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The semiconductor industry’s long held imperative—Moore’s Law, which dictates that transistor densities on a chip should double roughly every two years—is getting more and more difficult to maintain. The ability to shrink down transistors, and the interconnects between them, is hitting some basic physical limitations. In particular, when copper interconnects are scaled down, their resistivity skyrockets, which decreases how much information they can carry and increases their energy draw.
The industry has been looking for alternative interconnect materials to prolong the march of Moore’s Law a bit longer. Graphene is a very attractive option in many ways: The sheet-thin carbon material offers excellent electrical and thermal conductivity, and is stronger than diamond.
However, researchers have struggled to incorporate graphene into mainstream computing applications for two main reasons. First, depositing graphene requires high temperatures that are incompatible with traditional CMOS manufacturing. And second, the charge carrier density of undoped, macroscopic graphene sheets is relatively low.
Now, Destination 2D, a startup based in Milpitas, Calif., claims to have solved both of those problems. Destination 2D’s team has demonstrated a technique to deposit graphene interconnects onto chips at 300 °C, which is still cool enough to be done by traditional CMOS techniques. They have also developed a method of doping graphene sheets that offers current densities 100 times as dense as copper, according to Kaustav Banerjee, co-founder and CTO of Destination 2D.
“People have been trying to use graphene in various applications, but in the mainstream micro-electronics, which is essentially the CMOS technology, people have not been able to use this so far,” Banerjee says.
Destination 2D is not the only company pursuing graphene interconnects. TSMC and Samsung are also working to bring this technology up to snuff. However, Banerjee claims, Destination 2D is the only company to demonstrate graphene deposition directly on top of transistor chips, rather than growing the interconnects separately and attaching them to the chip after the fact.
Graphene was first isolated in 2004, when researcher separated sheets of graphene by pulling them off graphite chunks with adhesive tape. The material was deemed so promising that in 2010 the feat garnered a Nobel prize. (Nobel Prize co-recipient Konstantin Novoselov is now Destination 2D’s chief scientist).
Startup Destination 2D has developed a CMOS-compatible tool capable of depositing graphene interconnects at the wafer scale.Destination 2D
However, carefully pulling graphene off of pencil tips using tape is not exactly a scalable production method. To reliably create graphene structures, researchers have turned to chemical vapor deposition, where a carbon gas is deposited onto a heated substrate. This typically requires temperatures well above the roughly 400 °C maximum operating temperature in CMOS manufacturing.
Destination 2D uses a pressure-assisted direct deposition technique developed in Banerjee’s lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The technique, which Banerjee calls pressure-assisted solid phase diffusion, uses a sacrificial metal film such as nickel. The sacrificial film is placed on top of the transistor chip, and a source of carbon is deposited on top. Then, using a pressure of roughly 410 to 550 kilopascals (60 to 80 pounds per square inch), the carbon is forced through the sacrificial metal, and recombines into clean multilayer graphene underneath. The sacrificial metal is then simply removed, leaving the graphene on-chip for patterning. This technique works at 300 °C, cool enough to not damage the transistors underneath.
After the graphene interconnects are patterned, the graphene layers are doped to reduce the resistivity and boost their current-carrying capacity. The Destination 2D team uses a doping technique called intercalation, where the doping atoms are diffused between graphene sheets.
The doping atoms can vary—examples include iron chloride, bromine, and lithium. Once implanted, the dopants donate electrons (or their in-material counterparts, electron holes) to the graphene sheets, allowing higher current densities. “Intercalation chemistry is a very old subject,” Banerjee says. “We are just bringing this intercalation into the graphene, and that is new.”
This technique has a promising feature—unlike copper, as the graphene interconnects are scaled down, their current-carrying capacity improves. This is because for thinner lines, the intercalation technique becomes more effective. This, Banerjee argues, will allow their technique to support many generations of semiconducting technology into the future.
Destination 2D has demonstrated their graphene interconnect technique at the chip level, and they’ve also developed tools for wafer-scale deposition that can be implemented in fabrication facilities. They hope to work with foundries to implement their technology for research and development, and eventually, production.
The global technology community came together on 1 October to celebrate the 15th anniversary of IEEE Day, which commemorates the first time professionals gathered to share their technological innovations and advancements.
IEEE Day is held annually on the first Tuesday of October. This year’s celebration was the largest yet, with more than 1,100 events worldwide. The events provided professionals, students, and enthusiasts a platform to connect, collaborate, and showcase their work as well as have some fun. The spirit of innovation and community was evident as participants engaged in workshops, networking sessions, and more.
In addition to the events, 11 IEEE societies ran membership offers between 29 September and 12 October as a way to encourage professionals and students to join the IEEE community and learn more about their fields of interest.
Photography and video contests were held as well. More than 300 images and 140 videos were entered. The entries captured the essence of the IEEE Day events, showcasing participants’ creativity and enthusiasm. The contests also provided a visual record of the day’s global impact.
This year’s IEEE Day was filled with memorable events highlighting the spirit of innovation and community. Here are a few standouts:
Technical session. At the Vishwakarma Institute of Technology, in Pune, India, about 50 students attended an AI Unlocked session organized by the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society’s Pune chapter. Artificial intelligence specialist Jayesh Pingale and other experts discussed the technology’s applications. The event included projects that showcased the use of AI in interactive learning and concluded with a ceremony celebrating IEEE Day.
“Hundreds of entries were submitted to our contests, showcasing the outstanding creativity of IEEE members and the true joy of this celebration.” —Cybele Ghanem
Career fair. The event at Florida Polytechnic University, in Lakeland, included a career fair. IEEE Senior Member Andy Seely, Florida West Coast Section vice chair, discussed volunteer opportunities. Y.C. Wang, director of DigiKey’s global academic program, spoke about the company’s history and its suite of online tools for engineering students. IEEE Member Mohammad Reza Khalghani, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the university, gave a talk on cyber-physical security. He covered microgrids, network control systems, and AI techniques for cyber anomaly detection. The event attracted more than 80 people.
Competitions and games. At the Christ (Deemed to be University) engineering and technology school, in Bangalore, India, contests were held to add a fun, competitive edge to the celebrations. There was a quiz on IEEE history, as well as a chess tournament and an Uno card game. The activities tested participants’ knowledge and strategic thinking while providing a relaxed networking atmosphere.
“This year IEEE Day celebrated its 15th anniversary, which proved to be a remarkable celebration,” says Member Cybele Ghanem, IEEE Day committee chair.
“Gathered under the theme Leveraging Technology for a Better Tomorrow, IEEE members worldwide celebrated IEEE Day,” Ghanem says. “Hundreds of entries were submitted to our contests, showcasing the outstanding creativity of IEEE members and the true joy of this celebration. Thank you for celebrating with us.”
Visit the IEEE Day web page and follow IEEE Day on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or IEEE Collabratec to stay updated throughout the year.
In an age where data is bought and sold as a commodity, true privacy is rare. But homomorphic encryption can protect your data completely, so no one, not even the servers used to process it, can read your information.
Here’s how it works: A device encrypts data, sends it out for processing, computations are done on the encrypted data, and then the data is decrypted upon return. A mathematically complex process ensures that your processed data can be decrypted at the end without anyone being able to decode it in the middle.
However, the computational power required for the underlying mathematics that enable homomorphic encryption are too much for the Internet of Things as it currently is.
A team of engineers at Peking University, in Beijing, China aim to change that. Their new device, created using arrays of ferroelectric field effect transistors (FeFET), is optimized to carry out the encryption and decryption processes with high accuracy and low computational load. The engineers unveiled the array today at the 2024 IEEE International Electron Devices Meeting.
“By implementing novel semiconductor devices, we can have our commercial electronics like cell phones utilize the computing power of the cloud [while] also keeping the safety of our data,” says Kechao Tang, assistant professor of integrated circuits at Peking University and one of the researchers who developed the new system.
To carry out the homomorphic encryption process, a computer must be able to generate a random key, which will be used to encrypt and then later to “unlock” the data. It then uses that key to carry out polynomial multiplication and addition that puts the data in an encrypted form for processing.
To create a key for encryption, the transistor array uses fluctuations in current through the FeFETs. FeFETs can be engineered to have a much higher degree of fluctuation than a regular MOSFET transistor, so the random number generated by the device is less predictable than what you’d get from an ordinary silicon chip, making the encryption harder to crack.
For the encryption process, the key helps convert the user’s data into a vector consisting of the coefficients of polynomials. That vector is then multiplied by a matrix of numbers and then by another vector. So encryption usually takes two steps, but in the FeFET array, it can be done in just one.
