2026-06-04 02:00:02
New graduates’ careers are unfolding in an era when AI is not optional. The most successful engineers treat artificial intelligence as leverage, not competition.
Here are seven tips to help keep young professionals in demand no matter how quickly the field’s tools evolve.
1. Master the fundamentals first. AI tools can help you code, but you still need strong fundamentals in:
AI can autocomplete syntax, but if you don’t understand how things work under the hood, you’re likely to struggle to debug or optimize.
2. Learn how to work with AI, not against it. The best engineers will not try to out-code AI. Instead, they will learn to:
Think of AI as a teammate. The real skill is knowing when to trust it and when not to.
3. Build projects that showcase end-to-end thinking. Employers increasingly look for engineers who can design and build systems, not just solve problems. Create projects that show you can:
4. Sharpen your system design skills early. Even junior engineers are now asked questions about basic system design with AI. Expect to explain to prospective employers:
5. Develop strong communication skills. Today’s engineers don’t just code in isolation. You will be expected to:
This is one area where AI cannot replace you. Clear communication is a career accelerant.
6. Stay curious and keep learning. The tech industry moves fast, and AI is accelerating that pace. Cultivate habits such as:
Employers value engineers who keep themselves sharp and relevant.
7. Think beyond coding. AI will increasingly handle routine coding tasks. The differentiators for you will be:
For more career advice, subscribe to the IEEE Spectrum Career Alert Newsletter. The biweekly newsletter features the latest information on jobs, education, management, and the engineering workplace.
2026-06-03 19:00:01
This sponsored article is brought to you by Black & Veatch.
The biggest challenge facing utilities today isn’t what it seems. It’s not demand, even as load growth accelerates. It’s not extreme weather, even as “major events” become routine. It’s not cybersecurity, even as connections expand across the grid.
The real challenge is this: Distribution systems were designed for a different reality.
Long gone are the days of predictable demand, one-way power flow and isolated disruptions. At Black & Veatch, we see that leading utilities are no longer debating whether to modernize. They’re deciding how quickly they can do it, and how to do it at scale.
Across grid modernization programs globally, three truths consistently emerge. They define what it takes to prepare the distribution system for what’s next:
Resilience is being redefined in real time. A strategy centered on mobilizing crews and restoring service as quickly as possible is reactive, and increasingly insufficient.
Resilience has to shift upstream into integrated system design. That starts with hardening. Stronger poles, undergrounding and structural upgrades all have a role, particularly in high-risk corridors. We’re also seeing meaningful gains from how the network is configured and how quickly it can respond without waiting on manual intervention.
This is where distribution automation programs can change outcomes. Strategically placed reclosers, automated switches and fault indicators help contain disruptions before they spread. When combined with feeder reconfiguration and updated protection strategies, distribution automation investments allow utilities to set more aggressive recovery targets and achieve measurable reductions in outage duration and customer impact.
Forecasting is less and less reliable. Only 19 percent of utilities report strong confidence in their ability to predict future load growth, according to the Black & Veatch 2025 Electric Report. Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) like solar, storage, EVs and behind-the-meter generation are exciting solutions; but they fundamentally change how the system operates. Power is no longer just delivered. It’s injected, stored and redirected in ways the system was never designed to manage.
At scale, these challenges show up quickly — particularly on feeders where distributed generation is approaching or exceeding hosting capacity. Protection coordination becomes more difficult when fault current comes from multiple directions. Voltage becomes less predictable as generation fluctuates throughout the day. And planning models must now account for highly variable, location-specific behavior.
Distribution modernization is fundamentally changing how the system is designed and operated so it can absorb disruption, manage bi-directional flows and respond in real time.
Adapting to bi-directional power flow requires more than incremental updates. Leading utilities are responding by building flexibility into the system, moving beyond static assumptions toward dynamic hosting capacity and interconnection studies, planning that incorporates DER, EV adoption and localized load growth, and infrastructure aligned with the communications and control needed to manage it.
As system stress and complexity increase, utilities need far greater visibility and control over the network. Historically, utilities relied on customer calls, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) at the substation level and field crews to understand what was happening on the system. That model doesn’t hold up. You can’t effectively manage a system you can’t see. Plus, the most critical events are increasingly happening beyond the substation — on feeders, laterals, and at the edge where DER and customer behavior are interacting with the grid.
