I.E.E.E.

A standard trope in an I.E.E.E. demo is to place the old trembly technology beside the new, sleek and persuasive full-range touch illusion.

An I.E.E.E. haptics fair is exactly what Ben Franklin would have dreamed of for American science—practical-minded, eccentric, and, as with bifocals, solving problems that one was not entirely aware were problems until an inventor found a solution to them.

As a leading researcher at AT&T Bell Laboratories, Dr. Flanagan was a pioneer in the field of acoustics, envisioning and providing the technical foundation for speech recognition, teleconferencing, MP3 music files and the more efficient digital transmission of human conversation — most famously in a 1976 article, “Computers That Talk and Listen: Man-Machine Communication by Voice,” that appeared in Proceedings of the I.E.E.E., a journal published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

A local chapter of the engineering society I.E.E.E. meets each month near Union Square to explore the details of New York City’s infrastructure.

Twelve evenings a year, members and guests of one of the local chapters of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or I.E.E.E., the largest technical society in the world, convene in a borrowed space on the 19th floor of Consolidated Edison’s headquarters on Irving Place.