Willie D. Jones
IEEE Spectrum
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Past articles by Willie:
IBM Again Faces Allegations of Targeting Older Workers in Layoffs
Lawsuit says the company pushed longtime workers out because of their age and tenure, then coerced them into waiving their rights → Read More
DeepMind’s AI Shows Itself to Be a World-Beating World Builder
Bests human professional gamers in the complex strategy game StarCraft II → Read More
5 Things You Missed: Data Storage Obsolescence, X-Rays Map Out Chips, and More
5 Things You Missed: Highlights for the week of 24 April 2017 → Read More
5 Things You Missed: AI Algorithms Are Biased, They Know What You're Watching, and More
Image: iStockphoto Are we infecting machine learning algorithms with our human biases? A new study says yes. Apparently, an AI learning from existing English language texts will reflect the biases in those texts back at us. The researchers found that the AI was more likely to associate European-American names rather than African-American names with “pleasant” stimuli. It also tended to associate… → Read More
5 Things You Missed This Week at IEEE Spectrum: Clean Coal Conundrum, Boosting Females in STEM, and more
Photo: Mississippi Power For those who think the term “clean coal” is an oxymoron, here’s another data point in support of that assertion. The formation of system-fouling clinkers (chunks of ash fused to the gasifier mechanism) isn’t the only problem that has observers viewing a Mississippi integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) coal generation plant as a clunker. According to a report… → Read More
5 Things You Missed This Week at IEEE Spectrum: Nanorods for Li-Fi Displays, Health Apps Could Make People Sicker, and More
Moonsub Shim/University of Illinois In recent years, the hot application for quantum dots has been as a replacement for light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as a backlight source for liquid crystal displays. But now, an international team of researchers has produced engineered nanorods that each feature a quantum dot capable of emitting and absorbing visible light. With this advance, quantum dots could… → Read More
5 Things You Missed This Week at IEEE Spectrum: Nanorods for Li-Fi Displays, Health Apps Could Make People Sicker, and More
Moonsub Shim/University of Illinois In recent years, the hot application for quantum dots has been as a replacement for light-emitting diodes (LEDs) as a backlight source for liquid crystal displays. But now, an international team of researchers has produced engineered nanorods that each feature a quantum dot capable of emitting and absorbing visible light. With this advance, quantum dots could… → Read More
5 Things You Missed This Week at IEEE Spectrum: Solar DC Microgrids, Disposable Paper Drones, and More
Some of the highlights from the week of 30 January 2017 → Read More
5 Things You Missed This Week at IEEE Spectrum: A Primer on 5G, Can MOOCs Lower College Tuition, and more
Some of the highlights from the week of 23 January 2017 → Read More
5 Things You Missed This Week at IEEE Spectrum: Photonic Computing, Bendable Batteries, and More
Some of the highlights from the week of 2 January 2017 → Read More
What You Missed This Week at IEEE Spectrum: Jerk-Free Drones, a Killer Robots Ban, and more
Image: EPFL Drones don’t usually carry passengers at the moment, which is probably for the best. Their aerial maneuvers would probably cause even a trained fighter pilot to pass out or throw up. And some of their sudden jerks create forces that are beyond a human passenger’s ability to do important things like, say, remaining alive. But a group of researchers at Switzerland’s École Polytechnique… → Read More
What You Missed This Week @ IEEE Spectrum: Deep Learning for Hearing Aids, a Hacker Gives Away Self-Driving Car Software, and Controlling a Hand Exoskeleton With Your Mind
Photo: Dan Saelinger/Trunk Archive Creating a hearing aid that overcomes the so-called cocktail party problem—the inability to distinguish between several voices or sounds that reach the device simultaneously—has stumped signal processing specialists, artificial intelligence experts, and audiologists for decades. But researchers at Ohio State University think they’ve come up with a solution that… → Read More
Delta Airlines: On Second Thought, the Computer Crash Was Our Fault
Carrier admits that its original story, blaming a local utility for setting off the chain of events that led to more than 1000 flight cancellations on Monday and Tuesday, was a work of fiction → Read More
Delta Airlines Computer Failure Part of a Pattern
Hundreds of flight cancellations today are just the latest in a string of airline industry IT problems → Read More
How Should a Self-Driving Car Tell You to Take the Wheel?
Experts say self-driving cars should start with vibrations in your seat → Read More
How Should a Self-Driving Car Tell You to Take the Wheel?
Experts say self-driving cars should start with vibrations in your seat → Read More
How Should a Self-Driving Car Tell You to Take the Wheel?
Experts say self-driving cars should start with vibrations in your seat → Read More
Is Google Angling to Corner the Auto Insurance Market?
Already a leader in the race to put self-driving cars on the world's roads, it may ultimately use that position to push today's auto insurance carriers out of the market → Read More
Senegalese-American Chart-topper Looks to Light Up Africa
The wildly popular singer Akon is establishing an academy to teach Africans how to build and maintain grid-free power networks → Read More
What Not to Do With Self-driving Cars
Never enlist your friends or colleagues to be living, breathing crash test dummies → Read More