced Topics in Wireless courses offered by the IEEE Communications Society. IEEE also offers topical courses through its eLearning Library.
IEEE Leading Technical Teams is a live, six-hour course offered both in person and virtually. Addressing challenges that come with leading groups, it is designed for team leaders, managers, and directors of engineering and technical teams.
“Participating benefited me and my employer by enhancing my leadership skills in inspiring others to achieve the goals of our organization,” says Stephen Wilkowski, a system test engineer at CACI International in Reston, Va., who completed the training. “I found the leadership practices assessment to be very valuable, as I appreciated the anonymous feedback received from those who I work with. I would recommend the training to anyone desiring to improve their leadership skills.”
Attendees participate in the 360° Leadership Practices Inventory, a tool that solicits confidential feedback on the participant’s strengths and opportunities for improvement from their team members and managers. The program encompasses instructor-led exercises and case studies demonstrating the application of best practices to workplace challenges.
Participants learn the “five practices of exemplary leadership” and receive valuable peer coaching.
To learn more about in-person and virtual options for individuals and companies, complete this form.
The 12-week IEEE | Rutgers Online Mini-MBA for Engineers and Technical Professionals program covers business strategy, new product development management, financial analysis, sales and marketing, and leadership. It includes a combination of expert instruction, peer interaction, self-paced video lessons, interactive assessments, live office hours, and hands-on capstone project experience. The program offers flexible learning opportunities for individual learners as well as customized company cohort options.
Developing professionals into strong leaders can have a lasting impact on a company, and the IEEE Professional Development Suite can help make that possible.
“The mini-MBA was a great opportunity to explore other areas of business that I don’t typically encounter,” says graduate Jonathan Bentz, a senior manager at Nvidia. “I have a customer-facing technical role, and the mini-MBA allowed me to get a taste of the full realm of business leadership.”
For more information, see IEEE | Rutgers Online Mini-MBA for Engineers and Technical Professionals.
The Intensive Wireless Communications and the Advanced Topics in Wireless course series are exclusively presented by the IEEE Communications Society.
The Intensive Wireless interactive live course provides training necessary to stay on top of key developments in the dynamic, rapidly evolving communications industry. Designed for those with an engineering background who want to enhance their knowledge of wireless communication technologies, the series is an ideal way to train individual employees or your entire team at once.
The Advanced Topics in Wireless series is for engineers and technical professionals with a working knowledge of wireless who are looking to enhance their skill set. The series dives into recent advancements, applications, and use cases in emerging connectivity.
Participants in the live, online course series develop a comprehensive view of 5G/NR technology, as well as an understanding of the implementation of all the ITU-specified use case categories such as enhanced mobile broadband, mIoT, and ultra-reliable low-latency communication. The series also provides a robust foundation on the network architecture and the evolution of technology, which enables fully open radio access networks.
Learn more about the Advanced Topics in Wireless Course Series by completing this form.
Tailored for professionals, faculty, and students, the IEEE eLearning Library taps into a wealth of expertise from the organization’s global network of more than 450,000 industry and academia members. Courses cover a wide variety of disciplines including artificial intelligence, blockchain technology, cyber and data security, power and energy, telecommunications, and IEEE standards.
You can help foster growth and leadership skills for your organization by offering employees access to hundreds of courses. Start exploring the library by filling out this form.
Completion of course programs offers learners the ability to earn IEEE certificates bearing professional development hours, continuing education units, and digital badges.
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