2026-04-22 00:43:49
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When I was promoted to engineering manager of a mid-sized team at Clorox, I thought I had made it.
More money. More stock. More visibility. More proximity to senior leadership. From the outside, and on paper, it was clearly a promotion.
I had often heard the phrase, “Management isn’t a promotion. It’s a job switch.” I brushed it off as cliché advice engineers tell each other to sound wise.
It turns out both things were true. It was a promotion. It was also an entirely different job.
And I was nowhere near ready for what that meant.
There’s surprisingly little training for new managers. As engineers, we’re highly technical and used to mastering complex systems. Many of us assume managing people will be easier than distributed systems. Or we assume it’s just “more meetings.”
Both assumptions are wrong.
Yes, I had more meetings. But what changed most wasn’t my calendar, it was how my impact was measured. As an individual contributor, my output was visible. Code shipped. Features delivered. Bugs fixed.
As a manager, my impact became indirect. It flowed through other people.
That shift was disorienting.
So I fell back into my comfort zone. I started writing more code. I tried to be the strongest engineer on the team. It felt productive and measurable.
It was also a mistake.
By trying to be the number one engineer, I was neglecting my actual job. I wasn’t supporting senior engineers. I wasn’t unblocking systemic problems. I wasn’t building career paths. I was competing with the very people I was supposed to enable.
Management is about amplification.
The turning point came when I began each week with a simple question:
What is the single most impactful thing I can do right now?
Often, it wasn’t code. It was writing a document that clarified direction. It was fixing a broken process with a single point of failure. It was redistributing ownership so that knowledge wasn’t concentrated in one person.
I started deliberately removing myself from implementation work. I committed to writing almost no code. That forced trust. It also revealed gaps in the system that I could address at the right level: through coaching, documentation, hiring, or process changes.
Another major shift was taking one-on-one meetings seriously.
Many engineers dislike one-on-ones. They can feel awkward or devolve into status updates. I scheduled them every other week and approached them with a mix of tactical alignment and human check-in.
I rarely started with engineering questions. Instead:
Burnout doesn’t show up in Jira tickets. Neither does quiet disengagement.
Those conversations helped me anticipate turnover, redistribute workload, and build trust.
I also spent more time thinking about career ladders. Was I giving my team the kind of work that would help them grow? Was I hoarding high-visibility projects? Was I clear about what senior-level impact looked like?
That work felt less tangible than code, but it moved the needle far more.
Ultimately, I returned to the individual contributor track.
Part of it was practical: I was laid off from my management role, and the market rewarded senior IC roles more strongly at the time. But if I’m honest, the deeper reason was simpler.
I love writing code.
I enjoy improving systems and helping people, but the part of my day that energized me most was still building. Management required relinquishing that. You can’t be absorbed in technical implementation and deeply people-focused at the same time. Something has to give.
Personally, I don’t need to climb the corporate ladder to feel successful. And you might not have to. Many organizations offer technical leadership tracks that are truly in parity with management when it comes to salary bands. Staff and principal engineers steer strategy without managing people.
If you want to remain deeply technical, you should think very carefully before moving into people management. It requires surrendering control over implementation and focusing on alignment, growth, and long-range planning. If you don’t genuinely care about those things, you won’t just be unhappy, you’ll make your team unhappy.
Before taking a management role, ask yourself:
There’s no right answer.
The IC/manager fork isn’t about prestige. It’s about what kind of work you want your days to consist of.
Choose based on energy, not ego.
—Brian
Stanford University’s AI Index is out for 2026, tracking trends and noble developments in artificial intelligence. This year, China has taken a notable lead in AI model releases and industrial robotics compared to previous years. AIs are rapidly reaching benchmarks and achieving high levels of compute, but public trust in AI and confidence in government regulation of AI is mixed.
