Every year, IEEE recognizes individual researchers, innovators, and collaborative teams whose technical achievements and leadership have made a lasting impact on technology, engineering, and society worldwide with its Technical Field Awards.

The honorees are selected by the IEEE Awards Board based on their extraordinary technical achievements, societal impact, and leadership in specialized engineering disciplines and are approved by the IEEE Board of Directors.

“The 2027 IEEE Technical Field Award recipients embody the relentless spirit of innovation and ingenuity that defines our global community,” said Mary Ellen Randall, 2026 IEEE president and CEO in a news release. “Across microelectronics, artificial intelligence, medical robotics, wireless networks, energy conversion, and technical education, their groundbreaking accomplishments continue to push the boundaries of science and solve critical challenges for the benefit of humanity.”

IEEE Technical Field Award recipients

Sponsors: IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology, IEEE Circuits and Systems, and IEEE Signal Processing societies

IEEE Life Fellow Kullervo Hynynen

Sunnybrook Research Institute in Toronto, and the University of Toronto

“For pioneering contributions to the development, advancement, and clinical translation of therapeutic ultrasound.”

Sponsor: The Brunetti Bequest

IEEE Member Edward Charles Gage

IEEE Fellow Ganping Ju

IEEE Fellow Jan-Ulrich Thiele

Seagate Technology in Cupertino, Calif.

“For contributions to heat-assisted magnetic technology powering ultra-high-capacity hard disk drives and enabling greater storage of digital information.”

Sponsors: IEEE Control Systems Society and Friends and Family of Roger W. Brockett

IEEE Life Fellow Arjan van der Schaft

Bernoulli Institute at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands (Retired)

“For contributions to robust and geometric approaches to nonlinear control, hybrid systems, and the control of physical systems.”

Sponsors: IEEE Antennas and Propagation, IEEE Electromagnetic Compatibility, IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing, and IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology societies

IEEE Fellow Zoya Popović

University of Colorado Boulder

“For contributions to microwave and millimeter-wave circuit designs, including power amplifiers, power-combining, and wireless power systems.”

Sponsor: Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)

IEEE Life Fellow Chin-Hui Lee

Georgia Tech

“For contributions to and leadership in technologies that enable automatic speech and speaker recognition, including innovations in adaptive learning and discriminative training.”

Sponsor: Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)

IEEE Fellow Nicholas Dimitrios Sidiropoulos

University of Virginia in Charlottesville

“For contributions to signal processing methods for analyzing complex data and identifying patterns in multiple dimensions.”

Sponsor: IEEE Electron Devices Society

IEEE Fellow John Robert Brews

University of Arizona in Tucson (Retired)

“For foundational contributions to the physics and technology underlying MOS devices and circuits.”

Sponsor: Sony Group Corporation

IEEE Honorary Member Mike Lazaridis

Quantum Valley Investments in Waterloo, Ont., Canada

“For transformative contributions to mobile communication through visionary leadership that reshaped global consumer technology.”

Sponsor: Google LLC

IEEE Fellow Matthew Roughan

Adelaide University in Australia

“For foundational contributions to analyzing Internet traffic and network structures, enabling better network management and understanding.”

Sponsor: IEEE Industry Applications Society

IEEE Fellow Akshay Kumar Rathore

National University of Singapore

“For developing innovative current-fed and multilevel power electronics converters.”

Sponsors: Tektronix Inc. and the IEEE Instrumentation and Measurement Society

IEEE Life Fellow Pasquale Daponte

University of Sannio in Benevento, Italy

“For contributions to the measurement and standardization of analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog converters.”

Sponsor: IEEE Circuits and Systems Society

IEEE Life Fellow Janusz Rajski

Siemens Digital Industries Software in Wilsonville, Ore.

“For contributions to testing digital integrated circuits at the silicon level.”

Sponsor: The IEEE Leon K. Kirchmayer Memorial Fund

IEEE Life Fellow Rama Chellappa

Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore

“For contributions to multi-disciplinary graduate education and mentoring of doctoral students in image processing, computer vision, and pattern recognition.”

Sponsor: NEC Corporation

IEEE Member Amin Vahdat

Google in Mountain View, Calif.

“For developing network systems that scale data centers to support modern cloud computing and machine learning.”

Sponsor: Nokia Bell Labs

IEEE Life Member Jens-Rainer Ohm

RWTH Aachen University in Germany (Professor Emeritus)

IEEE Life Fellow Gary J. Sullivan

Dolby Laboratories in San Francisco

IEEE Member Benjamin Bross

Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications Heinrich-Hertz-Institut in Berlin

“For leadership in and contributions to developing the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) international standard, which improves the efficiency of digital video compression.”

Sponsor: IEEE Power Electronics Society

IEEE Fellow Paolo Mattavelli

University of Padova in Padua, Italy

“For contributions to advanced modeling and control of power electronics converters.”

Sponsor: IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society

IEEE Life Fellow Wanda Kay Gass

Texas Instruments in Bellevue, Wash. (Retired)

“For pioneering contributions to programmable digital signal processing systems through innovations in circuit design, system architecture, and silicon compilers.”

