2013 Fall Semester IEEE Reliability Society Student Outreach
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W. Eric Wong |
Vice President for Technical Activities |
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Chair, Dallas Chapter |
Since 2009, the Dallas Chapter of the Reliability Society has worked closely with the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas to organize a student outreach event each semester. These events have a special mission to reach out to the UT-Dallas students and explain the benefits of joining the Reliability Society, but they are also open to the general public and attracted many faculty in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Computer Engineering, and Systems Engineering, as well as those from local industry including HP, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, Boeing, and Texas Instruments, etc.
The event for the 2013 Fall semester was held on September 20 with Professor Michael Pecht, a world renowned expert in strategic planning, design, test, IP, and risk assessment of electronic products and systems, as the speaker. The president of the Reliability Society, Dennis Hoffman, and a few members of the society’s Administrative Committee, as well as Professor Steve Yurkovich, Director of IEEE Division X, also took part with welcoming remarks to all.
Professor Pecht is a Professional Engineer, IEEE Fellow, ASME Fellow, SAE Fellow, and IMAPS Fellow. He is currently a Chair Professor in Mechanical Engineering, a Professor in Applied Mathematics, and the founder and Director of Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering at the University of Maryland. The title of his talk was "Battery Health Monitoring and Prognostics" with a focus on the use of prognostics and systems health management for battery management to forecast battery life and safety. The presentation was laced with a variety of real-world examples including a number of technical issues associated with Boeing’s 787 Dreamliners such as electrical arcing in the aircraft’s main power panel and catastrophic failure of the batteries used to run the aircraft’s auxiliary power unit. These failures suggest that the traditional reliability approaches of product design, test, and risk assessment that Boeing and their suppliers implemented are flawed. Possible solutions were discussed during the presentation. Click here for a detailed announcement of this talk.
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Dennis Hoffman, President, Reliability Society & |
Dennis Hoffman (President), Steve Yurkovich (Director of IEEE Division X), |
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Photographs for the seminar by Professor Michael Pecht and the Dallas Chapter meeting on September 20, 2013 |
The number of attendees for this event was more than 100, making it one of the most successful outreaches in recent years at UT-Dallas.
We give our special thanks to the Department of Computer Science, and the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at UT-Dallas for their generous support, as well as students in Professor Eric Wong’s research group at UT-Dallas for assisting with all the logistics.