Much like large language models have learned from existing texts, new AI physics models are being trained on simulation results. This results in “large physics models” that can simulate situations in transportation, aerospace, or semiconductor engineering much faster than traditional physics simulations. Using new AI physics models “can be anywhere between 10,000 to close to a million times faster,” says Jacomo Corbo, CEO and co-founder of PhysicsX.
Kyle McGinley is an IEEE Student Member pursuing a bachelor’s degree in electrical and computer engineering at Temple University. Joining IEEE helped him to develop the skills necessary for real-world teams. “In school, they don’t teach you how to communicate with people. They only teach you how to remember stuff,” he says.
2026-04-21 21:00:01
Why does a chocolatier build a railroad? For Milton S. Hershey, it was a logical response to a sugar shortage brought on by World War I. The Hershey Chocolate Co. was by then a chocolate-making powerhouse, having refined the automation and mass production of its products, including the eponymous Hershey’s Milk Chocolate Bar and the bite-size Hershey’s Kiss. To satisfy its many customers, the company needed a steady supply of sugar. Plus, it wanted a way to circumvent the American Sugar Refining Co., also known as the Sugar Trust, which had a virtual monopoly on sugar processing in the United States.
Beginning in 1916, Hershey looked to Cuba to secure his sugar supply. According to historian Thomas R. Winpenny, the chocolate magnate had a “personal infatuation” with the lush, beautiful island. What’s more, U.S. business interests there were protected by a treaty known as the Platt Amendment, which made Cuba a satellite state of the United States.
Like many industrialists of the day, Hershey believed in vertical integration, and the company’s Cuban operation eventually expanded to include five sugar plantations, five modern sugar mills, a refinery, several company towns, and an oil-fired power plant with three substations to run it all.
A 1943 rail pass entitled the holder to travel on all ordinary passenger trains of the Hershey Electric Railway. Hershey Community Archives
The company also built a railroad. To maximize the sugar yield, the cane needed to be ground promptly after being cut, and the rail system offered an efficient means of transporting the cane to the mills, and ensured that the mills operated around the clock during the harvest. By 1920, one of Hershey’s three main sites was processing 135,000 tonnes of cane, yielding 14.4 million kilograms of sugar.
Initially, the Hershey Cuban Railway consisted of a single 56-kilometer-long standard gauge track on which ran seven steam locomotives that burned coal or oil. But due to the high cost of the imported fuel and the inefficiency of the locomotives, Hershey began electrifying the line in 1920. Although it was the first electrified train in Cuba, rail lines in Europe and the United States were already being electrified.
In addition to powering the various Hershey entities, the generating station supplied Matanzas and the smaller towns with electricity. F.W. Peters of General Electric’s Railway and Traction Engineering Department published a detailed account of the system in the April 1920 General Electric Review.
The company town of Central Hershey became the headquarters for Hershey’s Cuba operations. (“Central” is the Cuban term for a mill and the surrounding settlement.) It sat on a plateau overlooking the port of Santa Cruz del Norte, about halfway between Havana and Matanzas in the heart of Cuba’s sugarcane region.
Hershey imported the industrial utopian model he had established in Hershey, Penn., which was itself inspired by Richard and George Cadbury’s Bournville Village outside Birmingham, England.
The chocolate magnate Milton S. Hershey had a “personal infatuation” with Cuba.Underwood Archives/Getty Images
In Cuba as in Pennsylvania, Hershey’s factory complex was complemented by comfortable homes for his workers and their families, as well as swimming pools, baseball fields, and affordable medical clinics staffed with doctors, nurses, and dentists. Managers had access to a golf course and country club in Central Hershey. Schools provided free education for workers’ children.
Milton Hershey himself had very little formal education, and so in 1909 he and his wife, Catherine, established the Hershey Industrial School in Hershey, Penn. There, white, male orphans received an education until they were 18 years old. Now known as the Milton Hershey School, the school has broadened its admission criteria considerably over the years.