Grid-edge technologies have become essential. Sensors, Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) and automated switching provide the raw data and control needed to move from reactive to proactive operations. In more advanced deployments, utilities are creating centralized control environments that allow operators to see and manage the distribution system in near real time. That capability is enabled by:
The same connectivity enabling this real-time visibility and control also introduces new vulnerabilities, blurring the line between physical and cyber risk, yet many utilities manage them separately. Only 22 percent have unified teams in place, even as threats continue to rise, including a 50 percent increase in substation attacks and growing exposure to malware and ransomware, according to the Black & Veatch 2025 Electric Report. Cybersecurity and resilient network design must be embedded into the architecture from the outset—not layered on after the fact.
Distribution modernization is fundamentally changing how the system is designed and operated so it can absorb disruption, manage bi-directional flows and respond in real time.
To learn about a successful program, check out Georgia Power’s recent grid modernization program. Black & Veatch partnered with the utility on large-scale infrastructure upgrades. The results? Outages are down 76 percent, restoration times have improved by more than 80 percent and communities across Georgia are powered by a grid built to meet the future head-on.
When the state faced the most destructive storm in the company’s history, Hurricane Helene, Georgia Power deployed a rapid response team that utilized its “smart grid” and restored power to more than 1 million customers within days.
A grid built to meet the future head-on—that’s the result of bolder vision.2026-06-02 18:00:02
Direct-to-cell technology uses LEO satellites as spaceborne cell towers. It delivers LTE services to existing smartphones without hardware changes, bridging global coverage gaps.
What Attendees will Learn
2026-06-02 02:00:02
Children born after 2013 are the first generation to grow up fully immersed in digital systems, which weren’t designed with them in mind. One‑third of the world’s Internet users are younger than 18, according to UNICEF, yet these systems shaping their daily lives were built for adults. They were optimized for engagement and designed long before people understood how profoundly digital environments influence children.
For engineers and technical professionals, online safety is not an abstract policy debate. It is a design challenge that demands rigor, systems thinking, and ethical foresight.
Governments around the world are also beginning to recognize the problem. Policymakers from across Australia, Brazil, the European Union, Indonesia, and the United States are responding to risks engineers have long understood: Addictive features, inappropriate content, opaque data practices, and algorithmic systems shape user behavior in ways that their creators did not fully predict. For years, technology moved faster than governance. Now governance is trying to catch up.
In Athens this year I met with senior leaders of Greek government agencies and key national research institutions. Greece is moving quickly on digital transformation and responsible technology governance, and our discussions reinforced IEEE’s role as a trusted, neutral collaborator.
We focused on supporting Greece’s ambitions in digital modernization and public‑sector innovation. We also discussed responsible AI and age-appropriate digital design in Europe and elsewhere. These engagements, grounded in shared values and long‑term commitment, strengthened IEEE’s presence within the European ecosystem and opened new pathways for collaboration on trustworthy AI and child‑focused digital well‑being.
The European Union and the United Kingdom have been among the first to act, embedding age‑appropriate digital design into their broader children’s rights agenda. Drawing on IEEE expertise and global best practices, Indonesia is the first country in Asia, and Brazil is the first country in Latin America, to adopt age-appropriate design regulation. Australia is aiming to limit access to harmful content and addictive design features through age restrictions on certain platforms. And in the United States, in addition to federal efforts, states including California, New York, and Utah are enacting approaches including age-appropriate design principles.
Across these efforts, a shared realization is emerging. Protecting children online is not simply about filtering content or adding parental controls. It requires rethinking the architecture of digital systems regarding how data is collected, how algorithms make decisions, how interfaces influence attention, and how AI interacts with the developing minds of young users.
Engineers and technical professionals understand that design choices are never neutral. They encode values, incentives, and assumptions. When the user is a child, those choices carry greater weight.
This is where IEEE’s work becomes more essential.
