Tech

2022 IEEE President K.J. Ray Liu Honored for Leadership

Published

12 hours ago

July 24, 2026

Unlike many budding engineers, K.J. Ray Liu wasn’t inspired to enter the field by tinkering with electronics or following in the footsteps of a family member. Growing up in Taichung, Taiwan, he answered his government’s call for students to become electrical engineers to help manufacture semiconductors in the 1970s, when the country’s economy was struggling.

“Students who were good in math, science, and physics all wanted to be an electrical engineer because that was the top priority of the government,” Liu says. “That’s how I got into engineering. Now Taiwan is a world leader in semiconductors.”

K.J. Ray Liu

Occupation

Retired professor of information technology and a digital signal processing researcher at the University of Maryland in College Park

Member grade

Fellow

Alma maters

National Taiwan University; University of Michigan; UCLA

But by the time he graduated from university in 1983, semiconductor facilities were still under construction, so there were no jobs available.

Instead, he went on to have a successful career as an educator and entrepreneur in the United States.

For 31 years, he was a professor of information technology and a digital signal processing researcher at the University of Maryland in College Park until he retired in 2021.

Liu was the chairman, CEO, and CTO of Origin Wireless, a startup he founded in Rockville, Md. Origin, which was acquired by ADT in February, pioneers artificial intelligence for wireless sensing and indoor tracking.

Liu, an IEEE Fellow, is an active IEEE volunteer who served as the organization’s president in 2022.

IEEE honored him with this year’s Haraden Pratt Award for “transformative and impactful leadership.”

Liu is credited with increasing the diversity of nominees for IEEE’s Fellow program, which is the highest level of membership. He also led the effort to realign the organization’s regions geographically to ensure more equitable global representation on the IEEE Board of Directors.

He received the Pratt honor on 24 April during a ceremony in New York City. The IEEE Foundation sponsored the Board-level award.

“More than anything, I share the honor with the volunteers and staff I had the privilege to work alongside,” he says. “Our hard work is fueled by our shared devotion to this professional home we love and care for so much.”

In the 1970s, Taiwan’s policymakers decided to improve the country’s economy by pivoting from making products such as shoes and umbrellas to manufacturing electronics.

The industry got its start in 1976 when RCA, a major electronics company at the time, agreed to transfer licensed semiconductor processes to Taiwan’s Industrial Technology Research Institute. ITRI spun off several semiconductor-related companies including the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. TSMC, launched in 1987, is the world’s largest dedicated semiconductor foundry.

Liu graduated in 1983 with a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from National Taiwan University, in Taipei. At the time, there were no semiconductor companies to work for, he says.

“Nowadays, many of the country’s university graduates go right to TSMC to get a job,” he says. “But back then, there was no real job market.

“Most of my classmates—including me—came to the U.S. for graduate studies. Many of us stayed and, over the last three to four decades, contributed to the development of electronic computer communication technology in the U.S.”

Liu left Taiwan after a two-year mandatory stint in the Republic of China Armed Forces to attend the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, where in 1987 he earned a master’s degree in electrical engineering.

“If I can help make IEEE a better professional home for future members, that is something that I can pay back to IEEE.”

He went on to earn a Ph.D. in electrical, electronics, and communications engineering in 1990 from the University of California, Los Angeles. His interest in digital signal processing and very-large-scale integration (VLSI) was sparked while at UCLA. Today VLSI powers all modern electronics.

“When I was a graduate student, there was no wireless communication. Everybody had a landline,” he explains.

VLSI was an important, active research field at the time.

“My research interest was digital signal processing,” he says. “One day I saw a book on VLSI signal processing on my professor’s bookshelf. I immediately thought to myself: That is the field I want to pursue.

“VLSI is one lane, digital signal processing is the other, and there is a bridge linking the two. I was interested in both areas, so I did my Ph.D. thesis on VLSI signal processing.”

After graduating, Liu joined the University of Maryland, where he is credited with establishing its signal processing research program.

In addition to teaching, he conducted research on a broad range of signal processing and communication aspects. The topics include bioinformatics, game theory, signal processing algorithms and architectures, and wireless sensing and communications.

He has authored more than 10 books and 900 papers, and he holds 250 patents. You can find his research papers in the IEEE Xplore Digital Library.

Ambient-sensing trailblazer

Liu is considered to be a pioneer in the field of ambient sensing. The technology gathers environmental data and is used in security systems and health-monitoring devices.