Hershey duplicated this concept in the Cuban company town of Central Rosario, founding the Hershey Agricultural School. The first students were children whose parents had died in a horrific 1923 train accident on the Hershey Electric Railway. The high-speed, head-on collision between two trains killed 25 people and injured 50 more.
Milton Hershey was a generous philanthropist, and by most accounts he truly cared for his employees and their welfare, and yet his early 20th-century paternalism was not without fault. He was a fierce opponent of union activity, and any hard-won pay increases for workers often came at the expense of profit-sharing benefits. Like other U.S. businessmen in Cuba, Hershey employed migrant seasonal labor from neighboring Caribbean islands, undercutting the wages of local workers. Historians are still wrangling with how to capture the long-lasting effects of U.S. economic imperialism on Cuba.
Hershey continued to acquire new sugar plantations in Cuba throughout the 1920s, eventually owning about 24,300 hectares and leasing another 12,000 hectares. In 1946, a year after Milton Hershey’s death and amid growing political uncertainty on the island, the company sold its Cuban interests to the Cuban Atlantic Sugar Co. In addition to Hershey’s sugar operations, the sale included a peanut oil plant, four electric plants, and 404 km of railroad track plus locomotives and train cars.
Service on the Hershey Electric Railway in Cuba continued into at least the 2010s but became increasingly sporadic, with aging equipment like this car at the Central Hershey station. Hershey Community Archives
The Central Hershey sugar refinery continued to operate even after the Cuban Revolution but eventually closed in 2002. Passenger service, meanwhile, continued on the Hershey Electric Railway, albeit sporadically: By 2012, there were only two trips a day between Havana and Matanzas. This video, from 2013, gives a good sense of the route:
A colleague of mine who studies Cuban history told me that in his travels to the country over almost 30 years, he has never been able to ride the Hershey electric train. It was always out of service or had restricted service due to the island’s chronic electricity shortages, which have only gotten worse in recent years. I’ve been trying to find out if any part of the line is still operating. If you happen to know, please add a comment below.
Cuba’s frequent power outages make it difficult to operate the Hershey Electric Railway. In this 2009 photo, passengers await the restoration of electricity so they can continue their journey.Adalberto Roque/AFP/Getty Images
A 2024 analysis of the economic potential and challenges of reactivating Cuba’s Hershey Electric Railway noted that an electric railway could be a hedge against climate change and geopolitical factors. But it also acknowledged that frequent power outages and damaged infrastructure argue against reactivating the electrified railway, and it favored the diesel engines used on most of Cuba’s rail network.
Cuba has been mostly off-limits to U.S. tourists for my entire life, but it was one of my grandmother’s favorite vacation spots. I would love to imagine a future where political ties are restored, the power grid is stabilized, and the Hershey Electric Railway is reopened to the Cuban public and to curious visitors like me.
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 May 2026 print issue as “This Chocolate Empire Ran on Electric Rails.”
In April 1920, F.W. Peters of General Electric’s Railway and Traction Engineering Department wrote a detailed account called “Electrification of the Hershey Cuban Railway” in the General Electric Review, which was later abstracted in Scientific American Monthly to reach a broader audience.
Thomas R. Winpenny’s article “Milton S. Hershey Ventures into Cuban Sugar” in Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, Fall 1995, provided background to the business side of Hershey’s Cuba enterprise.
Florian Wondratschek’s 2024 article “Between Investment Risk and Economic Benefit: Potential Analysis for the Reactivation of the Hershey Railway in Cuba” in Transactions on Transport Sciences brought the story up to the present.
And if you’re interested in a visual take on the Hershey operation on Cuba, check out the documentary Milton Hershey’s Cuba by Ric Morris, a professor of Spanish and linguistics at Middle Tennessee State University.
2026-04-21 02:00:02
When the robotics engineering field that Maja Matarić wanted to work in didn’t exist, she helped create it. In 2005 she helped define the new area of socially assistive robotics.
As an associate professor of computer science, neuroscience, and pediatrics at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, she developed robots to provide personalized therapy and care through social interactions.
