Neal Notes
Neal's been contributing stories to IEEE since 1998. Topics have been far flung—mobile security, storage challenges, hybrid clouds, recommendation technology, exascale computing, and more.
Recent Articles
By Neal Leavitt
While we're still a long way in honoring an AI robot chef with a Michelin star, their popularity and usage in the culinary industry continues to grow. Thanks to generative AI technology, many of your kitchen appliances have also gotten a lot smarter – and more efficient. And AI is quickly changing the way we cook food and formulate recipes at hom...
By Neal Leavitt
"Baseball is 90% mental. The other half is physical."
"You've got to be very careful if you don't know where you are going because you might not get there."
"The future ain't what it used to be."
These witticisms were uttered decades ago by Hall of Fame New York Yankees catcher and manager Yogi Berra. As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more...
By Neal Leavitt
Without bees, millions of people worldwide would go hungry. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, for instance, says bees pollinate more than 70% of flowering plants – not only in the U.S, but globally.
These iconic winged insects are being decimated globally by urbanization, climate change, intensive agriculture, pesticides, and diseases.
"Forty...
By Neal Leavitt
"It was a dark and stormy night."
That was probably the world's shortest novel, penned by Snoopy atop his iconic doghouse in Charlie Brown's backyard (full disclosure – while this may date me as a print dinosaur, I still enjoy reading daily newspaper comics).
Fast forward to the digital age – More traditional long-form books are starting to b...
By Neal Leavitt
The technology's nothing new. In fact, Remote Patient Monitoring often referred to as RPM, has been around for a decade.
The premise behind RPM is relatively simple – it tracks vitals, provides important metrics when patients are away from a medical setting like an office, clinic, or hospital. Various types of RPM programs "collect data using sy...
By Neal Leavitt
As IEEE celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, it got me wondering – what key technologies (including hardware and software products/services/processes) have made a significant impact in our lives? ...
By Neal Leavitt
With literally hundreds of millions of Americans nationwide now sheltering in place because of the coronavirus, smart home security and automation is fast becoming an integral component of domestic life.
The numbers substantiate this. Zion Market Research says the global smart home tech market will be almost $54 billion by 2022. Swed...
By Neal Leavitt
Understandably the world's attention is currently focused on the coronavirus. If you're adhering to your country's guidelines/protocols, you're sheltering in place, keeping your distance when outside; in short, being smart and playing a part in helping to defeat this global scourge.
At home, you're probably using an array of gadgets ...
By Neal Leavitt
Countless companies and educational institutions are in R&D warp drive to quell the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic. And they’re utilizing sophisticated AI and Big Data tools. ...
By Neal Leavitt
If you own a dog or cat and love them like family, odds are your vet may have already recommended injecting a biochip transponder into Fido or Fluffy. The device basically serves as an RFID tag so if your pet runs away, you can track their whereabouts and hopefully recover your dog or cat.
Now the ante is being raised as microchip im...
By Neal Leavitt
At 8:30 PM on Dec. 7, the power suddenly went out in our house. We looked out our master bedroom window in the dark and saw a wall of 20-40-foot-high flames on an adjacent hillside sweeping towards us.
The Lilac Fire, which started as a small brushfire on Interstate 15 in San Diego County earlier that day, had quickly grown to over 4,000 acr...
By Neal Leavitt
Arghhh! To use some parlance from any of the 'Pirates of the Caribbean' movies, in the next few years, that's how some naysayers may react once they see crewless ships on the high seas. While they won't be ghost ships like the Black Pearl that was captained by both Jack Sparrow and Hector Barbossa, initially it may seem unnerving to watch giant sup...
By Neal Leavitt
Artificial intelligence (AI), to use a hackneyed term, is already causing a paradigm shift for marketers. AI, in brief, is helping brands to rapidly collaborate with and learn from online followers....
By Neal Leavitt
Marketers can learn a thing or two from our furry (and scaly for those who may own reptiles, snakes, other creepy-crawlers) friends.
While the fast-growing $61 billion a year pet product industry is wooing new consumers with disruptive marketing campaigns, e-Commerce and digital marketing to pet owners is still the new frontier. According to Ann...
By Neal Leavitt
This year at CES marked a personal milestone—the good folks at CES affixed a '10+ Years' ribbon to the bottom of my badge (it's actually 12 but who's counting). To paraphrase from those ubiquitous Allstate commercials, after a dozen consecutive Las Vegas sojourns, "I know a thing or two because I've seen a thing or two."
And there was a lot to...
By Neal Leavitt
It should come as no surprise - Millennials grab most of their info online – and via smartphones. And that extends to how they discover works of art. To further corroborate this, Invaluable, an online marketplace for fine art, antiques and collectibles, conducted a survey earlier this year entitled 'American Attitudes Toward Art.'
Some interes...
By Neal Leavitt
They never take a vacation day. In fact, they work 24/7 in the warehouse with nary a complaint. They don't kvetch about the rising cost of healthcare insurance. And other than initially programming them, they don't need any extensive training.
Warehouse robots are growing in popularity and are already causing an upheaval in the industry. Steve V...
By Neal Leavitt
I never threw out my extensive baseball card collection.
While I don't have a T206 Honus Wagner American Tobacco Company card (sold for $2.8 million in August 2007) or a Topps 1952 Mickey Mantle rookie year card (sold by Dallas-based Heritage Auctions in December 2015 to an anonymous collector for $525,800), the collection has increased in value...
By Neal Leavitt
Washers of the world, unite! While that's taking a bit of poetic license from the famous rallying cry in the 1848Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, advances in smart appliances may someday have washers from Halifax to Harare talking to each other.
Smart appliances (these rely on various communications technologies such as Bl...
By Neal Leavitt
An MIT study predicted last year that shared, self-driving cars may take so many vehicles off the road—perhaps 80% of them—that a new class of 'exurbs' in the U.S. may spring up within a decade.
"With fewer cars, much of this space could be freed for other uses. Such reduction in car numbers would also dramatically lower the cost (and relate...
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About the Author
Neal Leavitt runs San Diego County-based Leavitt Communications, which he established back in 1991. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in communications from UC-Berkeley and a Master of Arts degree in journalism & public affairs from American University in Washington, DC. Neal has also lived abroad and has traveled extensively to more than 80 countries worldwide.
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