SPIE Announces Name Change

SPIE announced today it has retired "The International Society for Optical Engineering" adopted as its business name in 1981 and will be known as "SPIE," to better represent its growing community of scientists, researchers and engineers in industry, academia and government. The society, which was founded in 1955, said in a statement, "As a pioneer in the development of technical conferences and exhibitions designed to bring together a broad spectrum of technical disciplines, SPIE is now the leading society for light-based technologies powering important achievements in communications, biomedicine, security, space exploration, entertainment, semiconductor manufacturing, robotics, medical imaging, next-generation displays, battlefield technologies, biometric security, image processing, astronomy and computing." SPIE has more than 188,000 active constituents representing 138 different countries. As the organizer and sponsor of approximately 26 major conferences and education programs annually in North America, Europe, Asia and the South Pacific, it provides publishing, speaking and learning opportunities on emerging technologies. The SPIE Digital Library contains the world's largest collection of optics, photonics, imaging, sensor and scientific and technical research -- 240,000 papers, with 18,000 added each year. It publishes six scholarly journals and a variety of print media publications and contributes more than $1 million annually in scholarships, grants and financial support and has 98 student chapters around the world.