Puzzles are a fun and relatable way to connect with many different audiences and create a sense of community, as they are great for all ages and walks of life. Puzzles have been proven to exercise your brain and improve your memory, elevate your IQ, increase your productivity, and boost your mood. The IEEE Puzzlers Community offers numerous genres of puzzles at varying levels of difficulty, including Missing Numbers and Logic games.

IEEE Puzzlers officially launched in May 2021, after a year of planning and development. The driving force behind the initiative was to offer a fun and engaging experience that could be delivered virtually while growing a new and vibrant IEEE community around recreational mathematics. What began as a fun and whimsical initiative snowballed into a movement, with over 3000 puzzler community members to date.

The IEEE Puzzlers are working on an exclusive collaborative initiative with WIE to create a contest for WIE ILC in San Diego this year. Spearheaded by the women volunteers in IEEE Puzzlers, special edition puzzles will be created for participants to solve and enter for a chance to win! IEEE Volunteers Ava Hedayatipour and Cybele Ghanem are the brains behind the puzzles you will see at the conference.

Dr. Ava Hedayatipour joined the CSULB Department of Electrical Engineering as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2020. Dr. Ava received her Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Dr. Hedayatipour’s current research interests include analog integrated circuit designs, bio-implantable and biomedical devices, low-power and low-noise designs, microelectronics, mixed-signal VLSI designs, and hardware security. WIE ILC was the first conference that I attended during my PhD. WIE ILC played a great role in finding my stand in as an engineer. Making a puzzle for WIE ILC is a small thank you for all the great work that this conference has done!

Cybele is a Computer and Telecommunications Engineer from the Lebanese University Faculty of Engineering 2 – Roumieh, who holds a Research Masters degree in Telecommunications, Networking and Cybersecurity. Apart from being a devoted student, Cybele gives huge importance to volunteering work in and outside IEEE. One of her main activities is IEEE Puzzlers. Cybele joined the team one year ago in the first batch of volunteers, and she soon became responsible for Volunteers onboarding and training. She dedicates her free time to create brainteasers and assist her peers. “Ever since I joined IEEE in 2016, I have been fascinated by the important role of women. Although I live in a masculine country, I wanted to show the world that a woman can be a leader too. This year I joined WIE in hopes of empowering other women who need to be reminded of their role in society. Creating puzzles for WIE ILC will be one of the ways to achieve this goal!”

We look forward to participating in WIE ILC and connecting with this community through fun brain-teasers! What are you waiting for? Log into IEEE Collabratec and join the fun today!