What Is the New Technology Connections Portal?

The New Technology Connections Portal is an IEEE digital resource designed to connect members, researchers, and industry practitioners with information about emerging technologies identified as strategic priorities by IEEE's governance bodies. The portal functions as a navigational layer within IEEE's broader information infrastructure, aggregating links to technical publications, working groups, standards projects, conferences, and community resources organized around specific technology focus areas rather than traditional society boundaries.

IEEE maintains extensive technical information across its publishing, standards, and membership platforms, but historically this content has been organized by society, journal, or standards committee. Practitioners working in cross-disciplinary or rapidly evolving fields often need to draw from multiple IEEE societies simultaneously. The New Technology Connections Portal addresses this by providing a unified entry point to resources spanning fields such as artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, quantum technologies, extended reality, and related areas where IEEE activity is distributed across multiple organizational units.

Relationship to IEEE Future Directions

The content and scope of the New Technology Connections Portal is informed by IEEE's Future Directions program, which identifies technology areas of strategic interest to IEEE and the engineering community at large. IEEE Future Directions operates under the IEEE Technical Activities Board, and its identified focus areas have historically determined which technology topics receive coordinated cross-society attention and dedicated portal resources.

When a technology area is recognized through the Future Directions process, IEEE can create structured communities, conference series, and curated resource collections around it. The New Technology Connections Portal provides the public-facing access point for this aggregated content, allowing practitioners to find IEEE publications, standards, and events without knowing in advance which IEEE society or technical committee has produced the relevant material.

Content and Navigation Structure

The portal organizes resources by technology domain rather than by publication type or organizational source. Within each domain, users can typically access links to IEEE Xplore papers and proceedings, active or completed standards projects, conference and event announcements, working group participation opportunities, and community forums or newsletters. This structure reflects a search behavior common among practitioners entering a new technology area: they want a topic-first entry point rather than a publication-first one.

Navigation typically includes both breadth and depth: a high-level technology area page surfaces the most prominent resources, while deeper pages provide access to more specialized working groups, technical committees, or standards committees that are active in narrower sub-areas of the technology.

Coordination with Standards and Technical Activities

Because the portal draws from both the standards development pipeline managed by IEEE SA and the technical community activity coordinated through the Technical Activities Board, it serves as a coordination artifact as well as a navigation tool. When a new standards project is approved by the IEEE SA Standards Board in an emerging technology area, the portal can surface that project alongside related research publications, giving practitioners a view of where the technology stands in both research development and standardization.

Applications

The New Technology Connections Portal supports a range of activities for IEEE members and the broader engineering community, including:

• Discovery of IEEE publications and standards in cross-disciplinary emerging technology fields
• Identification of working groups, technical committees, and participation opportunities
• Tracking IEEE's standardization activity in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and related domains
• Conference and event discovery across multiple IEEE societies for a given technology area
• Onboarding of practitioners and researchers entering a new technical domain