That’s possible because of the nature of FeFETs. In the part of the transistor that controls the flow of current through the device, the gate, they have a layer of ferroelectric—a material that holds an electric polarization without needing to be in an electric field. The ferroelectric layer can store data as the magnitude of this polarization. Like other transistors, FeFETs have three terminals: the drain, the source, and the gate. Counting the stored state in the ferroelectric material, this means three signals can be combined in an FeFET: the drain input, gate input, and the stored state. (The source provides the output current.) So one FeFET can be made to compute a three-input multiplication.
When many FeFETs are combined into an array, the array can now take in the three sets of data needed for encryption: a vector of the data to be encrypted and the encryption matrix and vector. The matrix is stored in the FeFET array’s ferroelectric layer, the vector of original data is inputted to the gate of each FeFET, and the second vector is input to the drains of the FeFET array. In one step, the FeFET array combines the signals of the vector, matrix, and vector together, then outputs the final encrypted data as current.
“We can do more efficient computing with less area overhead and also with less power consumption,” says Tang.
Researchers are also trying to use RRAM to accomplish the matrix multiplication required for homomorphic encryption, because it also has the ability to store a state in memory. However, ferroelectric devices should produce less noise in the decryption process than RRAM would, according to Tang. Because the ferroelectric devices have a greater difference between their on and off states than RRAM, “you are less likely to have mistakes when you do the encoding and decoding,” says Tang, “because you can easily tell whether it is one or zero.” Previous RRAM solutions had accuracies between 97.1 and 98.8 percent, while this device had an accuracy of 99.6 percent.
In the future, Tang hopes to see this technology in our smartphones. “If we can apply our device into the cellphone, it means that our cellphone will have the ability to encode the data to be uploaded to the cloud and then get it back and then decode it,” he says.
When Meta announced last week that it’s looking for a nuclear energy developer to power its future AI operations, it joined a growing cadre of tech companies all suddenly repeating the same refrain: We need more power—preferably carbon-free—and lots of it.
Electricity demand in the United States is expected to grow more than 15 percent over the next five years after remaining flat for the last two decades, according to a recent report from power sector consulting firm Grid Strategies. Most of the growth will be driven by the needs of data centers and their operators, who are scrambling to secure large amounts of reliable power while keeping their carbon neutral goals.
Nuclear energy fits that bill, and over the last few months, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have all announced ambitious deals to acquire it for their operations. Some of the plans aim to secure energy in the near term from existing power plants. Others focus on the long game and include investments in next-generation nuclear energy and small modular reactors (SMRs) that don’t yet exist on a commercial scale.
“Data centers have grown in size and AI is dramatically changing the future [energy] forecast,” says Dan Stout, founder of Advanced Nuclear Advisors in Chattanooga, Tenn. “In the 2030s, the grid will have less coal and there will be some constraints on gas. So nuclear energy’s power density and carbon-free high reliability is attractive, and tech companies are starting to take action on new nuclear deployments,” he says.
Amazon kicked off the bevy of public announcements in March when it bought a data center adjacent to a nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania. The purchase came with 300 megawatts of behind-the-meter electricity. After closing the deal, Amazon requested another 180 MW. The request caused a dustup over energy fairness, and in November regulators rejected it, leaving Amazon looking for other options. Tech companies are watching the precedent-setting situation closely.
Meanwhile, Microsoft was inking an agreement with Constellation Energy to restart a shuttered nuclear reactor on Three Mile Island—the site of the worst nuclear disaster in U.S. history. The plan, announced in September, calls for the reactor to supply 835 MW to grid operator PJM, and for Microsoft to buy enough of that power to match the electricity consumed by its data centers in the PJM Interconnection.
Then in October, just two days apart, Google and Amazon both announced investments in startups developing SMRs. The smaller size and modular design of SMRs could make building them faster, cheaper and more predictable than conventional nuclear reactors. They also come with enhanced safety features, and could be built closer to transmission lines.
SMRs are still at least five years from commercial operation in the United States. A year ago the first planned SMR in the United States was cancelled due to rising costs and a lack of customers. (China is building an SMR called the Linglong One on the island of Hainan, which is scheduled to be operational in 2026.)
To move things along, Amazon led a US $500 million financing round to support X-energy in Rockville, Md., which is developing a gas-cooled SMR. The financing will help X-energy finish its reactor design and build a nuclear fuel fabrication facility. The plan is to build multiple SMRs producing at least 5 GW total by 2039. Each reactor will provide 80 MW of electricity.
Google, for its part, is backing Kairos Power with a 500 MW development agreement. The Alameda, Calif.-based company is developing a molten fluoride salt-cooled SMR and has received construction permits from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build two demonstration facilities, both in Oak Ridge, Tenn. The company says the facilities will be operational by 2030.
The reactors that both Kairos and X-energy are developing run on tri-structural isotropic (TRISO) particle fuel. It’s made of uranium, carbon, and oxygen encapsulated in graphite kernels the size of a poppy seed. The kernels get loaded into golf ball-size spheres called pebbles that are also made of graphite. Each pebble contains thousands of fuel kernels.
The structure of the pebble encapsulation enables the fuel to withstand very high temperatures, so even in worst-case accidents, the pebbles won’t melt. The coatings “essentially provide the key safety functions that the large containment concrete structure is providing for conventional reactor technologies,” says Mike Laufer, co-founder of Kairos.
If regulators approve, the built-in containment feature could shrink the footprint of nuclear plants by reducing the size of containment structures. The U.S. Department of Energy has been developing and extensively testing TRISO fuel over the last two decades.
Kairos will use TRISO fuel in its high-temperature, low-pressure, fluoride salt-cooled reactor. In this design, fuel pebbles in the reactor core undergo fission, generating heat that transfers to the surrounding molten salt. Heat exchangers transfer the heat to boil water and generate steam, which drives a turbine and generates electricity. The molten salt acts as an additional safety barrier, chemically absorbing any fission products that escape the pebbles, Laufer says. Kairos’ commercial reactors will each generate about 75 MW of electricity, Laufer says.
X-energy plans to use TRISO fuel is its high-temperature gas-cooled reactor. In this design, helium gas runs through the reactor core. As the fuel pebbles undergo fission, the gas extracts the heat, which is used to boil water and generates steam to drive a turbine. Each fuel pebble will constantly shuffle through the reactor, passing through about six times. “The reactor is a lot like a gumball machine,” says Benjamin Reinke, vice president of global business development at X-energy. A mechanical corkscrew drives a pebble in an auger out of the system., and the pebble is checked to see if it’s fully burned up. If not, it goes back to into the top of the reactor, he says.
X-energy is working on getting a license to produce TRISO fuel on a commercial scale at a facility it plans to build in Oak Ridge. The company’s first customer, a Dow petrochemical plant in Seadrift, Tex., plans to replace its gas boilers with X-energy’s SMRs, which will create steam and electricity for the plant and possibly for the grid. X-energy’s deal with Amazon also supports a four-unit, 320-MW project with regional utility Energy Northwest in Richland, Wash.
Tech companies for the last decade have been investing in wind and solar energy too, but the power from these sources is intermittent, and may not be enough to meet the needs of power-guzzling AI.
The arrangements between big tech and small nuclear signal the beginning of a trend, says Stout. Meta’s announcement last week that it’s putting out a request for proposals for up to 4 gigawatts of nuclear power may be the most recent addition to that trend, but it’s probably not the last. Says Stout: “I expect there’s going to be more.”
This article was updated on 10 December 2024 to clarify the agreement between Google and Kairos Power.
Farming in India is tough work—and it’s only getting tougher. Water shortages, a rapidly changing climate, disorganized supply chains, and difficulty accessing credit make every growing season a calculated gamble. But farmers like Harish B. are finding that new AI-powered tools can take some of the unpredictability out of the endeavor. (Instead of a surname, Indian given names are often combined with initials that can represent the name of the person’s father or village.)
The 40-year-old took over his family’s farm on the outskirts of Bengaluru, in southern India, 10 years ago. His father had been farming the 5.6-hectare plot since 1975 and had shifted from growing vegetables to grapes in search of higher profits. Since taking over, Harish B. has added pomegranates and made a concerted effort to modernize their operations, installing drip irrigation and mist blowers for applying agricultural chemicals.
Then, a year and a half ago, he started working with the Bengaluru-based startup Fasal. The company uses a combination of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, predictive modeling, and AI-powered farm-level weather forecasts to provide farmers with tailored advice, including when to water their crops, when to apply nutrients, and when the farm is at risk of pest attacks.
Harish B. uses Fasal’s modeling to make decisions about irrigation and the application of pesticides and fertilizer. Edd Gent
Harish B. says he’s happy with the service and has significantly reduced his pesticide and water use. The predictions are far from perfect, he says, and he still relies on his farmer’s intuition if the advice doesn’t seem to stack up. But he says that the technology is paying for itself.
