Category: Human Impacts

ISTAS 2024 in Puebla, Mexico, has officially opened!
Tom Coughlin 2024 IEEE President gave the opening address this morning September 18, 2024, via recorded feed.
Virtual registration is still available for attendees outside of Mexico.

There is a clear parallel between conceptualizations of comedy clubs and AI labs as masculine spaces, and jokes and technology as for men. As Sutko writes, [AI] technology often gets equated with “men’s power,” while women and girls are portrayed as less technologically skilled and less interested than their male counterparts. Such stereotypes can contribute to the gender gap in women’s participation in related fields.

Welcome to the second installment of “Meet the Editorial Board.” We are delighted to introduce you to some more members of the IEEE Technology and Society Magazine’s editorial board.

While AI-generated responses can initially seem impressive, LLM and AI generated texts suffer from multiple risks, including hallucination and inaccuracy. 

Spain’s Comunitat Valenciana (Valencian Community) (Figure 1) has a rich agricultural history, with long traditions of resilience and innovation. This tradition,…  Read More

Social media platforms present a perplexing duality, acting at once as sites to build community and a sense of belonging, while also giving rise to misinformation, facilitating and intensifying disinformation campaigns and perpetuating existing patterns of discrimination from the physical world.

The LLES Project promotes the transformation of the conventional construction paradigm, incorporating bioclimatic architecture strategies like passive measures to minimize heat gain and maximize cooling.

Dr. Monica Huerta (Ecuador Section) was awarded the IEEE Region 9 Eminent Engineer Award for 2024 for R9.

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine is a rare place where social and technological concerns come together in a way that respects both the technological details as well as the critical, social areas that influence technological invention and adoption.

Dr. Kiani is a wonderful example of practicing what she preaches. First, she believes in talking with very young/K12 girls to get involved in STEM and she is very active in the IEEE-USA efforts. The implementation of the Nepal project is an example of “walk the talk.”

The term “explainability” is a multifaceted concept within the realm of computer science. In essence, it encompasses various aspects and capacities of a system to effectively convey its internal processes, decision-making, capabilities, and constraints to its users. Providing explanations can notably enhance initial trust, especially when trust is measured as a multidimensional concept that includes aspects such as competence, benevolence, integrity, intention to return, and perceived transparency.

We identified five key issues to prioritize when addressing gender equality: Reaching critical mass; Improving lived and living experience (maintaining critical mass); Selection and resource-allocation criteria; The misconception of merit in academia; Beyond gender equality.

These modernists aim to cultivate in readers the capacity to “think cybernetically”—that is, to develop strategies for responding in creative and generative ways to the 20th century’s complex sociocultural (and socio-technical) environment.

In June 2013 Presidents Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama signed a historic agreement to begin cooperation on cybersecurity. The mutual understanding developed through previous work in 2011 was to define critical terminology for a cyber conflict. I was part of the U.S. team that held the Russia-U.S. Bilateral discussions on cybersecurity. The aim was to build collaborative relationships between many nations in defining a common vocabulary so that mistakes would not be made because of misinterpretations of a certain word. It took us months just to agree on 20 terms

When an early-adopter buddy of mine stopped by recently in his brand-new electric Ford Mustang Mach-E GT, I was stunned at how impressed I was. For one thing, unlike other electric vehicles (EVs) I have seen up close (mostly Teslas), this one looked and felt like a real car: it had a real dashboard with real switches and knobs, a real brake pedal, and an overall design that did not look like something an eight-year-old doodled after seeing Blade Runner 2049. More importantly, it was by far the fastest vehicle I have ever driven, so much so that by the end of a quick spin I had an idiotic grin on my face I could not quite shake. It was, as Matthew Eisler reports in Age of Auto Electric, the “EV smile.”

Book review of The BBC: A Century on Air, by David Hendy

DCAI has the potential to revolutionize many industries and fields by enabling more efficient and effective decision-making based on insights extracted from data. Monitoring and evaluating the algorithm’s performance can help identify and mitigate biases over time, ensuring reliable and ethical results.

We urge that there be a federal mandate to include bionics in federal insurance programs and insurance companies regulated by Obamacare. As prostheses advance in sensory capabilities, insurance companies need to recognize prosthetic limbs as a part of the body susceptible to personal injury, not just as equipment, since they have haptic capabilities (i.e., the sense of touch) and can feel distress.

There have been many arguments made for why increasing diversity and improving the representation of women in this field is important such as workers shortage, estimated increase in countries’ gross domestic product (GDP) by including more women in this sector, creating software that better represents the needs of women overall—potentially addressing some of the existing biases in algorithms, and bringing about a general improvement in society.

Design for values is an umbrella term for approaches that pay systematic attention to social and moral values throughout the entire design process.