He came up with the idea, he says, while working on a project in 2009 for the U.S. Navy. He was trying to solve a problem the Navy was having with the wireless communication systems used in its submarines. Because submarines are made of metal, radio waves were unable to penetrate the vessels’ compartments and instead bounced around, creating interference, he says.

His solution was to use a relatively unknown concept in physics: time-reversal signal processing. The technique captures waves, such as sound and electromagnetic signals, and sends them back through the same medium in reverse, flipping the signal from last-in to first-out, and re-emits them.

“By using time-reversal feed, we could increase the signal-to-noise ratio by four times,” he says. “That improved performance dramatically.”

He became fascinated by the physics of time-reversal signal processing, he says, and wondered how he could apply the concept to serve society. After three years of research, he came up with the idea of using wireless sensing applications through ambient radio waves from surrounding Wi-Fi networks.

“I learned to turn Wi-Fi networks into sensing networks that decipher our activities,” he says. “We could know everything happening around us—our motions, breathing, heartbeat, even fall detection—without any wearables.”

Through the university’s incubator, which encourages faculty to work on projects with an impact on society, he launched Origin in 2013. The company’s Wi-FI and AI sensing technology enables accurate indoor tracking, motion detection, and health monitoring without the need for wearable devices or cameras. Its products, including its remote patient monitoring, received three innovation awards at the 2020 and 2021 Consumer Electronics shows, including one for best innovation.

Finding his professional home

Liu joined IEEE in 1986 as a graduate student to access its research papers, he says.

“If you didn’t join an IEEE society, you didn’t get its journal—which meant that you couldn’t read the most up-to-date research papers,” he says. “So, I joined the IEEE Signal Processing Society. When I attended my first signal processing conference, I knew I had found a professional home. I met many like-minded people, and together, we built a professional home for our members worldwide.”

He became an active volunteer, holding top leadership positions including 2012–2013 president of the Signal Processing Society and 2016–2017 director of IEEE Division IX, which covers societies focused on signal processing, data transmission, navigation, and transportation. In 2019 he was vice president of the Technical Activities Board.

In 2022 he served as IEEE president and CEO. The three accomplishments during his term he says he is most proud of are increasing the prize money for the IEEE Medal of Honor, overseeing the realignment of IEEE regions, and establishing greater financial transparency.

The reason for increasing the prize for IEEE’s highest award—from US $50,000 to $2 million—in 2025, he says, was to underscore the importance of the technologies the IEEE community develops. Those innovations include semiconductors, the Internet, and the GPU. The money for the Medal of Honor now exceeds that of the Nobel Prize, which carries an award of roughly $1 million.

“We need the whole world to understand the IEEE community has made the most impact on society in the last century,” Liu says. “Nevertheless, we did not receive the attention and respect we deserved, so we needed to help ourselves. We want the whole world to know what our contributions are.”

His next achievement was realigning IEEE’s regions. During the past several years, membership in Region 10, which covers countries in Asia and the Pacific, has grown from 10 percent of total membership to nearly 40 percent, he says. It is the largest and most populous of IEEE’s geographic areas, but its members were not equitably represented on the Board of Directors. Each region had one representative on the Board.

“The region has 40 percent of the members but only makes up 10 percent of the Board,” Liu says. “That didn’t make sense to a lot of us.”

The IEEE Board in 2022 approved region realignment. The total number of regions remains at 10, but their organization is changing. Effective 1 January 2028, the six U.S.-based regions will be consolidated into five, and Region 10 will be split into two. IEEE will no longer use the Region 1 designation. The new Region 2 will represent the Northeastern and Eastern U.S. Region 10 will cover North Asia, and the new Region 11 will represent South Asia and the Pacific.

Liu also succeeded in leading a movement that persuaded the IEEE Board to invest in a better financial reporting system to have a clearer understanding of the organization’s finances. A more modern system now tracks banking transactions, contracts, expense reports, and other spending.

“Now we know exactly where the money comes from and where it is spent,” he says, “so that we can make more informed decisions.

“If I can help make IEEE a better professional home for future members, that is something that I can pay back to IEEE,” he adds. “I truly appreciate what IEEE offered me. From student to professor to an established leader, at every stage, it offered me different opportunities to grow. That is why I worked very hard when I was president to make sure everybody realizes it is a professional home for our entire career.”