“Before, with our old method, we were using more water,” he says. “Now it’s more accurate, and we only use as much as we need.” He estimates that the farm is using 30 percent less water than before he started with Fasal.
Indian farmers who are looking to update their approach have an increasing number of options, thanks to the country’s burgeoning “agritech” sector. A host of startups are using AI and other digital technologies to provide bespoke farming advice and improve rural supply chains.
And the Indian government is all in: In 2018, the national government has declared agriculture to be one of the focus areas of its AI strategy, and it just announced roughly US $300 million in funding for digital agriculture projects. With considerable government support and India’s depth of technical talent, there’s hope that AI efforts will lift up the country’s massive and underdeveloped agricultural sector. India could even become a testbed for agricultural innovations that could be exported across the developing world. But experts also caution that technology is not a panacea, and say that without careful consideration, the disruptive forces of innovation could harm farmers as much as they help.
India is still a deeply agrarian society, with roughly 65 percent of the population involved in agriculture. Thanks to the “green revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s, when new crop varieties, fertilizers, and pesticides boosted yields, the country has long been self-sufficient when it comes to food—an impressive feat for a country of 1.4 billion people. It also exports more than $40 billion worth of foodstuffs annually. But for all its successes, the agricultural sector is also extremely inefficient.
Roughly 80 percent of India’s farms are small holdings of less than 2 hectares (about 5 acres), which makes it hard for those farmers to generate enough revenue to invest in equipment and services. Supply chains that move food from growers to market are also disorganized and reliant on middlemen, a situation that eats into farmers’ profits and leads to considerable wastage. These farmers have trouble accessing credit because of the small size of their farms and the lack of financial records, and so they’re often at the mercy of loan sharks. Farmer indebtedness has reached worrying proportions: More than half of rural households are in debt, with an average outstanding amount of nearly $900 (the equivalent of more than half a year’s income). Researchers have identified debt as the leading factor behind an epidemic of farmer suicides in India. In the state of Maharashtra, which leads the country in farmer suicides, 2,851 farmers committed suicide in 2023.
While technology won’t be a cure-all for these complex social problems, Ananda Verma, founder of Fasal, says there are many ways it can make farmers’ lives a little easier. His company sells IoT devices that collect data on crucial parameters including soil moisture, rainfall, atmospheric pressure, wind speed, and humidity.
This data is passed to Fasal’s cloud servers, where it’s fed into machine learning models, along with weather data from third parties, to produce predictions about a farm’s local microclimate. Those results are input into custom-built agronomic models that can predict things like a crop’s water requirements, nutrient uptake, and susceptibility to pests and disease.
“What is being done in India is sort of a testbed for most of the emerging economies.” —Abhay Pareek, Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution
The output of these models is used to advise the farmer on when to water or when to apply fertilizer or pesticides. Typically, farmers make these decisions based on intuition or a calendar, says Verma. But this can lead to unnecessary application of chemicals or overwatering, which increases costs and reduces the quality of the crop. “[Our technology] helps the farmer make very precise and accurate decisions, completely removing any kind of guesswork,” he says.
Fasal’s ability to provide these services has been facilitated by a rapid expansion of digital infrastructure in India, in particular countrywide 4G coverage with rock-bottom data prices. The number of smartphone users has jumped from less than 200 million a decade ago to over a billion today. “We are able to deploy these devices in rural corners of India where sometimes you don’t even find roads, but there is still Internet,” says Verma.
Reducing water and chemical use on farms can also ease pressure on the environment. An independent audit found that across the roughly 80,000 hectares where Fasal is currently operating, it has helped save 82 billion liters of water. The company has also saved 54,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions produced by running-water pumps, and reduced chemical usage by 127 tonnes.
However, getting these capabilities into the hands of more farmers will be tricky. Harish B. says some smaller farmers in his area have shown interest in the technology, but they can’t afford it (neither the farmers nor the company would disclose the product’s price). Taking full advantage of Fasal’s advice also requires investment in other equipment like automated irrigation, putting the solution even further out of reach.
Verma says farming cooperatives could provide a solution. Known as farmer producer organizations, or FPOs, they provide a legal structure for groups of small farmers to pool their resources, boosting their ability to negotiate with suppliers and customers and invest in equipment and services. In reality, though, it can be hard to set up and run an FPO. Harish B. says some of his neighbors attempted to create an FPO, but they struggled to agree on what to do, and it was ultimately abandoned.
Cropin’s technology combines satellite imagery with weather data to provide customized advice. Cropin
Other agritech companies are looking higher up the food chain for customers. Bengaluru-based Cropin provides precision agriculture services based on AI-powered analyses of satellite imagery and weather patterns. Farmers can use the company’s app to outline the boundaries of their plot simply by walking around with their smartphone’s GPS enabled. Cropin then downloads satellite data for those coordinates and combines it with climate data to provide irrigation advice and pest advisories. Other insights include analyses of how well different plots are growing, yield predictions, advice on the optimum time to harvest, and even suggestions on the best crops to grow.
But the company rarely sells its services directly to small farmers, admits Praveen Pankajakshan, Cropin’s chief scientist. Even more than cost, the farmer’s ability to interpret and implement the advice can be a barrier, he says. That’s why Cropin typically works with larger organizations like development agencies, local governments, or consumer-goods companies, which in turn work with networks of contract farmers. These organizations have field workers who can help farmers make sense of Cropin’s advisories.
Working with more-established intermediaries also helps solve a major problem for agritech startups: establishing trust. Farmers today are bombarded with pitches for new technology and services, says Pankajakshan, which can make them wary. “They don’t have problems in adopting technology or solutions, because often they understand that it can benefit them,” he says. “But they want to know that this has been tried out and these are not new ideas, new experiments.”
That perspective rings true to Harish C.S., who runs his family’s 24-hectare fruit farm north of Bengaluru. He’s a customer of Fasal and says the company’s services are making an appreciable difference to his bottom line. But he’s also conscious that he has the resources to experiment with new technology, a luxury that smaller farmers don’t have.
Harish C.S. says Fasal’s services are making his 24-hectare fruit farm more profitable.Edd Gent
A bad call on what crop to plant or when to irrigate can lead to months of wasted effort, says Harish C.S., so farmers are cautious and tend to make decisions based on recommendations from trusted suppliers or fellow farmers. “People would say: ‘On what basis should I apply that information which AI gave?’” he says. “‘Is there a proof? How many years has it worked? Has it worked for any known, reputable farmer? Has he made money?’”
While he’s happy with Fasal, Harish C.S. says he relies even more on YouTube, where he watches videos from a prominent pomegranate growing expert. For him, technology’s ability to connect farmers and help them share best practices is its most powerful contribution to Indian agriculture.
Some are betting that AI could help farmers with that knowledge-sharing. The latest large language models (LLMs) provide a powerful new way to analyze and organize information, as well as the ability to interact with technology more naturally via language. That could help unlock the deep repositories of agricultural know-how shared by India’s farmers, says Rikin Gandhi, CEO of Digital Green, an international nonprofit that uses technology to help smallholders, or owners of small farms.
The nonprofit Digital Green records videos about farmers’ solutions to their problems and shows them in villages. Digital Green
Since 2008, the organization has been getting Indian farmers to record short videos explaining problems they faced and their solutions. A network of workers then tours rural villages putting on screenings. A study carried out by researchers at MIT’s Poverty Action Lab found that the program reduces the cost of getting farmers to adopt new practices from roughly $35 (when workers traveled to villages and met with individual farmers) to $3.50.
But the organization’s operations were severely curtailed during the COVID-19 pandemic, prompting Digital Green to experiment with simple WhatsApp bots that direct farmers to relevant videos in a database. Two years ago, it began training LLMs on transcripts of the videos to create a more sophisticated chatbot that can provide tailored responses.
Crucially, the chatbot can also incorporate personalized information, such as the user’s location, local weather, and market data. “Farmers don’t want to just get the generic Wikipedia, ChatGPT kind of answer,” Gandhi says. “They want very location-, time-specific advice.”
Two years ago, Digital Green began working on a chatbot trained on the organization’s videos about farming solutions. Digital Green
But simply providing farmers with advice through an app, no matter how smart it is, has its limits. “Information is not the only thing people are looking for,” says Gandhi. “They’re looking for ways that information can be connected to markets and products and services.”
So for the time being, Digital Green is still relying on workers to help farmers use the chatbot. Based on the organization’s own assessments, Gandhi thinks the new service could cut the cost of adopting new practices by another order of magnitude, to just 35 cents.