Sponsor: The IEEE Frederik Philips Award Fund

Recipient: IEEE Member Ann B. Kelleher

Intel in Portland, Ore. (Retired)

“For leading the historic advancement of CMOS process technology, culminating in the first node with backside power delivery.”

Sponsor: IEEE Photonics Society

IEEE Life Fellow Martin David Dawson

University of Strathclyde in Glasgow

“For contributions to microstructured and wide-bandgap semiconductor optoelectronics and for leadership in technological innovation.”

Sponsor: IEEE Robotics and Automation Society

IEEE Life Fellow Russell H. Taylor

Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore

“For contributions to, leadership in, and the clinical translation of surgical and medical robotics.”

Sponsor: IEEE Computational Intelligence Society

IEEE Life Fellow Shun-ichi Amari

Teikyo University in Tokyo

“For foundational contributions to neural network theory and information geometry.”

Sponsor: IEEE Nuclear and Plasma Sciences Society

Victor Malka

Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel

“For leadership in the development of laser-driven particle sources and advancing the technology toward practical applications.”

Sponsors: Hitachi, Ltd. and the IEEE Computer Society

IEEE Fellow Jaideep Vaidya

Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J.

IEEE Senior Member Lucila Ohno-Machado

Yale School of Medicine

IEEE Senior Member Xiaoqian Jiang

The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston

“For leadership in designing and deploying privacy-preserving distributed clinical research infrastructures that enable secure, large-scale collaboration using health data.”

Sponsor: IEEE Standards Association

IEEE Life Fellow Mehmet Ulema

Manhattan University in New York City (Professor Emeritus)

“For leadership in the development and standardization of architecture, management, and protocols used in wireless communications and data networks.”

Sponsor: Nokia Bell Labs

IEEE Fellow Gerhard Fettweis

Technische Universität Dresden Barkhausen Institut in Germany

“For contributions to physical-layer communication technology that have had an impact on the global wireless industry.”

Sponsors: Wolong Electric Group Co. Ltd. and the IEEE Industry Applications and IEEE Power & Energy societies

IEEE Life Fellow Pragasen Pillay

Concordia University in Montreal

“For contributions to the modeling, design, and application of electric machines in industrial, transportation, and renewable energy applications.”

Sponsors: The late Dr. Kiyo Tomiyasu and the IEEE Geoscience and Remote Sensing and the IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology societies

IEEE Fellow Yun Raymond Fu

Northeastern University in Boston

“For contributions to computer vision and augmented human-machine interaction.”

Sponsors: IEEE Industry Applications, IEEE Industrial Electronics, IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems, IEEE Microwave Theory and Technology, IEEE Power Electronics, IEEE Power & Energy, and IEEE Vehicular Technology societies

IEEE Fellow Chunting Chris Mi

San Diego State University

“For contributions to advancing electric and hybrid electric vehicle technologies.”

Sponsors: IEEE Electronics Packaging Society and Friends of Rao R. Tummala

IEEE Fellow Ravi Mahajan

Intel in Chandler, Ariz.

“For contributions to the development of technology that connects multiple chips within advanced electronic packages.”

Sponsor: IEEE Education Society

IEEE Fellow Rhonda Rene Franklin

University of Minnesota in Minneapolis

“For leadership in advancing inclusive workforce development initiatives that create clear and accessible career pathways via undergraduate engineering education.”

Sponsor: IEEE Systems, Man, and Cybernetics Society

IEEE Life Fellow Peng Shi

Adelaide University in Australia

“For contributions to artificial intelligence-based methods for robust control and filtering in complex systems.”

Nominate a colleague

Nominations are now open for the 2028 Technical Field Awards. The deadline to submit a nomination is 15 January.

For more information on the awards, please visit the IEEE Awards webpage.

The G-Shock development team responsible for the new collection tells WIRED the fundamental challenge was building a “near-unbreakable” watch using an inherently brittle material. Making watch cases from sapphire is not new in the high-end watch world, and many distinguished makers, including Richard Mille and Hublot, have released pieces made of the crystal.

To make the sapphire case work for a G-Shock, however, Casio had to develop a brand-new, dedicated shock-resistant structure, with the Multi-Guard construction using virtually invisible seams, alongside a completely screwless assembly method to hit the required shock performance. To do this, the outer case assembly required the development of completely new, dedicated jigs and fixtures, a process apparently so demanding that only one person at Yamagata Casio (the primary “mother factory” for Casio) can currently perform it.

All three new watches, along with the proper G-Shock resistance to knocks and drops, are water-resistant to 200 meters, solar-powered, and feature radio-controlled timekeeping, world time, stopwatch, countdown timer, five daily alarms, and a full-auto LED backlight.

If the $80K G-Shock is too steep an investment, the MRG-B5000SA-2 with two two-carat facet-cut blue sapphires and a grade-5 titanium exterior is limited to 500 pieces. The cheapest GMW-B5000SB-1A2 marries a full-metal black exterior with four round brilliant-cut blue sapphires.