Employer
University of Southern California, Los Angeles
Job Title
Professor of computer science, neuroscience, and pediatrics
Member grade
Fellow
Alma maters
University of Kansas and MIT
The robots could have conversations, play games, and respond to emotions.
Today the IEEE Fellow is a professor at USC. She studies how robots can help students with anxiety and depression undergo cognitive behavioral therapy. CBT focuses on changing a person’s negative thought patterns, behaviors, and emotional responses.
For her work, she received a 2025 Robotics Medal from MassRobotics, which recognizes female researchers advancing robotics. The Boston-based nonprofit provides robotics startups with a workspace, prototyping facilities, mentorship, and networking opportunities.
When receiving the award at the ceremony in Boston, Matarić was overcome with joy, she says.
“I’ve been very fortunate to be honored with several awards, which I am grateful for. But there was something very special about getting the MassRobotics medal, because I knew at least half the people in the room,” she says. “Everyone was just smiling, and there was a great sense of love.”
Matarić grew up in Belgrade, Serbia. Her father was an engineer, and her mother was a writer. After her father died when she was 16, Matarić and her mother moved to the United States.
She credits her father for igniting her interest in engineering, and her uncle who worked as an aerospace engineer for introducing her to computer science.
Matarić says she didn’t consider herself an engineer until she joined USC’s faculty, since she always had worked in computer science.
“In retrospect, I’ve always been an engineer,” Matarić says. “But I didn’t set out specifically thinking of myself as one—which is just one of the many things I like to convey to young people: You don’t always have to know exactly everything in advance.”
Maja Matarić and her lab are exploring how socially assistive robots can help improve the communication skills of children with autism spectrum disorder. National Science Foundation News
While pursuing her bachelor’s degree in computer science at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, she was introduced to industrial robotics through a textbook. After earning her degree in 1987, she had an opportunity to continue her education as a graduate student at MIT’s AI Lab (now the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab). During her first year, she explored the different research projects being conducted by faculty members, she said in a 2010 oral history conducted by the IEEE History Center. She met IEEE Life Fellow Rodney Brooks, who was working on novel reactive and behavior-based robotic systems. His work so excited her that she joined his lab and conducted her master’s thesis under his tutelage.
Inspired by the way animals use landmarks to navigate, Matarić developed Toto, the first navigating behavior-based robot. Toto used distributed models to map the AI Lab building where Matarić worked and plan its path to different rooms. Toto used sonar to detect walls, doors, and furniture, according to Matarić’s paper, “The Robotics Primer.”
After earning her master’s degree in AI and robotics in 1990, she continued to work under Brooks as a doctoral student, pioneering distributed algorithms that allowed a team of up to 20 robots to execute complex tasks in tandem, including searching for objects and exploring their environment.
Matarić earned her Ph.D. in AI and robotics in 1994 and joined Brandeis University, in Waltham, Mass., as an assistant professor of computer science. There she founded the Interaction Lab, where she developed autonomous robots that work together to accomplish tasks.
Three years later, she relocated to California and joined USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering as an assistant professor in computer science and neuroscience.
In 2002 she helped to found the Center for Robotics and Embedded Systems (now the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Center). The RASC focuses on research into human-centric and scalable robotic systems and promotes interdisciplinary partnerships across USC.
Matarić’s shift in her research came after she gave birth to her first child in 1998. When her daughter was a bit older and asked Matarić why she worked with robots, she wanted to be able to “say something better than ‘I publish a lot of research papers,’ or ‘it’s well-recognized,’” she says.
“In academia, you can be in a leadership role and still do research. It’s a wonderful and important opportunity that lets academics be on top of our field and also train the next generation of students and help the next generation of faculty colleagues.”
“Kids don’t consider those good answers, and they’re probably right,” she says. “This made me realize I was in a position to do something different. And I really wanted the answer to my daughter’s future question to be, ‘Mommy’s robots help people.’”