Not everyone is sold on AI’s potential to help farmers. In a 2022 paper, ecological anthropologist Glenn Stone argued that the penetration of big data technologies into agriculture in the global south could hold risks for farmers. Stone, a scholar in residence at Washington and Lee University, in Virginia, draws parallels between surveillance capitalism, which uses data collected about Internet users to manipulate their behavior, and what he calls surveillance agriculture, which he defines as data-based digital technologies that take decision-making away from the farmer.
The main concern is that these kinds of tools could erode the autonomy of farmers and steer their decision-making in ways that may not always help. What’s more, Stone says, the technology could interfere with existing knowledge-sharing networks. “There is a very real danger that local processes of agricultural learning, or ‘skilling,’ which are always partly social, will be disrupted and weakened when decision-making is appropriated by algorithms or AI,” he says.
Another concern, says Nandini Chami, deputy director of the advocacy group IT for Change, is who’s using the AI tools. She notes that big Indian agritech companies such as Ninjacart, DeHaat, and Crofarm are focused on using data and digital technologies to optimize rural supply chains. On the face of it, that’s a good thing: Roughly 10 percent of fruits and vegetables are wasted after harvest, and farmers’ profits are often eaten up by middlemen.
But efforts to boost efficiencies and bring economies of scale to agriculture tend to primarily benefit larger farms or agribusiness, says Chami, often leaving smallholders behind. Both in India and elsewhere, this is driving a structural shift in the economy as rural jobs dry up and people move to the cities in search of work. “A lot of small farmers are getting pushed out of agriculture into other occupations,” she says. “But we don’t have enough high-quality jobs to absorb them.”
AI proponents say that with careful design, many of these same technologies can be used to help smaller farmers too. Purushottam Kaushik, head of the World Economic Forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR), in Mumbai, is leading a pilot project that’s using AI and other digital technologies to streamline agricultural supply chains. It is already boosting the earnings of 7,000 chili farmers in the Khammam district in the state of Telangana.
In the state of Telangana, AI-powered crop quality assessments have boosted farmers’ profits. Digital Green
Launched in 2020 in collaboration with the state government, the project combined advice from Digital Green’s first-generation WhatsApp bot with AI-powered soil testing, AI-powered crop quality assessments, and a digital marketplace to connect farmers directly to buyers. Over 18 months, the project helped farmers boost yields by 21 percent and selling prices by 8 percent.
One of the key lessons from the project was that even the smartest AI solutions don’t work in isolation, says Kaushik. To be effective, they must be combined with other digital technologies and carefully integrated into existing supply chains.
In particular, the project demonstrated the importance of working with the much-maligned middlemen, who are often characterized as a drain on farmers’ incomes. These local businessmen aren’t merely traders; they also provide important services such as finance and transport. Without those services, agricultural supply chains would grind to a halt, says Abhay Pareek, who leads C4IR’s agriculture efforts. “They are very intrinsic to the entire ecosystem,” he says. “You have to make sure that they are also part of the entire process.”
The program is now being expanded to 20,000 farmers in the region. While it’s still early days, Pareek says, the work could be a template for efforts to modernize agriculture around the world. With India’s huge diversity of agricultural conditions, a large proportion of smallholder farmers, a burgeoning technology sector, and significant government support, the country is the ideal laboratory for testing technologies that can be deployed across the developing world, he says. “What is being done in India is sort of a testbed for most of the emerging economies,” he adds.
As with many AI applications, one of the biggest bottlenecks to progress is data access. Vast amounts of important agricultural information are locked up in central and state government databases. There’s a growing recognition that for AI to fulfill its potential, this data needs to be made accessible.
Telangana’s state government is leading the charge. Rama Devi Lanka, director of its emerging technologies department, has spearheaded an effort to create an agriculture data exchange. Previously, when companies came to the government to request data access, there was a torturous process of approvals. “It is not the way to grow,” says Lanka. “You cannot scale up like this.”
So, working with the World Economic Forum, her team has created a digital platform through which vetted organizations can sign up for direct access to key agricultural data sets held by the government. The platform has also been designed as a marketplace, which Lanka envisages will eventually allow anyone, from companies to universities, to share and monetize their private agricultural data sets.
India’s central government is looking to follow suit. The Ministry of Agriculture is developing a platform called Agri Stack that will create a national registry of farmers and farm plots linked to crop and soil data. This will be accessible to government agencies and approved private players, such as agritech companies, agricultural suppliers, and credit providers. The government hopes to launch the platform in early 2025.
But in the rush to bring data-driven techniques to agriculture, there’s a danger that farmers could get left behind, says IT for Change’s Chami.
Chami argues that the development of Agri Stack is driven by misplaced techno-optimism, which assumes that enabling digital innovation will inevitably lead to trickle-down benefits for farmers. But it could just as easily lead to e-commerce platforms replacing traditional networks of traders and suppliers, reducing the bargaining power of smaller farmers. Access to detailed, farm-level data without sufficient protections could also result in predatory targeting by land sharks or unscrupulous credit providers, she adds.
The Agri Stack proposal says access to individual records will require farmer consent. But details are hazy, says Chami, and it’s questionable whether India’s farmers, who are often illiterate and not very tech-savvy, could give informed consent. And the speed with which the program is being implemented leaves little time to work through these complicated problems.
“[Governments] are looking for easy solutions,” she says. “You’re not able to provide these quick fixes if you complicate the question by thinking about group rights, group privacy, and farmer interests.”
Some promising experiments are taking a more democratic approach. The Bengaluru-based nonprofit Vrutti is developing a digital platform that enables different actors in the agricultural supply chain to interact, collect and share data, and buy and sell goods. The key difference is that this platform is co-owned by its users, so they have a say in its design and principles, says Prerak Shah, who is leading its development.
Vrutti’s platform is primarily being used as a marketplace that allows FPOs to sell their produce to buyers. Each farmer’s transaction history is connected to a unique ID, and they can also record what crops they’re growing and what farming practices they’re using on their land. This data may ultimately become a valuable resource—for example, it could help members get lines of credit. Farmers control who can access their records, which are stored in a data wallet that they can transfer to other platforms.
Whether the private sector can be persuaded to adopt these more farmer-centric approaches remains to be seen. But India has a rich history of agricultural cooperatives and bottom-up social organizing, says Chami. That’s why she thinks that the country can be a proving ground not only for innovative new agricultural technologies, but also for more equitable ways of deploying them. “I think India will show the world how this contest between corporate-led agritech and the people’s agritech plays out,” she says.
When Sony’s robot dog, Aibo, was first launched in 1999, it was hailed as revolutionary and the first of its kind, promising to usher in a new industry of intelligent mobile machines for the home. But its success was far from certain. Legged robots were still in their infancy, and the idea of making an interactive walking robot for the consumer market was extraordinarily ambitious. Beyond the technical challenges, Sony also had to solve a problem that entertainment robots still struggle with: how to make Aibo compelling and engaging rather than simply novel.
Sony’s team made that happen. And since Aibo’s debut, the company has sold more than 170,000 of the cute little quadrupeds—a huge number considering their price of several thousand dollars each. From the start, Aibo could express a range of simulated emotions and learn through its interactions with users. Aibo was an impressive robot 25 years ago, and it’s still impressive today.
Far from Sony headquarters in Tokyo, the town of Kōta, in Aichi Prefecture, is home to the Sony factory that has manufactured and repaired Aibos since 2018. Kōta has also become the center of fandom for Aibo, since the Hummingbird Café opened in the Kōta Town Hall in 2021. The first official Aibo café in Japan, it hosts Aibo-themed events, and Aibo owners from across the country gather there to let their Aibos loose in a play area and to exchange Aibo name cards.
One patron of the Hummingbird Café is veteran Sony engineer Hideki Noma. In 1999, before Aibo was Aibo, Noma went to see his boss, Tadashi Otsuki. Otsuki had recently returned to Sony after a stint at the Japanese entertainment company Namco, and had been put in charge of a secretive new project to create an entertainment robot. But progress had stalled. There was a prototype robotic pet running around the lab, but Otsuki took a dim view of its hyperactive behavior and decided it wasn’t a product that anyone would want to buy. He envisioned something more lifelike. During their meeting, he gave Noma a surprising piece of advice: Go to Ryōan-ji, a famed Buddhist temple in Kyoto. Otsuki was telling Noma that to develop the right kind of robot for Sony, it needed Zen.
When the Aibo project started in 1994, personal entertainment robots seemed like a natural fit for Sony. Sony was a global leader in consumer electronics. And in the 1990s, Japan had more than half of the world’s industrial robots, dominating an industry led by manufacturers like Fanuc and Yaskawa Electric. Robots for the home were also being explored. In 1996, Honda showed off its P2 humanoid robot, a prototype of the groundbreaking ASIMO, which would be unveiled in 2000. Electrolux, based in the United Kingdom, introduced a prototype of its Trilobite robotic vacuum cleaner in 1997, and at iRobot in Boston, Joe Jones was working on what would become the Roomba. It seemed as though the consumer robot was getting closer to reality. Being the first to market was the perfect opportunity for an ambitious global company like Sony.
