Artificial intelligence is the transformative, strategic technology of the early 21st century. It is significantly reshaping practically every aspect of our lives, including in ways that probably no one anticipated. Its rate of adoption and impact have been unprecedented when compared with other technologies.
AI as a distinct field was formally established in 1956 at the Dartmouth Summer…
In the late 1940s—when computer engineers were grappling with unreliable hardware and noisy transmission environments—a team of engineers inside a modest lab at the University of Manchester, England, confronted a problem so fundamental that it threatened the viability of digital computing itself. Machines could generate bits, but they could not reliably read them back.
The inconsistent…
Many of the world’s most advanced electronic systems—including Internet routers, wireless base stations, medical imaging scanners, and some artificial intelligence tools—depend on field-programmable gate arrays. Computer chips with internal hardware circuits, the FPGAs can be reconfigured after manufacturing.
On 12 March, an IEEE Milestone plaque recognizing the first FPGA was dedicated at…
When you hear the term humanoid robot, you may think of C-3PO, the human-cyborg-relations android from Star Wars__.__ C-3PO was designed to assist humans in communicating with robots and alien species. The droid, which first appeared on screen in 1977, joined the characters on their adventures, walking, talking, and interacting with the environment like a human. It was ahead of its…
Happy 80th anniversary, ENIAC! The Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, the first large-scale, general-purpose, programmable electronic digital computer, helped shape our world.
On 15 February 1946, ENIAC—developed in the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, in Philadelphia—was publicly demonstrated for the first time. Although primitive by…
During times of political turmoil, history often gets rewritten, erased, or lost. That is what happened to the legacy of Jan Czochralski, a Polish chemist whose contributions to semiconductor manufacturing were expunged after World War II.
In 1916 he invented a method for growing single crystals of semiconductors, metals, and synthetic gemstones. The process, now known as the Czochralski…