PEP26 is going on right now. Here's everything you need to know about this annual competition.

The MIT report, "Humans in the Loop: The evolution of work in early experiments with Generative AI," cuts through the hype around generative AI and lands on a more consequential reality: this is not (yet) a story of job replacement, it is a story of job redesign.

AI is making hydrodynamic design faster and more effective by cutting down on expensive CFD runs, improving early-stage hull exploration, and speeding up optimization. ASNE President VADM David Lewis (USN, Ret.) looks at how surrogate models, deep learning, generative AI, and reinforcement learning are producing measurable gains in hull design workflows.

There are two near-term 2026 opportunities still open to naval engineers and maritime organizations—the ASNE Fleet Maintenance & Modernization Symposium and the MARAD Centers of Excellence program—and now is a good time to begin preparing now for major 2027 forums like AMTS and SNAME. The best publication, presentation, and funding opportunities tend to cluster in late winter and early spring, making early planning a professional advantage.

Engineering Leadership in the Third Industrial Revolution and prospects for the Fourth Industrial Revolution

ASNE’s latest Talk a Little, Learn a Lot episode explores why ship appearance is about far more than cosmetics. In a conversation with Capt. John Cordle and CWO Ben Miner, the podcast examines how maintenance burden, ownership, and material condition all connect directly to fleet readiness.

A Winter 2025 NEJ paper argues that early ship design often loses requirements traceability in the first 10% of the process due to document-driven workflows and rising system complexity. It proposes a “meet-in-the-middle” approach that blends naval architecture practice with systems engineering rigor, with MBSE as the authoritative digital source of truth.

A Winter 2025 NEJ paper evaluates whether water mist injection inside a gas turbine exhaust duct can reduce plume temperature and improve IR signature management. Using two-phase CFD with two-way coupling, it shows how droplet dynamics and evaporation physics determine realistic cooling potential.

A Winter 2025 NEJ paper introduces a federated-learning “digital twin” approach to detect and localize cyber attacks in distributed DC ship power systems without centralizing raw controller data. It targets both false data injection and controller hijacking while using robust aggregation to handle real-world controller differences and untrusted participants.

A Winter 2025 NEJ paper shows how the Mark V catalytic burner’s operating temperature directly drives submarine cooling and power burden—and why even a 100°F drop could meaningfully cut waste heat. It evaluates a platinum monolithic catalyst as a potential path to cleaner air at lower temperatures, with practical handling and recycling benefits.