Have the complex geopolitical affairs affected conversations about technology in organisations like IEEE?
Well, we are not a political organisation. We like to exchange ideas across scientific minds and technical minds, and try to advance technology. We do encourage working together and sharing ideas, learning from each other, supporting each other, networking and developing standards that can be used around the world. Over 1,000 such standards are already in place, and another 1,000 are in the works. So there are many ways that we interface with the technical community. In January, IEEE surpassed the 500,000-member mark. So we do have a vast community.
My question was not necessarily from a political point of view, but more about collaboration across borders. A certain close-mindedness is coming into the world at the moment, right?
Well, everything affects everything. It comes down to people, in my opinion. In IEEE, we are all there because we want to make a difference. So people do try to share and uplift each other and provide support around the world. We are a public charity with members.
And that’s our secret sauce. I think our members are very generous in giving and sharing. IEEE holds over 2,000 conferences each year, and in those conferences, people come from all over the world. Our local organisational units are across 190 countries, so we still have many people that we can work with, regardless of what’s going on in the world at large. I can’t say we are not affected by what is going on, but we have a very solid organisational unit where we can work together and make a difference. You are working on AI standards. In most cases, the standards are decided first and the tech is built on top of it. Here you have a tech that is out, being used by the public and standards are being retrofitted. How does that influence IEEE’s role?
Well, you are right. This is complicated, but it’s also very powerful. We want to put some guardrails that help you to know how accurate is the information you are getting from AI and how do you ensure there’s no bias in the data. How do you make sure that it’s used in a responsible and ethical way?
Does it make the role of IEEE a little more difficult when nations put different kinds of guardrails or indeed remove them?
Yeah. Take internet security—there are different laws in different countries, and we grapple with all that and try to come up with a good, common foundation in order to operate at a worldwide level. But you are correct that things are going on in different countries that can affect how we solve the problem.
India produces a large number of engineering graduates every year but lags in terms of engineering-led innovation. What can fix this?
I’ve had the opportunity to visit some of the universities in India and talk to some of the students and graduate students and the professors. What I found is that there is a lot of entrepreneurial emphasis in India, and there’s a lot of support for students innovating and starting companies.
Those are all good seeds that are being planted. I don’t see quite what you are describing. I know the professors, I know several of them through IEEE, and they are very dedicated to making sure that the students coming out of the universities are very well-equipped to handle global problems. What I really like is that there’s a strong humanitarian focus.
What can organisations like IEEE do to encourage more girls to take up science, particularly in the Global South?
In IEEE we have a women-in-engineering group. You can also have local groups of women who get together, and we are also joined at the worldwide level. Many of the people that I visited when I was in India were women who were in authority positions.
The head of our India council is a woman. We do a lot of STEM outreach for everyone in the younger grades. A lot of the people that deliver that are women. One of the things that we found in our experience is that for them to go into engineering, they need a role model. And so when they start to see these women coming in and imparting knowledge, that encourages others.
You launched an initiative called MOVE (Mobility Outreach Vehicle) in India recently.
In the US, we get hit by a lot of storms, and with that comes a lot of flooding. A lot of high winds cause damage to large areas. The infrastructure goes out, and people are sometimes without power and communication for weeks at a time. We wanted to help. We have such a great skill base.
We have IT people, we have engineers. They are all natural problem solvers. So MOVE came out of that and is a nice truck with tech, power and communications equipment. It has just grown and grown and grown. When we are not fighting disasters, we can take it to schools, and have a live demonstration of what engineers do. We unveiled the first truck outside the US in India last week. The India team has also developed some beautiful science kits that they take to schools.