Aibo was the idea of Sony engineer Toshitada Doi (on left), pictured in 1999 with an Aibo ERS-111. Hideki Noma (on right) holds an Aibo ERS-1000.Raphael Gaillarde/Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images; Right; Timothy Hornyak
Sony’s new robot project was the brainchild of engineer Toshitada Doi, co-inventor of the CD. Doi was inspired by the speed and agility of MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks’s Genghis, a six-legged insectile robot that was created to demonstrate basic autonomous walking functions. Doi, however, had a vision for an ”entertainment robot with no clear role or job.” It was 1994 when his team of about 10 people began full-scale research and development on such a robot.
Hideki Noma joined Sony in 1995. Even then, he had a lifelong love of robots, including participating in robotics contests and researching humanoids in college. “I was assigned to the Sony robot research team’s entertainment robot department,” says Noma. “It had just been established and had few people. Nobody knew Sony was working on robots, and it was a secret even within the company. I wasn’t even told what I would be doing.”
Noma’s new colleagues in Sony’s robot skunk works had recently gone to Tokyo’s Akihabara electronics district and brought back boxes of circuit boards and servos. Their first creation was a six-legged walker with antenna-like sensors but more compact than Brooks’s Genghis, at roughly 22 centimeters long. It was clunky and nowhere near cute; if anything, it resembled a cockroach. “When they added the camera and other sensors, it was so heavy it couldn’t stand,” says Noma. “They realized it was going to be necessary to make everything at Sony—motors, gears, and all—or it would not work. That’s when I joined the team as the person in charge of mechatronic design.”
Noma, who is now a senior manager in Sony’s new business development division, remembers that Doi’s catchphrase was “make history.” “Just as he had done with the compact disc, he wanted us to create a robot that was not only the first of its kind, but also one that would have a big impact on the world,” Noma recalls. “He always gently encouraged us with positive feedback.”
“We also grappled with the question of what an ‘entertainment robot’ could be. It had to be something that would surprise and delight people. We didn’t have a fixed idea, and we didn’t set out to create a robot dog.”
The team did look to living creatures for inspiration, studying dog and cat locomotion. Their next prototype lost two of the six legs and gained a head, tail, and more sophisticated AI abilities that created the illusion of canine characteristics.
A mid-1998 version of the robot, nicknamed Mutant, ran on Sony’s Aperios OS, the operating system the company developed to control consumer devices. The robot had 16 degrees of freedom, a million-instructions-per-second (MIPS) 64-bit reduced-instruction-set computer (RISC) processor, and 8 megabytes of DRAM, expandable with a PC card. It could walk on uneven surfaces and use its camera to recognize motion and color—unusual abilities for robots of the time. It could dance, shake its head, wag its tail, sit, lie down, bark, and it could even follow a colored ball around. In fact, it was a little bundle of energy.
Looks-wise, the bot had a sleek new “coat” designed by Doi’s friend Hajime Sorayama, an industrial designer and illustrator known for his silvery gynoids, including the cover art for an Aerosmith album. Sorayama gave the robot a shiny, bulbous exterior that made it undeniably cute. Noma, now the team’s product planner and software engineer, felt they were getting closer to the goal. But when he presented the prototype to Otsuki in 1999, Otsuki was unimpressed. That’s when Noma was dispatched to Ryōan-ji to figure out how to make the robot seem not just cute but somehow alive.
Established in 1450, Ryōan-ji is a Rinzai Zen sanctuary known for its meticulously raked rock garden featuring five distinctive groups of stones. The stones invite observers to quietly contemplate the space, and perhaps even the universe, and that’s what Noma did. He realized what Doi wanted Aibo to convey: a sense of tranquility. The same concept had been incorporated into the design of what was arguably Japan’s first humanoid robot, a large, smiling automaton named Gakutensoku that was unveiled in 1928.
The rock garden at the Ryōan-ji Zen temple features carefully composed groupings of stones with unknown meaning. Bjørn Christian Tørrissen/Wikipedia
Roboticist Masahiro Mori, originator of the Uncanny Valley concept for android design, had written about the relationship between Buddhism and robots back in 1974, stating, “I believe robots have the Buddha-nature within them—that is, the potential for attaining Buddhahood.” Essentially, he believed that even nonliving things were imbued with spirituality, a concept linked to animism in Japan. If machines can be thought of as embodying tranquility and spirituality, they can be easier to relate to, like living things.
“When you make a robot, you want to show what it can do. But if it’s always performing, you’ll get bored and won’t want to live with it,” says Noma. “Just as cats and dogs need quiet time and rest, so do robots.” Noma modified the robot’s behaviors so that it would sometimes slow down and sleep. This reinforced the illusion that it was not only alive but had a will of its own. Otsuki then gave the little robot dog the green light.
The cybernetic canine was named Aibo for “Artificial Intelligence roBOt” and aibō, which means “partner” in Japanese.
In a press release, Sony billed the machine as “an autonomous robot that acts both in response to external stimuli and according to its own judgment. ‘AIBO’ can express various emotions, grow through learning, and communicate with human beings to bring an entirely new form of entertainment into the home.” But it was a lot more than that. Its 18 degrees of freedom allowed for complex motions, and it had a color charge-coupled device (CCD) camera and sensors for touch, acceleration, angular velocity, and range finding. Aibo had the hardware and smarts to back up Sony’s claim that it could “behave like a living creature.” The fact that it couldn’t do anything practical became irrelevant.
The debut Aibo ERS-110 was priced at 250,000 yen (US $2,500, or a little over $4,700 today). A motion editor kit, which allowed users to generate original Aibo motions via their PC, sold for 50,000 yen ($450). Despite the eye-watering price tag, the first batch of 3,000 robots sold out in 20 minutes.
Noma wasn’t surprised by the instant success. “We aimed to realize a society in which people and robots can coexist, not just robots working for humans but both enjoying a relationship of trust,” Noma says. “Based on that, an entertainment robot with a sense of self could communicate with people, grow, and learn.”
Hideko Mori plays fetch with her Aibo ERS-7 in 2015, after it was returned to her from an Aibo hospital. Aibos are popular with seniors in Japan, offering interactivity and companionship without requiring the level of care of a real dog.Toshifumi Kitamura/AFP/Getty Images
Aibo was the first consumer robot of its kind, and over the next four years, Sony released multiple versions of its popular pup across two more generations. Some customer responses were unexpected: as a pet and companion, Aibo was helping empty-nest couples rekindle their relationship, improving the lives of children with autism, and having a positive effect on users’ emotional states, according to a 2004 paper by AI specialist Masahiro Fujita, who collaborated with Doi on the early version of Aibo.
“Aibo broke new ground as a social partner. While it wasn’t a replacement for a real pet, it introduced a completely new category of companion robots designed to live with humans,” says Minoru Asada, professor of adaptive machine systems at Osaka University’s graduate school of engineering. “It helped foster emotional connections with a machine, influencing how people viewed robots—not just as tools but as entities capable of forming social bonds. This shift in perception opened the door to broader discussions about human-robot interaction, companionship, and even emotional engagement with artificial beings.”
Aibo also played a crucial role in the evolution of autonomous robotics, particularly in competitions like RoboCup, notes Asada, who cofounded the robot soccer competition in the 1990s. Whereas custom-built robots were prone to hardware failures, Aibo was consistently reliable and programmable, and so it allowed competitors to focus on advancing software and AI. It became a key tool for testing algorithms in real-world environments.
By the early 2000s, however, Sony was in trouble. Leading the smartphone revolution, Apple and Samsung were steadily chipping away at Sony’s position as a consumer-electronics and digital-content powerhouse. When Howard Stringer was appointed Sony’s first non-Japanese CEO in 2005, he implemented a painful restructuring program to make the company more competitive. In 2006, he shut down the robot entertainment division, and Aibo was put to sleep.
What Sony’s executives may not have appreciated was the loyalty and fervor of Aibo buyers. In a petition to keep Aibo alive, one person wrote that the robot was “an irreplaceable family member.” Aibo owners were naming their robots, referring to them with the word ko (which usually denotes children), taking photos with them, going on trips with them, dressing them up, decorating them with ribbons, and even taking them out on “dates” with other Aibos.
For Noma, who has four Aibos at home, this passion was easy to understand.
Hideki Noma [right] poses with his son Yuto and wife Tomoko along with their Aibo friends. At right is an ERS-110 named Robbie (inspired by Isaac Asimov’s “I, Robot”), at the center is a plush Aibo named Choco, and on the left is an ERS-1000 named Murphy (inspired by the film Interstellar).