If you were hoping memory prices would cool down soon, I have some bad news. Micron, one of the world’s biggest memory makers, has warned that the RAM shortage isn’t going anywhere, and it might even get worse.

According to The Register, Micron CEO and chair Sanjay Mehrotra told investors on the company’s FY 2026 earnings call that it has already sold most of next year’s memory output. Buyers will also pay “much higher prices” than they did this year.

How long will the RAM shortage last?

It will last longer than any of us would like. “In calendar 2027 as well as 2028, we see demand exceeding supply,” Mehrotra said, adding that the crunch in those two years will be worse than what we’re seeing in 2026. Even more worrying, Micron doesn’t know when the situation will improve. “We do not have a line of sight to when supply and demand will return to balance,” he admitted.

Micron is building new factories that should start production in 2028, backed by $25 billion in planned spending for the first half of its new financial year. Sadly, don’t expect relief the moment they open, as Micron’s executives cautioned that the new plants won’t fix availability or pricing right away.

Blame it on AI. The high-bandwidth memory (HBM) that powers AI hardware is in such demand that it’s outpacing demand for the standard DRAM servers use.

What does it mean for you?

For regular users like us, the takeaway is simple. With most of Micron’s memory already sold and AI gobbling up supply, cheaper laptops, PCs, and RAM upgrades seem unlikely anytime soon. If you were waiting for prices to drop before upgrading, you might be waiting a long time.

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It has been unavailable since the afternoon of September 30.

The Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD) says that the breach of its network was possible by exploiting a chain of two zero-day vulnerabilities in the open-source Zammad ticketing system.

Previously, the nonprofit organization of volunteer security researchers said the attack was “loud and very, very messy,” driven by an AI agent that moved autonomously and decided its next steps without external intervention or direction.

DIVD retrieved extensive details about the attack because the AI agent left behind clear explanations of its decisions, allowing the organization to reconstruct the incident.

According to the cybersecurity nonprofit, the two flaws, now identified as CVE-2026-102489 and CVE-2026-102490, enabled session hijacking, remote code execution, and escalation to root privileges.

After exploiting the vulnerabilities, the attacker was able to access other services, read and exfiltrate data from DIVD’s systems, all actions performed in a matter of seconds, thanks to AI automation.

“Used together, they allowed the attackers to hijack sessions, run code remotely, and escalate privileges from the Zammad user to root, in seconds, due to the agentic part of this hack,” DIVD says.

Due to network segmentation and incident response actions, the threat actor did not move deeper into the network. However, the investigation is still underway.

Zammad is an open-source AI-powered helpdesk and support ticketing platform used to manage customer inquiries, IT support requests, and internal ticketing.

The solution is available as a self-hosted or hosted service, and Zammad claims on its website that it has over 2,000 customers and 55,000 users, including De’Longhi, Amnesty International, and NextCloud.

DIVD discovered the zero-day vulnerabilities in collaboration with Merlon Security. The organization notified Zammad about the issue and is alerting other users of vulnerable instances.

The nonprofit recommends that Zammad users upgrade to version 7, which is considered safe, or take the instance offline as soon as possible.

DIVD has promised to share additional updates about the incident tomorrow.

Join Mikko Hyppönen and security leaders from the NFL, CHANEL, and Atlassian for a two-hour digital summit on what AI-speed attacks change, what defenders should stop doing, and how to validate, decide, fix, and re-validate at machine speed.

Save your seat

Google parent company Alphabet has launched Gemini 4 Argon, a new AI model built to handle a variety of tasks such as coding, research, and writing. But it’s cybersecurity that Gemini 4 Argon is supposed to have a particular knack for, according to Google.

Argon is only being rolled out to a select group of the company’s cyber partners through its Fairwind Program, Google’s security initiative. The model was trained specifically for defensive cyber work, and the company says it can “autonomously find, validate, and patch critical software vulnerabilities.”

Argon is also said to be good at coding and engineering, with the company noting that its own staff have already been using the model for their daily work, including debugging and codebase migrations. Google also touts Argon’s ability to parse visuals — whether that’s analyzing the contents of long videos or charts.

“Built to sustain deep reasoning across complex, long-horizon workflows, Argon is fundamentally changing the way we work and build at Google,” the company said in a blog post Wednesday.

Top AI labs have rushed to release increasingly powerful models, attempting to outdo each other even as those very same firms warn that AI could spin out of control. Not long ago, OpenAI released Astra — which it hailed as its best model yet. Earlier this year, Anthropic’s Fable was also released with similar rhetoric from the company.

Firms have done their best to market their services as superior to their competitors. In its blog, Google claims that Argon scored significantly higher than OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra and Anthropic’s Fable and Opus models across a variety of AI benchmarks. It cites Vals — an increasingly popular AI benchmarking startup — to show that Argon is currently the leading model on the company’s AI model index.

Once considered “behind” in the AI race, Google has recently enjoyed success with Gemini. The company announced in August that its app had over a billion users per month, a metric that makes it competitive with OpenAI, which also recently announced that ChatGPT had reached a billion monthly users.