For more than a decade, IEEE has been building technical and ethical foundations for safer digital experiences. The first IEEE standard on age-appropriate design in 2021 marked a turning point. It offers a structured, principled approach to designing with children’s rights in mind. The Institute’s 2022 article “Use a New IEEE Standard to Design a Safer Digital World for Kids” highlights how the standard helps translate those principles into engineering practice.
Today the IEEE Standards Association’s (SA) Trustworthy Digital Experiences portfolio provides a practical, technically grounded framework for governments and industry. Spanning ethical design, data governance, algorithmic transparency, and child‑focused digital well‑being, it has already initiated discussions with government stakeholders around the world. This work helps bridge the gap between engineering realities and policy ambitions.
No single country can solve these challenges alone. Many policymakers lack access to the combined expertise in technology, governance, and children’s rights needed to act quickly and effectively. This collaborative effort helps close that gap.
The stakes are high. Without coordinated action, public policy will continue to lag behind technology, leaving children exposed to risks that could have been mitigated through thoughtful design. But with the right frameworks, governments can ensure digital systems respect children’s rights, support healthy development, and promote well‑being.
IEEE’s emerging standards and collaborative technology policy work offer a path forward. By grounding national efforts in evidence‑based, rights-aligned design principles, IEEE is helping governments move from reactive regulation to proactive, coherent, and globally informed strategies for protecting children online.
Safeguarding childhood in the digital age is both a moral imperative and an engineering challenge. And IEEE is helping to lead the way.
—Mary Ellen Randall
IEEE president and CEO
Please share your thoughts with me: [email protected].
This article appears in the June 2026 print issue.
2026-06-01 19:06:01
“Not in my backyard” is the rallying cry of citizens everywhere resisting projects proposed for their locality. Whether it’s affordable housing, a waste treatment plant, or a new data center, they may recognize the benefit of the activity. They just don’t want it near them. And the roots of that resistance differ from place to place. When it comes to the ongoing transition from fossil fuels to renewables, companies and policymakers need to know where, exactly, people are coming from.
The Italian island of Sardinia is a textbook example. As IEEE Spectrum’s power and energy editor Emily Waltz discovered when she traveled there last October, Sardinian opposition to wind and solar projects runs deep. It spurred a quarter of the voting population to queue up in public squares in 2024 to sign a petition banning all construction of renewable energy.
Waltz was surprised. She went there to see a promising new grid-scale energy storage system that uses domes inflated with carbon dioxide. While reporting on that project, she interviewed residents, engineers, activists, and professors about their attitudes toward climate change and the Italian government’s grand plans for renewable energy on the island. And Waltz soon learned of Sardinians’ profound antipathy toward renewable energy and its deep ties to a history of invasion, occupation, and exploitation stretching back 2,700 years.
It started with the Phoenicians and then extended through the Romans, the Byzantines, and the Iberians. Sardinia was absorbed into a newly unified Italy in 1861, and it became an autonomous region of Italy in 1948. The island’s population is justifiably suspicious of outsiders, including the Italian government. “When you’re in Sardinia, the weight of history—you can feel it like in the air,” Waltz told me. “And it gets passed down from one generation to the next.”
Now, Italy needs Sardinia to produce even more power to meet the country’s climate goals—something that Sardinians see as Rome’s problem, not theirs. “Sardinia already exports about 30 percent of its electricity. It’s not like they need more,” Waltz says. “So it’s hard to make the case to build, build, build.”
The result of Waltz’s old-fashioned shoe leather reporting is this month’s cover story. She notes that the Sardinians she talked to aren’t climate-change deniers, and they don’t object to renewables per se. They just don’t like the way corporations and Italian policymakers are trying to plug into Sardinia like it’s one giant battery rather than the home of an ancient and proud people.
“I think Sardinians would be more receptive to renewable projects if it was more of a ground-up, grassroots approach,” Waltz says. Indeed, this homegrown approach is already working in some places in Sardinia. She knows of more than 50 projects, called energy communities, where the residents are deploying renewables themselves. The idea also holds promise for other places struggling to get locals to buy into the renewable-energy transition.