Hideki Noma
“Some owners treat Aibo as a pet, and some treat it as a family member,” he says. “They celebrate its continued health and growth, observe the traditional Shichi-Go-San celebration [for children aged 3, 5, and 7] and dress their Aibos in kimonos.…This idea of robots as friends or family is particular to Japan and can be seen in anime like Astro Boy and Doraemon. It’s natural to see robots as friends we consult with and sometimes argue with.”
With the passion of Aibo fans undiminished and the continued evolution of sensors, actuators, connectivity, and AI, Sony decided to resurrect Aibo after 12 years. Noma and other engineers returned to the team to work on the new version, the Aibo ERS-1000, which was unveiled in January 2018.
Fans of all ages were thrilled. Priced at 198,000 yen ($1,760), not including the mandatory 90,000-yen, three-year cloud subscription service, the first batch sold out in 30 minutes, and 11,111 units sold in the first three months. Since then, Sony has released additional versions with new design features, and the company has also opened up Aibo to some degree of programming, giving users access to visual programming tools and an application programming interface (API).
A quarter century after Aibo was launched, Noma is finally moving on to another job at Sony. He looks back on his 17 years developing the robot with awe. “Even though we imagined a society of humans and robots coexisting, we never dreamed Aibo could be treated as a family member to the degree that it is,” he says. “We saw this both in the earlier versions of Aibo and the latest generation. I’m deeply grateful and moved by this. My wish is that this relationship will continue for a long time.”
U.S. presidential administrations tend to have big impacts on tech around the world. So it should be taken as a given that when Donald Trump returns to the White House in January, his second administration will do the same. Perhaps more than usual, even, as he staffs his cabinet with people closely linked to the Heritage Foundation, the Washington, D.C.–based conservative think tank behind the controversial 900-page Mandate for Leadership (also known as Project 2025). The incoming administration will affect far more than technology and engineering, of course, but here at IEEE Spectrum, we’ve dug into how Trump’s second term is likely to impact those sectors.
Read on to find out more, or click to navigate to a specific topic. This post will be updated as more information comes in.
During Trump’s campaign, he vowed to rescind President Joe Biden’s 2023 executive order on AI, saying in his platform that it “hinders AI Innovation, and imposes Radical Leftwing ideas on the development of this technology.” Experts expect him to follow through on that promise, potentially killing momentum on many regulatory fronts, such as dealing with AI-generated misinformation and protecting people from algorithmic discrimination.
However, some of the executive order’s work has already been done; rescinding it wouldn’t unwrite reports or roll back decisions made by various cabinet secretaries, such as the Commerce secretary’s establishment of an AI Safety Institute. While Trump could order his new Commerce secretary to shut down the institute, some experts think it has enough bipartisan support to survive. “It [helps develop] standards and processes that promote trust and safety—that’s important for corporate users of AI systems, not just for the public,” says Doug Calidas, senior vice president of government affairs for the advocacy group Americans for Responsible Innovation.
As for new initiatives, Trump is expected to encourage the use of AI for national security. It’s also likely that, in the name of keeping ahead of China, he’ll expand export restrictions relating to AI technology. Currently, U.S. semiconductor companies can’t sell their most advanced chips to Chinese firms, but that rule contains a gaping loophole: Chinese companies need only sign up for U.S.-based cloud computing services to get their AI computations done on state-of-the-art hardware. Trump may close this loophole with restrictions on Chinese companies’ use of cloud computing. He could even expand export controls to restrict Chinese firms’ access to foundation models’ weights—the numerical parameters that define how a machine learning model does its job. —Eliza Strickland
Trump plans to implement hefty tariffs on imported goods, including a 60 percent tariff on goods from China, 25 percent on those from Canada and Mexico, and a blanket 10 or 20 percent tariff on all other imports. He’s pledged to do this on day 1 of his administration, and once implemented, these tariffs would hike prices on many consumer electronics. According to a report published by the Consumer Technology Association in late October, the tariffs could induce a 45 percent increase in the consumer price of laptops and tablets, as well as a 40 percent increase for video-game consoles, 31 percent for monitors, and 26 percent for smartphones. Collectively, U.S. purchasing power for consumer technology could drop by US $90 billion annually, the report projects. Tariffs imposed during the first Trump administration have continued under Biden.
Meanwhile, the Trump Administration may take a less aggressive stance on regulating Big Tech. Under Biden, the Federal Trade Commission has sued Amazon for maintaining monopoly power and Meta for antitrust violations, and worked to block mergers and acquisitions by Big Tech companies. Trump is expected to replace the current FTC chair Lina Khan, though it remains unclear how much the new administration—which bills itself as antiregulation—will affect the scrutiny Big Tech is facing. Executives from major companies including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Intel, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Qualcomm congratulated Trump on his election on social media, primarily X. (The CTA also issued congratulations.) —Gwendolyn Rak
On 6 November, the day the election was called for Trump, Bitcoin jumped 9.5 percent, closing at over $75,000—a sign that the cryptocurrency world expects to boom under the next regime. Donald Trump marketed himself as a procrypto candidate, vowing to turn America into the “crypto capital of the planet” at a Bitcoin conference in July. If he follows through on his promises, Trump could create a national bitcoin reserve by holding on to bitcoin seized by the U.S. government. Trump also promised to remove Gary Gensler, the chair of the Securities and Exchanges Commission, who has pushed to regulate most cryptocurrencies as securities (like stocks and bonds), with more government scrutiny.
While it may not be within Trump’s power to remove him, Gensler is likely to resign when a new administration starts. It is within Trump’s power to select the new SEC chair, who will likely be much more lenient on cryptocurrencies. The evidence lies in Trump’s procrypto cabinet nominations: Howard Lutnick as Commerce Secretary, whose finance company oversees the assets of the Tether stablecoin; Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the Secretary of Health and Human Services, who has said in a post that “Bitcoin is the currency of freedom”; and Tulsi Gabbard for the Director of National Intelligence, who had holdings in two cryptocurrencies back in 2018. As Trump put it at that Bitcoin conference, “The rules will be written by people who love your industry, not hate your industry.” —Kohava Mendelsohn
Trump’s plans for the energy sector focus on establishing U.S. “energy dominance,” mainly by boosting domestic oil and gas production, and deregulating those sectors. To that end, he has selected oil services executive Chris Wright to lead the U.S. Department of Energy. “Starting on day 1, I will approve new drilling, new pipelines, new refineries, new power plants, new reactors, and we will slash the red tape,” Trump said in a campaign speech in Michigan in August.
Trump’s stance on nuclear power, however, is less clear. His first administration provided billions in loan guarantees for the construction of the newest Vogtle reactors in Georgia. But in an October interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, Trump said that large-scale nuclear builds like Vogtle “get too big, and too complex, and too expensive.” Trump periodically shows support for the development of advanced nuclear technologies, particularly small modular reactors (SMRs).
As for renewables, Trump plans to “terminate” federal incentives for them. He vowed to gut the Inflation Reduction Act, a signature law from the Biden Administration that invests in electric vehicles, batteries, solar and wind power, clean hydrogen, and other clean energy and climate sectors. Trump trumpets a particular distaste for offshore wind, which he claims will end “on day 1” of his next presidency.
The first time Trump ran for president, he vowed to preserve the coal industry, but this time around, he rarely mentioned it. Coal-fired electricity generation has steadily declined since 2008, despite Trump’s first-term appointment of a former coal lobbyist to lead the Environmental Protection Agency. For his next EPA head, Trump has nominated former New York Representative Lee Zeldin—a play expected to be central to Trump’s campaign pledges for swift deregulation. —Emily Waltz
The Biden-Harris administration’s signature achievement in semiconductors was the 2022 CHIPS and Science Act, which promised to revitalize chipmaking in the United States. When the bill was passed, there was no leading-edge manufacturing done in the country. In its early years, the new administration will enjoy a very different environment with at least two leading-edge fabs, one from Intel and one from TSMC, scheduled for operation. Nevertheless, the Biden administration is concerned about the Act’s implementation under Trump, so it is rushing to get as much done as possible before inauguration day.
“I’d like to have really almost all of the money obligated by the time we leave,” Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo told Politico in mid-November, adding that the CHIPS office had been working seven-day weeks toward that goal. Prior to the election, only $123 million was committed. But between the election and Thanksgiving it pumped out nearly $16 billion more, including $6.6 billion to TSMC and $7.8 billion to Intel to help build those advanced fabs. Critics worry that this haste is coming at that expense of workforce goals, tax-payer guardrails, and environmental review.