Matarić and her doctoral student David Feil-Seifer presented a paper defining socially assistive robotics at the 2005 International Conference on Rehabilitation Robotics. It was the only paper that talked about helping people complete tasks and learn skills by speaking with them rather than by performing physical jobs, she says.
Feil-Seifer is now a professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Nevada in Reno.
At the same time, she founded the Interaction Lab at USC and made its focus creating robots that provide social, rather than physical, support.
“At this point in my career journey, I’ve matured to a place where I don’t want to do just curiosity-driven research alone,” she says. “Plenty of what my team and I do today is still driven by curiosity, but it is answering the question: ‘How can we help someone live a better life?’”
In 2006 she was promoted to full professor and made the senior associate dean for research in USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering. In 2012 she became vice dean for research.
“In academia, you can be in a leadership role and still do research,” she says. “It’s a wonderful and important opportunity that lets academics be on top of our field and also train the next generation of students and help the next generation of faculty colleagues.”
One of the longest research projects Matarić has led at her Interaction Lab is exploring how socially assistive robots can help improve the communication skills of children with autism spectrum disorder. ASD is a lifelong neurological condition that affects the way people interact with others, and the way they learn. Children with ASD often struggle with social behaviors such as reading nonverbal cues, playing with others, and making eye contact.
Matarić and her team developed a robot, Bandit, that can play games with a child and give the youngster words of affirmation. Bandit is 56 centimeters tall and has a humanlike head, torso, and arms. Its head can pan and tilt. The robot uses two FireWire cameras as its eyes, and it has a movable mouth and eyebrows, allowing it to exhibit a variety of facial expressions, according to the IEEE Spectrum’s robots guide. Its torso is attached to a wheeled base.
The study showed that when interacting with Bandit, children with ASD exhibited social behaviors that were out of the ordinary for them, such as initiating play and imitating the robot.
Matarić and her team also studied how the robot could serve as a social and cognitive aid for elderly people and stroke patients. Bandit was programmed to instruct and motivate users to perform daily movement exercises such as seated aerobics.
Maja Matarić and doctoral student Amy O’Connell testing Blossom, which is being used to study how it can aid students with anxiety or depression.University of Southern California
Over the years, Matarić’s lab developed other robots including Kiwi and Blossom. Kiwi, which looked like an owl, helped children with ASD learn social and cognitive skills, helped motivate elderly people living alone to be more physically active, and mediated discussions among family members. Blossom, originally developed at Cornell, was adapted by the Interaction Lab to make it less expensive and personalizable for individuals. The robot is being used to study how it can aid students with anxiety or depression to practice cognitive behavioral therapy.
Matarić’s line of research began when she learned that large language model (LLM) chatbots were being promoted to help people with mental health struggles, she said in an episode of the AMA Medical News podcast.
“It is generally not easy to get [an appointment with a] therapist, or there might not be insurance coverage,” she said. “These, combined with the rates of anxiety and depression, created a real need.”
That made the chatbot idea appealing, she says, but she was interested to see if they were effective compared with a friendly robot such as Blossom.
Matarić and her team used the same LLMs to power CBT practice with a chatbot and with Blossom. They ran a two-week study in the USC dorms, where students were randomly assigned to complete CBT exercises daily with either a chatbot or the robot. Participants filled out a clinical assessment to measure their psychiatric distress before and after each session.
The study showed that students who interacted with the robot experienced a significant decrease in their mental state, Matarić said in the podcast, and students who interacted with the chatbot did not.
“Joining an [IEEE] society has an impact, and it can be personal. That’s why I recommend my students join the organization—because it’s important to get out there and get connected.”
She and her team also reviewed transcripts of conversations between the students and the robot to evaluate how well the LLM responded to the participants. They found the robot was more effective than the chatbot, even though both were using the same model.