The Sardinian experience is both a cautionary tale and a blueprint. Ignore the weight of history that communities carry and your project risks failure. Meet the people where they are and you might just get somewhere. The same lesson applies whether you’re in Sulawesi or sub-Saharan Africa. You just have to show up to learn it.2026-05-31 21:00:01
In 1987, Richard Greenhill, a British photographer who was fascinated by (but had no actual training in) robotics, decided he wanted to build a life-size humanoid that could do useful things, like carrying luggage. He was working at a startup called Intergalactic Robots, but he couldn’t convince anyone there to build such a machine, so he set about building one himself, in his attic.
To help with his project, he organized a weekly get-together of a dozen or so like-minded folks. Every Wednesday night, his wife, Sally, would make a big pot of spaghetti, and the group would tinker with components scavenged from old printers and picked up from junkyards. They called themselves the Shadow Group. They eventually constructed several different robots, but their main project was the two-legged Shadow Walker.
In 1987, photographer Richard Greenhill organized a weekly gathering of DIY enthusiasts to work on projects in his attic, including the Shadow Walker. Richard Greenhill and David Buckley
Greenhill’s friend David Buckley, a robotics and animatronics expert he’d met at Intergalactic, sketched out a rough design based on medical textbooks of human bone structure and muscle movement. The robot’s skeleton, made of maple, was greatly simplified—only one bone in the lower leg and a single wide toe on each foot. The ankle’s double-axis design allowed for two degrees of movement. The knee had no complicating kneecap.
Greenhill didn’t want the robot to use motors, so its movement was controlled using compressed air to extend and contract 28 “air-muscles”—his version of a McKibben muscle, invented in the 1950s to mimic musculature with pneumatics. The muscles were connected to the bones across eight joints (hips, knees, ankles, toes), which provided 12 degrees of freedom.
The robot’s headless torso held the control valves, electronics, and computer interfaces. It stood 168 centimeters tall and 46 cm wide and weighed about 38 kilograms. The group managed to get the robot to stand up reliably and balance itself; it could even regain its center if pushed a little. But walking turned out to be more of a challenge.
Rich Walker joined the group as a teenager and began writing software to get the robot to stand. He was particularly interested in using neural networks to solve balancing problems, although he ran into a number of hardware obstacles, including the unreliability of the sensors and the valves, and the robot’s overall fragility. Over time, Walker and the team developed a standard library of routines to control the robot. Walker wrote a detailed description of the Shadow Walker in 1999, which is available on David Buckley’s website.
By the time the Shadow Group began developing Shadow Walker, engineers in academia and industry had been working on robotics for several decades. The world’s first industrial robot, the Unimate, debuted in 1961, and in 1967 Donald Michie and others began building a series of Freddy robots to investigate machine intelligence. The IEEE created its first dedicated robotics organization in 1984 when it established the IEEE Robotics and Automation Council, which became the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society in 1987. Also in 1987, the nonprofit International Federation of Robotics was established to promote research, development, use, and cooperation in the field of robotics.
As Shadow Walker pushed the limits for a DIY humanoid robot, industrial humanoids were also gaining ground. In 1986, Honda began working on its experimental (E-series) and later the prototype (P-series) humanoid robots, finally unveiling the P2 in 1996. The P2 stood 183 cm tall and weighed 210 kg. It was the first humanoid capable of stable, autonomous walking. This work eventually led to the development of the groundbreaking ASIMO.
Greenhill’s friend, roboticist David Buckley, consulted medical textbooks to create Shadow Walker’s humanoid design.Richard Greenhill and David Buckley
In the late 1980s, the public was both fascinated and horrified by the potential of robots. Businesses saw robots as a way to increase productivity, while workers worried they would take their jobs. Children viewed them as wondrous toys, while people with disabilities embraced them as tools of liberation. Military experts hoped robots would fight wars without endangering human soldiers, while politicians pondered if robots might eventually get to vote. Philosophers thought robots could challenge our notions of intelligence (and stupidity), while the religious struggled with concerns about the human race in a robot-dominated future.
Shadow Walker’s simplified anatomy included only one bone in the lower leg and a single wide toe on each foot.Science Museum Group
Mowforth himself thought all of the competing visions of robots were overblown. Steeped in machine learning research and robotics development, he knew firsthand the limitations of the state of the art: Robots rarely worked as intended, easily broke down, and glitched over seemingly trivial problems. He envisioned the Robot Olympics as a testbed to assess what the latest generation of robots could and could not do.