Even if the incoming administration were interested in pulling back on this manufacturing boon, it would be difficult, says one Washington expert. Unlike many other programs, that part of the CHIPS Act has a five-year appropriation, so Congress would have to act to specifically defund it. And with manufacturing funds in negotiation for projects in at least 20 states, such a move could be politically costly to Congressional Republicans.
The Biden-Harris administration has also been busy on the “and Science” part of the Act— deciding the sites for two of three R&D centers as well as promising billions for packaging R&D, semiconductor workforce development programs, and defense-related research.
Harish Krishnaswamy, a managing director at Sivers Semiconductors and Columbia University wireless expert, is part of two projects funded by the latter program. With the initial contracts already signed earlier this month, he isn’t worried about the funding through the project’s first year. “I think where there’s uncertainty is the extension to year two and year three,” he says.
As for semiconductor R&D coming from the National Science Foundation, it’s not a likely target in the short term, says Russell Harrison, executive director of IEEE-USA. And it can always fall victim to general budget cutting. “Research is an easy thing to cut out of a budget, politically. In the first year there is little broad impact. It’s in the 10th year that you have a big problem, but nobody is thinking that long term.” —Samuel K. Moore
The incoming administration hasn’t laid out too many specifics about transportation yet, but Project 2025 has lots to say on the subject. It recommends the elimination of federal transit funding, including programs administered by the Federal Transit Administration (FTA). This would severely impact local transit systems—for instance, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in New York City could lose nearly 20 percent of its capital funding, potentially leading to fare hikes, service cuts, and project delays. Kevin DeGood, Director of Infrastructure Policy at the Center for American Progress, warns that “taking away capital or operational subsidies to transit providers would very quickly begin to result in systems breaking down and becoming unreliable.” DeGood also highlights the risk to the FTA’s Capital Investment Grants, which fund transit expansion projects such as rail and bus rapid transit. Without this support, transit systems would struggle to meet the needs of a growing population.
Project 2025 also proposes spinning off certain Federal Aviation Administration functions into a government-sponsored corporation. DeGood acknowledges that privatization can be effective if well structured, and he cautions against assuming that privatization inherently leads to weaker oversight. “It’s wrong to assume that government control means strong oversight and privatization means lax oversight,” he says.
Project 2025’s deregulatory agenda also includes rescinding federal fuel-economy standards and halting initiatives like Vision Zero, which aims to reduce traffic fatalities. Additionally, funding for programs designed to connect underserved communities to jobs and services would be cut. Critics, including researchers from Berkeley Law, argue that these measures prioritize cost-cutting over long-term resilience.
Trump has also announced plans to end the $7,500 tax credit for purchasing an electric vehicle. —Willie D. Jones
Thanks to generous funding from the ON Semiconductor Foundation, TryEngineering has partnered with IEEE members to develop several new resources about semiconductors for middle school educators. The resources include lesson plans, an e-book, and videos. The grant also paid for the creation of in-person professional development sessions for educators—which were held at three locations in the United States.
The foundation is part of Onsemi’s Giving Now program. The company, headquartered in Scottsdale, Ariz., is a semiconductor manufacturer serving tens of thousands of customers across several markets with intelligent power and sensing technologies. Onsemi funds STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art, and math) educational activities for underprivileged youth in underserved communities where it operates globally.
“We are so grateful to have partners like Onsemi who share our passion for inspiring students to change the world as an engineer or technology professional,” says Jamie Moesch, IEEE Educational Activities managing director. “The work we have developed together is being used by instructors around the world to become more comfortable teaching students about semiconductors, microelectronics, and more.”
The Making of a Microchip lesson plan covers how a chip is created using low-cost accessible materials. Included is an introduction to the engineering design process and an overview of terms used in the semiconductor industry.
The plan has additional exploratory activities, called missions, to introduce students to semiconductor technology. Teachers can assign the missions as a series of projects over a two-week period or to differentiate instruction, providing opportunities for further exploration to anyone interested in semiconductors.
Complementing the lesson plan is the new Microchip Adventures e-book, which explains how semiconductors are made.
The grant also funded the creation of three recorded interviews with IEEE members who have semiconductor expertise. The three videos—Electronic Packaging, The Semiconductor Industry, and What Is a Semiconductor?—are intended to familiarize students with industry terms used by engineers. The videos can supplement the lesson plans or act as standalone resources.
One of the videos features interviews with staff members at Ozark Integrated Circuits, a privately held company in Fayetteville, Ark., owned by IEEE Region 5 Director Matt Francis. The company specializes in design techniques and modeling and design tools for integrated circuits and systems on chip for extreme environments.
Another interview was with Kathy Herring Hayashi, an IEEE member and Region 6 director. She is a software consultant and a computer science instructor in the San Diego Community College District and at Palomar College, in San Marcos, Calif.
Francis, an IEEE senior member, and a team of IEEE members and semiconductor experts—Stamatis Dragoumanos, Lorena Garcia, and Case Kirk—developed the video content.
Onsemi’s award included funding to create and deliver in-person professional development sessions to teachers across the United States. The first Technology for Teachers sessions were held in Phoenix; Fayetteville, Ark.; and New Brunswick, N.J.
The Arizona State University electrical engineering department hosted the first session. Faculty members gave the participants a tour of the university’s NanoFab, a nanoscale processing and fabrication facility.
In Fayetteville, teachers toured Ozark Integrated Circuits, where they met with engineers and technologists. In addition, the Making of a Microchip lesson was launched at the sessions, and the teachers viewed the videos.
“The work we have developed together is being used by instructors around the world to become more comfortable teaching students about semiconductors, microelectronics, and more.” —Jamie Moesch, IEEE Educational Activities managing director
“Fifteen Arkansas and Missouri middle school teachers learned about the semiconductor supply chain, and they left with guided lesson plans, engaging videos, and the newest content for their classrooms,” Francis says. “We toured Ozark Integrated Circuits and ended up brainstorming about the future. Listening to them talk about their kids back home—and how they are going to ‘get this’—really tugged at my heart. It reminded me of wanting to know how those ‘magic computers’ worked when I was at their age.”
Participants in New Brunswick, welcomed by Rutgers University, toured its Nanofabrication CORE Facility, which provides students with skills and capabilities to have a career in the semiconductor industry.
“TryEngineering’s Technology for Teachers program offered a unique professional development opportunity for educators,” says Debra Gulick, IEEE Educational Activities director of student and academic education programs. “Combining access to engaging resources and the opportunity to meet with IEEE engineers and tour state-of-the-art facilities made this an inspiring experience and one that teachers were able to bring into their classrooms.”
As a result of TryEngineering’s efforts this year, Onsemi’s Giving Now program has renewed its financial support for next year.
IEEE Educational Activities is honored to be a part of the ON Semiconductor Foundation’s generous support of US $2 million to fund global outreach programs, Moesch says.
Teachers receive the materials they need to bring the activities back to their classrooms, and to inspire the next generation of engineers and technologists.
TryEngineering staff and volunteers are collaborating with Field Day researchers at the University of Wisconsin—Madison to develop a game that simulates challenges faced in the semiconductor industry. Players can learn about the technology and the supply chain while playing the game.
“We have such an incredible opportunity right now to reach traditionally underserved populations with information about the career paths available in the semiconductor industry,” says Jennifer Fong, IEEE Educational Activities director of continuing education and business development. “This creates more economic opportunity for more people.
“As IEEE takes a comprehensive approach to semiconductor workforce development, starting with preuniversity programs and continuing with microcredentials for those without four-year degrees [as well as] skills and competency frameworks for technical jobs, training courses, and more, we will have the greatest impact through partnership. I applaud Onsemi’s focus on making sure we engage kids early so we have the workforce needed for the future.”
The content can be found in the TryEngineering website’s semiconductors section.
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months. Please send us your events for inclusion.
Enjoy today’s videos!
Step into the future of factory automation with MagicBot, the cutting-edge humanoid robots from Magiclab. Recently deployed to production lines, these intelligent machines are mastering tasks like product inspections, material transport, precision assembly, barcode scanning, and inventory management.
[ Magiclab ]
Some highlights from the IEEE / RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots - Humanoids 2024.
[ Humanoids 2024 ]
This beautiful feathered drone, PigeonBot II, comes from David Lentik’s lab at University of Groningen in the Netherlands. It was featured in Science Robotics just last month.
[ Lentink Lab ] via [ Science ]
Thanks, David!
In this video, Stretch AI takes a language prompt of “Stretch, put the toy in basket” to control Stretch to accomplish the task.
[ Hello Robot ]
Simone Giertz, “the queen of shitty robots,” interviewed by our very own Stephen Cass.
[ IEEE Spectrum ]
We present a perceptive obstacle-avoiding controller for pedipulation, i.e. manipulation with a quadrupedal robot’s foot.