Based on those findings, in 2024 Matarić received a grant from the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health to conduct a six-week clinical trial to explore how effective a socially assistive robot could be at delivering CBT practice. The trial, currently underway, also is expected to study how Blossom can be personalized to adapt to each user’s preferences and progress, including the way the robot moves, which exercises it recommends, and what feedback it gives.
During the trial, the 120 students participating are wearing Fitbits to study their physiologic responses. The participants fill out a clinical assessment to measure their psychiatric distress before and after each session.
Data including the participants’ feelings of relating to the robot, intrinsic motivation, engagement, and adherence will be assessed by the research team, Matarić says.
She says she’s proud of the graduate students working on this project, and seeing them grow as engineers is one of the most rewarding parts of working in academia.
“Engineers generally don’t anticipate having to work with human study participants and needing to understand psychology in addition to the hardcore engineering,” she says. “So the students who choose to do this research are just wonderful, caring people.”
Matarić joined IEEE as a graduate student in 1992, the year she published her first paper in IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation. The paper, “Integration of Representation Into Goal-Driven Behavior-Based Robots,” described her work on Toto.
As a member of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society, she says she has gained a community of like-minded people. She enjoys attending conferences including the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, and the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, which is closest to her field of research.
Matarić credits IEEE Life Fellow George Bekey, the founding editor in chief of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics, for recruiting her for the USC engineering faculty position. He knew of her work through her graduate advisor Brooks, who published a paper in the journal that introduced reactive control and the subsumption architecture, which became the foundation of a new way to control robots. It is his most cited paper. Bekey, who was editor in chief at the time, helped guide Brooks through the challenging review process. Matarić joined Brooks’s lab at MIT two years after its publication, and her work on Toto built on that foundation.
“Joining a society has an impact, and it can be personal,” she says. “That’s why I recommend my students join the organization—because it’s important to get out there and get connected.”
2026-04-19 21:00:02
In 1627, a year after the death of the philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon, a short, evocative tale of his was published. The New Atlantis describes how a ship blown off course arrives at an unknown island called Bensalem. At its heart stands Salomon’s House, an institution devoted to “the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things” and to “the effecting of all things possible.” The novel captured Bacon’s vision of a science built on skepticism and empiricism and his belief that understanding and creating were one and the same pursuit.
No mere scholar’s study filled with curiosities, Salomon’s House had deep-sunk caves for refrigeration, towering structures for astronomy, sound-houses for acoustics, engine-houses, and optical perspective-houses. Its inhabitants bore titles that still sound futuristic: Merchants of Light, Pioneers, Compilers, and Interpreters of Nature.
Francis Bacon wrote The Advancement and Proficience of Learning.Public Domain
Bacon didn’t conjure his story from nothing. Engineers he likely had met or observed firsthand gave him reason to believe such an institution could actually exist. Two in particular stand out: the Dutch engineer Cornelis Drebbel and the French engineer Salomon de Caus. Their bold creations suggested that disciplined making and testing could transform what we know.
Drebbel came to England around 1604 at the invitation of King James I. His audacious inventions quickly drew notice. By the early 1620s, he unveiled a contraption that bordered on fantasy: a boat that could dive beneath the Thames and resurface hours later, ferrying passengers from Westminster to Greenwich. Contemporary descriptions mention tubes reaching the surface to supply air, while later accounts claim Drebbel had found chemical means to replenish it. He refined the underwater craft through iterative builds, each informed by test dives and adjustments. His other creations included a perpetual-motion device driven by heat and air-pressure changes, a mercury regulator for egg incubation, and advanced microscopes.
De Caus, who arrived in England around 1611, created ingenious fountains that transformed royal gardens into animated spectacles. Visitors marveled as statues moved and birds sang in water-driven automatons, while hidden pipes and pumps powered elaborate fountains and mythic scenes. In 1615, de Caus published The Reasons for Moving Forces, an illustrated manual on water- and air-driven devices like spouts, hydraulic organs, and mechanical figures. What set him apart was scale and spectacle: He pressed ancient physical principles into the service of courtly theater.
