With nearly 100,000 members, the IEEE Computer Society is the world's leading organization of computer professionals. It is the largest of the 37 societies of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). It is headquartered in Washington, D.C.

Contents

1 History 2 Organization 3 Competition 4 See also 5 External links

History

The Computer Society traces its origins (and founding date) to a subcommittee of the Institute of Radio Engineers that was founded in 1946, although it did not assume its present form until 1963 and its present name until 1971.

Organization

The Computer Society is organized geographically into chapters, and topically into an enormous number of technical committees, technical communities, technical councils, task forces, and standards committees. Besides its official magazine, known simply as Computer, the Society also publishes 28 other journals and magazines, many of which are known as "IEEE Transactions of [name of the field]".

The IEEE 802 standards committee is famous for its work on local area networking standards like Ethernet.

Competition

The primary competitor of the Computer Society is the Association for Computing Machinery. It is difficult to generalize about the distinction between the two, but the Computer Society tends to focus more on computer hardware while ACM focuses more on computer software. The IEEE tends to attract electrical engineering majors while ACM attracts computer science majors; as a result, the Society has been more aggressive than ACM in promoting a shift from the field of computer science to the engineering discipline of software engineering. Also, ACM does not engage in standardization activities while IEEE does.

Of course, there is significant overlap in their activities, and the two organizations do cooperate from time to time on joint projects like computer science curricula.

See also

• IEEE

External links

• Web site: http://www.computer.org/