[ Pedipulation ]
Kernel Foods has revolutionized fast food by integrating KUKA robots into its kitchen operations, combining automation with human expertise for consistent and efficient meal preparation. Using the KR AGILUS robot, Kernel optimizes processes like food sequencing, oven operations, and order handling, reducing the workload for employees and enhancing customer satisfaction.
[ Kernel Foods ]
If this doesn’t impress you, skip ahead to 0:52.
[ Paper via arXiv ]
Thanks, Kento!
The cuteness. I can’t handle it.
[ Pollen ]
A set of NTNU academics initiate a new research lab - called Legged Robots for the Arctic & beyond lab - responding to relevant interests within the NTNU student community. If you are a student and have relevant interests, get in touch!
[ NTNU ]
Extend Robotics is pioneering a shift in viticulture with intelligent automation at Saffron Grange Vineyard in Essex, addressing the challenges of grape harvesting with their robotic capabilities. Our collaborative project with Queen Mary University introduces a robotic system capable of identifying ripe grapes through AI-driven visual sensors, which assess ripeness based on internal sugar levels without damaging delicate fruit. Equipped with pressure-sensitive grippers, our robots can handle grapes gently, preserving their quality and value. This precise harvesting approach could revolutionise vineyards, enabling autonomous and remote operations.
[ Extend Robotics ]
Code & Circuit, a non-profit organization based in Amesbury, MA, is a place where kids can use technology to create, collaborate, and learn! Spot is a central part of their program, where educators use the robot to get younger participants excited about STEM fields, coding, and robotics, while advanced learners have the opportunity to build applications using an industrial robot.
[ Code & Circuit ]
During the HUMANOIDS Conference, we had the chance to speak with some of the true rock stars in the world of robotics. While they could discuss robots endlessly, when asked to describe robotics today in just one word, these brilliant minds had to pause and carefully choose the perfect response.
Personally I would not have chosen “exploding.”
[ PAL Robotics ]
Lunabotics provides accredited institutions of higher learning students an opportunity to apply the NASA systems engineering process to design and build a prototype Lunar construction robot. This robot would be capable of performing the proposed operations on the Lunar surface in support of future Artemis Campaign goals.
[ NASA ]
Before we get into all the other course projects from this term, here are a few free throw attempts from ROB 550’s robotic arm lab earlier this year. Maybe good enough to walk on the Michigan basketball team? Students in ROB 550 cover the basics of robotic sensing, reasoning, and acting in several labs over the course: here the designs to take the ball to the net varied greatly, from hook shots to tension-storing contraptions from downtown. These basics help them excel throughout their robotics graduate degrees and research projects.
[ University of Michigan Robotics ]
Wonder what a Robody can do? This. And more!
[ Devanthro ]
It’s very satisfying watching Dusty print its way around obstacles.
[ Dusty Robotics ]
Ryan Companies has deployed Field AI’s autonomy software on a quadruped robot in the company’s ATX Tower site in Austin, TX, to greatly improve its daily surveying and data collection processes.
[ Field AI ]
Since landing its first rover on Mars in 1997, NASA has pushed the boundaries of exploration with increasingly larger and more sophisticated robotic explorers. Each mission builds on the lessons learned from the Red Planet, leading to breakthroughs in technology and our understanding of Mars. From the microwave-sized Sojourner to the SUV-sized Perseverance—and even taking flight with the groundbreaking Ingenuity helicopter—these rovers reflect decades of innovation and the drive to answer some of science’s biggest questions. This is their evolution.
[ NASA ]
Welcome to things that are safe to do only with a drone.
[ Team BlackSheep ]
When the lights went out on the BCS East-West Interlink fiber optic cable connecting Lithuania and Sweden on 17 November, the biggest question wasn’t when internet service would be restored. (That’d come another 10 or so days later.) The outage—alongside a cable failure the next day of an undersea line connecting Finland and Germany—soon became a whodunit, as German, Swedish, and Finnish officials variously hinted that the damage to the lines could constitute acts of “sabotage” or “hybrid warfare.” Suspicion soon centered around Russia or China—especially given the presence of a Chinese-flagged cargo vessel in the area during both incidents.
The outages underscore how much of the global communications and financial system hinges on a few hundred cables of bundled glass fibers that are strung across ocean floors around the world, each cable about the same diameter as a garden hose. And, says Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Hudson Institute, defending undersea fiber optic cables from damage and sabotage is increasingly challenging. The technology to do so is nowhere near bulletproof, he says, yet the steep cost of failing to protect them is too high to consider simply writing them off. (NATO is currently investigating future internet backup routes through satellites in the case of undersea cable failures. But that technology is only in a preliminary, proof-of-concept stage and may be many years from real-world relevance.)
“In the past, when these kinds of cable cutting incidents have happened, the perpetrator has tried to somehow disguise the source of the disruption, and China’s not necessarily doing that here,” Clark says. “What we’re seeing now is that maybe countries are doing this more overtly. And then also they may be using specialized equipment to do it rather than dragging an anchor.”
Clark says protecting undersea cables in the Baltic is actually one of the less-challenging situations on the geostrategic map of seafloor cable vulnerabilities. “In the Mediterranean and the Baltic, the transit lanes or the distance you have to patrol is not that long,” he says. “And so there are some systems being developed that would just patrol those cables using uncrewed vehicles.”
In other words, while the idea of uncrewed underwater vehicles (UUVs) regularly patrolling internet cableways is still in the realm of science fiction, it’s not that far removed from science fact as to be out of the realm of soon-to-be-realized possibility.
But then comes the lion’s share of the undersea internet cables around the world—the lines of fiber that traverse open oceans across the globe.
In these cases, Clark says, there are two regions of each cables’ path. There’s the deep sea portion—the Davy Jones’ Locker realm where only top-secret missions and movie directors on submarine jags dare venture. And then there are the portions of cable in shallower waters, typically nearer to coasts, that are accessible by present day anchors, submersibles, drones, and lord-knows-what-other kinds of underwater tech.
Moreover, once an undersea cable ventures into the legal purview of a given country—what’s called a nation’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ)—that in particular is when fancy, newfangled tech to defend or attack an undersea line must take a backseat to old-fashioned military and policing might.
Satellite imaging and underwater drones, says the Hudson Institute’s Bryan Clark, are two technologies that can protect undersea fiber optic lines. Hudson Institute
“If you were patrolling the area and just monitoring the surface, and you saw a ship [traveling] above where the cables are, you could send out Coast Guard forces, paramilitary forces,” Clark says. “It would be a law enforcement mission, because it’s within the EEZs of different countries who are owners of those cables.”
In fact, the Danish navy reportedly did just that concerning the Baltic voyage of a Chinese-flagged chip called Yi Peng 3. And now Sweden is calling for the Yi Peng 3 to cooperate in an inspection of the ship in a larger investigation of the undersea cable breaches.
According to Lane Burdette, research analyst at the internet infrastructure analysis firm TeleGeography, the vastness of undersea internet lines points to a dilemma of shoring up the high-vulnerability shallow regions and setting aside for the time being the deeper realms beyond protection.
“As of 2024, TeleGeography estimates there are 1.5 million kilometers of communications cables in the water,” she says. “With a network this large, it’s not possible to monitor all cables, everywhere, all the time. However, new technologies are emerging that make it easier to monitor activity where damage is most likely and potentially prevent even some accidental disruption.”
At the moment, much of the game is still defensive, Clark says. Efforts to lay undersea internet cable lines today, he says, can also include measures to cover the lines to prevent their detection or dig small trenches to protect the lines from being severed or dragged by ships’ anchors.
Satellite imaging will be increasingly crucial in defending undersea cables, Clark adds. Geospatial analysis offered by the likes of the Herndon, Va.-based BlackSky Technology and SpaceX’s Starshield will be essential for countries looking to protect their high-bandwidth internet access. “You’ll end up with low-latency coverage over most of the mid-latitudes within the next few years, which you could use to monitor for ship operations in the vicinity of known cable runs,” Clark says.
However, once UUVs are ready for widespread use, he adds, the undersea internet cable cat-and-mouse game could change drastically, which UUV being used offensively as well as defensively.
“A lot of these cables, especially in shallow waters, are in pretty well-known locations,” he says. “So in the Baltic, you could see where Russia [might] deploy a relatively large number of uncrewed vehicles—and cut a large number of cables at once.”
All of which could one day render something like the Yi Peng 3 situation—a Chinese-flagged freighter trawling over known runs of undersea internet cabling—a quaint relic of the pre-UUV days.
“Once you’ve determined where you’re pretty sure a cableway is, you could drive your ship over, deploy your uncrewed vehicles, and then they could loiter,” Clark says. “And then you could cut the cable five days later, in which case you wouldn’t be necessarily blamed for it, because your ship traveled over that region a week ago.”