Drebbel’s airtight submersibles and methodical trials echo in the motion studies and environmental chambers of Salomon’s House. De Caus’s melodic fountains and hidden mechanisms parallel its acoustic trials and optical illusions. From such hands-on workshops, Bacon drew the lesson that trustworthy knowledge comes from working within material constraints, through gritty making and testing. On the island of Bensalem, he imagines an entire society organized around it.
Beyond inspiring Bacon’s fiction, figures like Drebbel and de Caus honed his emerging philosophy. In 1620, Bacon published Novum Organum, which critiqued traditional philosophical methods and advocated a fresh way to investigate nature. He pointed to printing, gunpowder, and the compass as practical inventions that had transformed the world far more than abstract debates ever could. Nature reveals its secrets, Bacon argued, when probed through ingenious tools and stringent tests. Novum Organum laid out the rationale, while New Atlantis gave it a vivid setting.
Francis Bacon also wrote Novum Organum.Public Domain
That devotion to inquiry followed Bacon to the roadside one day in March 1626. In a biting late-winter chill, he halted his carriage for an impromptu trial. He bought a hen and helped pack its gutted body with fresh snow to test whether freezing alone could prevent decay. Unfortunately, the cold seeped through Bacon’s own body, and within weeks pneumonia claimed him. Bacon’s life ended with an experiment—and set in motion a larger one. In 1660, a group of London thinkers hailed Bacon as their inspiration in founding the Royal Society. Their motto, Nullius in verba (“take no one’s word for it”), committed them to evidence over authority, and their ambition was nothing less than to create a Salomon’s House for England.
The Royal Society and its successors realized fragments of Bacon’s dream, institutionalizing experimental inquiry. Over the following centuries, though, a distorting story took root: Scientists discover nature’s truths, and the rest is just engineering. Nineteenth-century “men of science” pressed for greater recognition and invented the title of “scientist,” creating a new professional hierarchy. Across the Atlantic, U.S. engineers adopted the rigorous science-based curricula of French and German technical schools and recast engineering as “applied science” to gain institutional legitimacy.
We still call engineering “applied science,” a label that retrofits and reverses history. Alongside it stands “technology,” a catchall word that obscures as much as it describes. And we speak of “development” as if ideas cascade neatly from theory to practice. But creation and comprehension have been partners from the start. Yes, theory does equip engineers with tools to push for further insights. But knowing often follows making, arising from things that someone made work.
Bacon’s imaginary academy offered only fleeting glimpses of its inventions and methods. Yet he had seen the real thing: engineers like Drebbel and de Caus who tested, erred, iterated, and pushed their contraptions past the edge of known theory. From his observations of those muddy, noisy endeavors, Bacon forged his blueprint for organized inquiry. Later generations of scientists would reduce Bacon’s ideas to the clean, orderly “scientific method.” But in the process, they lost sight of its inventive roots.
2026-04-17 22:00:50
A practical guide to designing log-periodic dipole array fed parabolic reflector antennas using advanced 3D MoM simulation — from parametric modeling to electrically large structures.
What Attendees will Learn
2026-04-17 02:00:01
Roughly 90 percent of hard tech startups fail due to funding constraints, longer R&D timelines for developing hardware, and the complexity of manufacturing their products, according to a number of studies.
Generally, these startups require up to 50 percent more investor financing than software ones, according to a Medium article. Typically, they need at least US $30 million, according to a Lucid article. That’s double the funding needed by software companies on average.
To help them connect with investors, IEEE Entrepreneurship in 2024 launched its Hard Tech Venture Summits. The two-day events connect founders with potential investors and other entrepreneurs. Attendees include manufacturers, design engineers, and intellectual property lawyers.
“Even though there are a lot of startup investor conferences, it’s hard to find those focused on hard tech,” says Joanne Wong, who helped initiate the program and is now the chair. She is a general partner at Redds Capital, a California-based venture capital firm that invests in global early-stage IT startups.
