The Hindu Business Line : IEE, IIE merger to form Institute for Engg & Tech

THE global body of scientists and engineers, Institute of Electrical Engineers, will merge with the Institute of Incorporated Engineers (IIE) in mid-2006.

The new entity, Institute for Engineering and Technology, will be 1,65,000-member strong, with the addition of 40,000 from the IIE.

"As skill sets change, we felt the need to incorporate different engineers, from front-end specialists to marketing professionals. We will now span more disciplines," said Mr Paul Jackson, Director, Professional Operations, Institute of Electrical Engineers (IEE).

The UK-based IEE is a not-for-profit organisation and hopes to contribute more to the making of standards, policies and regulations in the coming years. The association has invested in setting up two offices in India.

Declining to reveal the exact amount, Mr Jackson said, "India can go beyond being just a source of software engineers to being a source of knowledge. There is a potential to do more especially in Delhi, where we can extend external and impartial advice to the Government."

The association has 1,500 members in India, and hopes to increase this number with the establishment of offices in Bangalore and Delhi. The society will also recruit four people for fulltime posts whose main function will be industry interaction to increase the number of business partners.

Currently, there are 100 of them in India, of which 15 are from Bangalore, said Mr M.R. Sitharaman, Chairman, IEE Bangalore Branch.

Engineers, according to Mr Jackson, now have to dip into more than one discipline. Information hubs and digital libraries will help them remain abreast of changes and distribute knowledge quickly across borders. "We make available tiers of information. Over 3 lakh records of technical white papers and reports are archived per year," he said. Inspect, the digital library, is a database available to members of the IEE across the globe.

The association recently co-developed a video streaming software with DatMedia, a European company. It will be used to record, store and broadcast lectures over the Internet. The investment in this project, said Mr Jackson, is £4,00,000 (Rs 328 lakh). The software, called IEE TV, enables members to search slide titles of videos stored. Over 1,000 lectures have been archived in Inspect and another 300 will be added by the end of this year, said Mr Jackson.

Presentations of IEE's two-day international conference on embedded systems and software in the city will also be recorded and broadcast.

"Over the next two weeks, we expect an audience of over 400 to avail the service," said Mr Jackson. Speakers from top companies across the globe will present topics ranging from Ultra Wide Band, a low-power wireless technology, to automotive application.

An exhibition has also been organised to allow smaller companies to showcase their products to a worldwide audience.

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page