What Is the IEEE Organization?

IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, is a professional association for engineers, scientists, and allied professionals working in electrical engineering, electronics, computing, and related disciplines. It is a not-for-profit corporation registered in New York, with more than 400,000 members in over 160 countries, and it describes its purpose as advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. Its principal outputs are technical publications, conferences, standards, and professional and educational programs, and it is among the largest publishers of technical literature in its fields.

The organization was created on 1 January 1963 by the merger of two older bodies: the American Institute of Electrical Engineers, founded in 1884 around power and wire communications, and the Institute of Radio Engineers, founded in 1912 around radio and electronics. The account of the merger maintained on the Engineering and Technology History Wiki records that the combined body began with about 150,000 members, and that although the AIEE was legally the surviving corporation, the practices of the larger IRE largely prevailed.

Governance and Structure

IEEE is governed by a Board of Directors elected by the membership, headed by a president who serves a one-year term after a year as president-elect. Below the board, work is divided among major organizational units. The Technical Activities Board oversees the technical societies and councils, close to forty of them, each with its own publications, conferences, and technical committees, covering areas from power and energy to signal processing, robotics, and computing. Member and Geographic Activities administers the geographic hierarchy of ten regions, subdivided into sections, chapters, affinity groups, and student branches. The IEEE Standards Association operates as a distinct entity with its own board and process, and IEEE-USA, the IEEE Foundation, and the History Center round out the structure.

Membership and Grades

Membership is individual rather than institutional and is organized into grades that reflect professional experience. Student and graduate student membership leads to full member grade, then to senior member for those with substantial professional achievement, and finally to Fellow, an honor conferred by the Board of Directors and limited each year to a small fraction of one percent of the voting membership. Volunteers drawn from the membership run the conferences, edit the publications, chair the standards working groups, and populate the governance bodies, with a comparatively small professional staff providing continuity.

Publications, Conferences, and Standards

IEEE publishes hundreds of journals, transactions, magazines, and conference proceedings, delivered through the IEEE Xplore digital library, and sponsors or co-sponsors roughly two thousand conferences and events each year. The IEEE Standards Association develops consensus standards through an accredited process open to participants from industry, academia, and government, and its portfolio includes some of the most widely deployed specifications in computing and communications, among them the 802.3 Ethernet family, the 802.11 wireless local area network family, and the 754 floating-point arithmetic standard. The history of IEEE standards work traces the program back to the standards operations of both predecessor societies.

Indexing and Controlled Vocabulary

To make that volume of literature findable, IEEE maintains a controlled indexing vocabulary. The IEEE Thesaurus is a hierarchical list of preferred descriptors with broader, narrower, and related term relationships and a set of "used for" cross-references from non-preferred synonyms, and the IEEE Taxonomy arranges the top levels of those terms into branches. Every record in Xplore is indexed against this vocabulary, which is revised annually and published openly through IEEE's thesaurus and taxonomy service.

Applications

The work of the IEEE organization has applications in a range of fields, including:

• Interoperable networking and computing products built to IEEE standards
• Academic publishing and scholarly literature retrieval
• Professional certification, continuing education, and career development
• Technology policy and public advocacy
• Engineering ethics and professional conduct frameworks
• Historical and bibliometric research on technical fields