At the 1990 Robot Olympics, held in Glasgow, Shadow Walker wore pants to conceal its pneumatic “air-muscles” from competitors.Adam Hart-Davis/Science Source
The call for participation was wide open. Instead of having predetermined categories of competition, the organizers opted to see who applied to compete and then group them based on their claimed capabilities. In addition to picking the winners of individual events, the judges would select an overall Olympic champion based on the quality of the hardware, the sophistication of behavior, and novelty. Other prizes were given for young competitors, technologies that showed commercial potential, and design. In the end, more than 50 robots were entered, from a mix of universities, industry, and hobbyist groups from Canada, France, India, Japan, Mexico, the Soviet Union, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Yugoslavia.
There were plenty of disappointments. Trolleyman, a golf-cart-like wheeled robot, suffered a power failure while carrying the opening Olympic torch through the streets of Glasgow. The pile rug in the arena tripped up many robots that had been trained only on flat, smooth floors. David Buckley later concluded that the events were too difficult, and that the Olympics didn’t push development forward.
Of course, there were winners. In a surprise triumph for vintage technology, the fully mechanical 19th-century Japanese Archer from the Museum of Automata in York, England, won gold in javelin, beating out competitors more than 100 years its junior. The overall Olympic Champion was Yamabico, Shoji Suzuki’s entry from the University of Tsukuba, in Japan, which won bronze in obstacle avoidance and gold in wall following, but was disqualified in the talking category for not speaking English.
The Shadow Group had high hopes for Shadow Walker. Unfortunately, though, it failed to take a step, and the biped race was won by the Cardiff University Biped. Shadow Walker now resides in the collections of the Science Museum in London.
In 1997, a paying customer in search of a robotic leg compelled the Shadow Group to get serious and become a registered company. Shadow Robot is now Britain’s oldest robotics company. Rich Walker, who had left the Shadow Group to earn a B.A. in mathematics and a diploma in computer science at the University of Cambridge, joined Shadow Robot in 1999 as technical director. Today he’s the director of the company.
Shadow Robot specializes in durable robot hands rather than walking robots. But the focus on hands is also a legacy of the Shadow Group. Walker remembers that the Shadow Group’s first humanoid hand in the late 1990s was impressive simply for being able to pick up a pint of beer (a smooth-sided, thin-walled glass). Today, Shadow Robot’s hands are testbeds for dexterity. Gone are the pneumatic muscles, replaced by actuators that move each finger with precision. The classic model contains 20 motors, allowing for abductive and adductive movement with 24 degrees of freedom.
Shadow Walker’s operator wore a data suit that captured his movements and allowed the robot to copy them.Richard Greenhill
In a recent blog post, Sejal Parsotomo, senior marketing executive at Shadow Robot, wrote that while humanoid robots are great for public relations, specialized dexterity is key for success: A robot that can walk into your factory may be impressive, but a robot that can reliably manipulate objects is transformative.
In its struggles to take more than a few steps, the Shadow Walker showed the inherent difficulty that robots had in mastering even low-level skills. In August 2025, Beijing hosted the World Humanoid Robot Games. Competing in sports such as gymnastics, soccer, and track events, as well as more “useful” tasks like hotel cleaning and sorting medicine, these robots could literally have run circles around the competitors in the first Robot Olympics 35 years earlier. And yet, there is still so much work needed in order for robots to navigate the human-built environment. Despite the astonishing progress, we’re still not all that close to actually useful humanoid robots.
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 June 2026 print issue as “Learning to Walk.”
Richard Greenhill gives an overview of his life and the founding of the Shadow Group in a post on Shadow Robot’s corporate website.
David Buckley has a compilation of resources on the Shadow Biped Walker, including specifications from the 1999 iteration and a brochure from the 1st International Robot Olympics.
There is coverage of the Robot Olympics worthy of a gossip sheet in La Repubblica and lovely footage of the competition in this TV-am interview of Peter Mowforth by Lorraine Kelly.