The IEEE member is also an entrepreneur. She founded SciosHub in 2020. The company’s software-as-a-service and informatics platform automates the data-management process for biomedical research labs.
“Many investors are focused on AI software—which is good,” she says. “But for hard tech companies, it is still hard to find support.”
The summit also includes a workshop to help founders navigate manufacturing processes and regulatory compliance. The event is open to IEEE members and others.
IEEE is a natural fit for the program, Wong says, because hard tech is synonymous with electrical engineering.
“Some of the domains we’re covering are robotics, semiconductors, and aerospace technology. IEEE has societies for all these fields,” she says. “Because of that, there are many resources within the organizations for startups, whether it be mentors or guides on how to commercialize products.”
There are several venture summits planned for this year. Two are scheduled in collaboration with the IEEE Systems Council: this month in Menlo Park, Calif., and in October in Toronto.
On 10 and 11 June, a third summit is scheduled to take place in Boston at the IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology Society’s International Microwave Symposium.
More events are being planned for next year in Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America.
Each summit includes keynote speakers, followed by networking roundtables. Each table is composed of people from three to five startups, one or two investors, and a service provider.
That arrangement helps founders build relationships, which is the summit organizers’ priority, Wong says. Investors at past events have included i3 Ventures, Monozukuri Ventures, and TSV Capital.
“The connection with the community was fantastic, especially investors and founders in robotics.” —Mark Boysen, founder of Naware
Startups present their pitch, which a number of investors evaluate before ranking the business plan and product. The top 10 startups pitch their business to all the investors.
On the second day, the startup founders participate in a half-day engineering design–to–manufacturing workshop, at which manufacturing engineers teach them how to navigate the process and meet regulations.
In an exhibition area, participants can see demonstrations from the startups and connect with service providers.
The 2025 event’s half-day engineering design–to–manufacturing workshop was led by Liz Taylor, president of DOER Marine. The company manufactures marine equipment.Larissa Abi Nakhle/IEEE
In a survey of past summit attendees, startup founders said the event connected them not only with investors but also with other entrepreneurs having similar struggles.
“The connection with the community was fantastic, especially investors and founders in robotics,” said Mark Boysen, who founded Naware. The company, based in Edina, Minn., developed a robot that uses AI to detect and remove weeds from golf courses, parks, and lawns.
“I loved getting the investors’ perspectives and understanding what they’re looking for,” Boysen said.
Jeffrey Cook, who attended a summit in 2024, said he met “a lot of great contacts and saw what the hard tech venture climate is like.”
Attendees of the Hard Tech Venture Summit spend the first day networking and presenting their pitch to investors. IEEE Entrepreneurship
“Those in the community would benefit from coming to the summit,” said Cook, who founded Gigantor Technologies in Melbourne Beach, Fla. It develops hardware systems for AI-powered devices.
More than 90 percent of attendees at the 2025 event in San Francisco said they would highly recommend the summit to others, according to a survey.
Investors and service providers also have found the events successful.
Ji Ke, a partner and the chief technology officer of deep tech VC firm SOSV, attended the 2025 summit.
“I met a lot of young entrepreneurs tackling some big challenges,” he said. “This is one of the best events to meet some very-early-stage companies.”
Startup founders who want to attend a summit must apply. Applications for this year’s events are open. Participants must be founders of preseed, seed, or Series A startups.
Preseed founders are seeking small investments to get their businesses off the ground. Those in the seed stage have already secured funding from their first investor. Series A startups have obtained funding and are developing their product.
Applicants are reviewed by a committee of investors to ensure the startups would be a good fit. Those who are approved are matched with investors and service providers based on their specialty.
“The journey for a hard tech startup is very long and arduous,” Wong says. “Founders need to meet as many investors as possible and other people who support hard tech systems so that they’re able to reach out to them for advice or help.”
Those interested in learning more about an upcoming event can send a request to [email protected].