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Tech

Prentis, new AI lab co-founded by Reid Hoffman, Mark Pincus in talks to raise $100M

Published

8 hours ago

July 25, 2026

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Prentis, a new AI research lab focused on computer use models, co-founded by serial entrepreneur Ritankar Das and tech heavyweights Reid Hoffman and Mark Pincus, is in talks to raise $100 million at a $1 billion valuation, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

Launched in April, Prentis is training models to learn how office workers navigate routine workflows across documents and systems, with the goal of building AI agents that can control computers to automate those tasks.

Prentis will ostensibly develop agents tailored to these customers’ needs, such as handling insurance claims and automating customs duty refund exceptions without needing a human to hunt down paperwork.

The startup has already signed contracts worth up to $50 million with several customers, including healthcare management service organization, a manufacturer, and goods and clothing manufacturers, the two people familiar with the discussions tell TechCrunch. This echoes investor materials obtained by TechCrunch that predict an estimated $75 million annualized run rate by the third quarter of this year. (Prentis’ pitch deck notes those figures reflect estimated annualized value based on a contracted fee equal to 20% of savings realized, not recognized revenue, and are “performance-dependent and subject to final execution.”)

By its own account, Prentis says its Hive-32B model outperforms rivals, including OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, on two computer-use benchmarks: WindowsAgentArena, which measures end-to-end task completion on real Windows applications, and ScreenSpot-v2, which tests a model’s ability to locate the right on-screen control.

In its pitch deck, the company argues its edge comes from running a much smaller, cheaper model. In fact, it claims roughly 10 times lower cost per task than frontier APIs, saying it’s more economical to deploy across everyday workflows. TechCrunch hasn’t independently verified the company’s benchmark results.

The startup is betting that automating everyday office tasks will soon outpace coding as AI’s biggest use case, but it’s a crowded market. Anthropic, Open AI, and Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab are also working on developing AI agents for computer use, one of the sources said. Anthropic has also been acquiring talent in the category directly — it bought the Seattle computer-use startup Vercept earlier this year, folding in its founders and shutting down its product.

Prentis didn’t respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

Ritankar Das, CEO of Prentis, is also the founder of Titan, a holding company that builds and operates AI companies. Das, now 31, was UC Berkeley’s youngest University Medalist in more than a century, graduating at 18 with a double major in bioengineering and chemical biology before earning a master’s in biomedical engineering at Oxford.

He founded Titan in 2014 after dropping out of an AI PhD program at Cambridge, where he’d been a Gates Cambridge Scholar. Das has described Titan as an intentional throwback to an old-fashioned holding-company model like Berkshire Hathaway, one that’s funded by its own exits rather than outside limited partners.

Other businesses launched and operated by Titan include AI-powered virtual care provider Tala Health, which raised a $100 million seed round last year, and Forta Health, an autism care startup that raised $55 million led by Insight Partners in 2024. Titan-founded disease prediction company Dascena was acquired by CirrusDx in 2022.

Prentis is a side project of sorts for its two other co-founders. Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock partner, said last month that he was stepping down from Microsoft’s board after nearly a decade to go “founder mode” on Manas AI, an AI drug-discovery startup he’s also backing; he was an early OpenAI investor and co-founded Inflection AI with Mustafa Suleyman before Microsoft absorbed most of that team in 2024.

Pincus, the Zynga founder, now runs the investment firm Reinvent Capital with Hoffman as a senior adviser, and published a memoir, “Life at the Speed of Play,” last month.

Prentis has already hired more than 25 employees, including researchers who previously worked at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Meta, Tencent, and Alibaba, according to its website.

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Tech

I tried out OpenAI’s new AI keypad — which will be fun for some coders and slightly mystifying to everyone else

Published

8 hours ago

July 25, 2026

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OpenAI launched its first piece of hardware last week — a fancy little keypad built to pair with ChatGPT. Micro, which was developed in collaboration with specialty keyboard designer Work Louder, is essentially an artisanal workplace novelty that tech-savvy users will love and that may leave everyone else a little puzzled.

OpenAI’s entrance into the hardware market hasn’t arrived without drama. Several weeks ago, Apple sued the AI lab and accused it of trade theft — kicking off what’s certain to be a long-simmering legal battle. Meanwhile, news of another smart home product in development at OpenAI has also raised eyebrows, as the supposed device — which is being built to pair with ChatGPT — was reportedly developed by former Apple engineers.

Until the legal battle works itself out and OpenAI’s broader hardware ambitions materialize, the most the startup has to offer is Micro — a funky little keypad clearly engineered to delight the tech industry’s code monkeys.

