What Are IEEE Activities?

IEEE activities are the programs through which the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers carries out its technical and professional mission: publishing research, convening conferences, developing standards, educating practitioners, and representing the engineering profession in public matters. The organization describes itself as the largest technical professional association in the world, with more than 400,000 members in over 160 countries, and its work is divided among a set of major boards that report to the IEEE Board of Directors. Those IEEE Boards give the activities their administrative shape. Technical Activities oversees the societies and councils, Educational Activities runs learning programs, Publication Services and Products governs the journal portfolio, Member and Geographic Activities supports regions and sections, and the IEEE Standards Association Board of Governors directs standards work.

The activities are interlocking rather than separate. A research result presented at a society conference is published in the proceedings, cited in a journal article, and may eventually be codified in a standard, with the same volunteer community involved at each stage.

Publishing and Conferences

Scholarly publishing is the largest single activity by volume. IEEE journals, transactions, letters, and magazines cover the electrical, electronic, and computing disciplines, and their contents are distributed through the IEEE Xplore digital library, which holds several million documents including conference papers and standards. Conference activity is comparably large: IEEE and its societies sponsor or cosponsor well over a thousand meetings each year, ranging from small workshops to flagship events such as the International Solid-State Circuits Conference and the International Conference on Robotics and Automation. The IEEE conferences and events program coordinates the approval, financial sponsorship, and publication of these meetings, so that papers presented at them enter the permanent technical record.

Standards Development

Standards work is administered by the IEEE Standards Association, which maintains an active portfolio of more than a thousand published standards and a comparable number of projects in development. Standards are written by working groups of volunteers under a consensus process that includes a public ballot and an appeals mechanism, and the results include widely deployed specifications such as the IEEE 802 family for local and metropolitan area networking and IEEE 1547 for distributed energy resource interconnection. The IEEE Standards Association program for accessing and developing standards sets out how a project is proposed, balloted, and maintained. Individual societies also sponsor standards in their own technical areas through standards activities coordinated with Technical Activities.

Educational and Professional Activities

Education is handled by the IEEE Educational Activities Board, which develops continuing education courses, supports accreditation and curriculum work, funds scholarships, and produces pre-university outreach material intended to bring students into engineering. Professional activities cover the rest of a member's working life: awards and fellow grade elevation that recognize technical contribution, mentoring and networking through local units, and career resources for practicing engineers. IEEE-USA carries out public policy activity on behalf of the United States membership, preparing position statements on subjects such as spectrum allocation, energy infrastructure, and the engineering workforce. Humanitarian programs, including field projects that deliver electrification and communication capability to underserved communities, form a further strand of activity organized largely through volunteer sections and student branches.

Applications

IEEE activities support work across a range of settings, including:

• Dissemination and archiving of peer-reviewed engineering research
• Development of interoperability and safety standards for industry
• Continuing professional education and certification for practicing engineers
• Local technical community building through sections, chapters, and student branches
• Technical input to government policy on technology and infrastructure
• Recognition of technical achievement through awards and fellowship