OpenAI sent TechCrunch a Micro test unit. The first big thing you notice when initially handling the keypad is that it’s a sturdy little device — enough so that if the AI accessory thing doesn’t end up working out, it could easily double as a paperweight. The other thing you might notice (and I am not the only one to point this out), is that the packaging — an immaculate white box with a sleek, clean aesthetic — is pretty Apple-coded. Make of that what you will.

The keypad’s layout involves six frosted “agent” keys at the top of the pad, which can be customized to carry out specific tasks within ChatGPT or its agentic coding tool Codex. Below them are six command keys, which can be used to control those programs. You can pair your Micro with your computer either through a Bluetooth connection or a USB cable.

**Image Credits:**Lucas Ropek/TechCrunch

Perhaps the most convenient thing Micro offers is a button for voice dictation — meaning you simply tell the app what you want done and it will get busy working on your behalf. Just hold down the dictation button and start talking. When you’re done, tap the “send” button next to it to submit your request.

You can customize your Micro keypad within ChatGPT itself, where a Micro tab allows you to adjust everything from the brightness of the light from the keys to the specific commands and projects you want tied to those keys.

Coders — the device’s actual target audience — haven’t exactly embraced it. Reviews by Redditors have largely negative, with one Reddit user calling it “a prank and not a real product,” and others saying serious coders won’t touch it. A review by the smaller independent outlet Aftermath was even harsher, calling the $230 price tag hard to justify next to cheaper DIY and off-the-shelf alternatives. (The title of that review: “OpenAI’s expensive macropad feels engineered to piss me off specifically.”)

It’s definitely the case that new users may need some time to figure out how Micro works and what to do with it.

Once I figured out how to program the keypad to my liking, I found it was actually pretty fun. You can assign various ChatGPT sessions to specific keys, which then allows you to easily toggle back and forth between all of your various projects. When you combine that with the dictation button, it makes the whole experience considerably more efficient and enjoyable.

But there’s still a learning curve. Micro’s buttons are color-coded. White means an agent is idle, blue means its thinking, green means a task is complete, and red means there’s been an error. You’ll need to memorize that, along with memorizing which specific projects are coded to each key.

The big question is whether the Micro keypad is functionally easier to use than just continuing to work on your laptop. In short: Why would I spend a week learning how to program and operate this thing when I already know how to use my computer’s mouse and keyboard?

Ultimately, your experience with the Micro will depend heavily on how much you use ChatGPT. Since I don’t use AI much day to day, I’m probably not the target audience for it.

That said, if you’re a ChatGPT power user, have $230 to spare, and like vintage-looking hardware with clicky buttons, Micro probably isn’t the worst purchase you could make — it might even brighten your day a little.

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Tech

SpaceX launches new V3 Starlink satellites but suffers another booster failure

Published

9 hours ago

July 24, 2026

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SpaceX successfully deployed the first third-generation Starlink satellites on Friday using an upgraded version of its prototype Starship — the 13th test flight of its mega-rocket to date. But the company suffered another failure with its Super Heavy booster during a planned simulated landing in the Gulf of Mexico.

It’s the second time the company has had an issue with the Super Heavy booster on this V3 version of Starship. In May, on the first Starship V3 flight, SpaceX encountered a failure of the Starship’s Super Heavy booster as it separated from the upper stage of the rocket.

The launch came a little more than a week after SpaceX tried to conduct the 13th Starship launch. That attempt had to abort immediately after ignition due to a number of rocket engine failures. SpaceX said it replaced six engines ahead of Friday’s flight to fix the problem.

During Friday’s launch, the booster made it further into its planned flight, but wasn’t able to properly fire up all of the engines required for its simulated landing burn. The booster exploded after a faster-than-expected impact with the water.

This was the first launch of Starship since SpaceX went public in June in the largest IPO in history. In a test of SpaceX’s “fly, fail, fix” approach to Starship development, the company saw its stock decline last week in the day following the launch abort. The dip is part of a larger downward trend since the IPO that has seen the company’s stock drop from a peak of more than $200 per share to $115 at the close of trading on Friday. In after-hours trading, SpaceX shares fell another 2% following the booster failure, before paring some of those losses.

SpaceX appears to have had better luck with the Starship V3 upper stage during Friday’s launch. The upper stage lost a rocket engine during the first V3 launch in May. That didn’t happen this time around, as Starship encountered no issues on its way to deploying the new Starlinks.

The new Starlink satellites are expected to burn up in the atmosphere roughly 20 minutes after deployment, as Starship still isn’t capable of reaching Earth orbit.

This story is developing…

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