Reliability Society Newsletter
Vol. 60, No. 1. February 2014
Front page:
President's Message
From the Editor
Society News:
Engineer of the Year, Lifetime Achievement Recipient, Officers Recognized at RAMS
Outgoing President Hoffman Receives Tribute
Members & Chapters
Chapter Outreach Guangzhou, China
2013 Member Satisfaction Survey
Meetings & Conferences
2014 IEEE PHM Conference in Spokane
RAMS® 2015 Symposium Call for Papers
Publications
Call for Papers: Special Issue of Trans in Reliability, Software Quality Assurance
Compendium of Ralph Evans' Editorials Now Available to Members
Standards
President's Message
Dear
Reliability Society Member,
It is a great honor and pleasure for me to serve as your 2014 President. I have been actively involved with the society in various capacities since 1997, and I have greatly enjoyed working with many great leaders and been amazed to see the society grow tremendously in terms of products and services offered to our members. During my presidency, I hope to bring further value to our members, as well as bring an increased awareness to our society, and promote the society as the natural go-to place and one-stop-shopping for all aspects of specialty engineering.
The specialty engineering disciplines, which cover reliability, maintainability, safety, security, prognostics and health management (PHM) and many other technical disciplines, intersect with just about any engineering discipline you can imagine and overlaps with virtually every technical society of the IEEE. The word "Trust" is often used as the common denominator that describes in short all of the disciplines covered by the Reliability Society's Field of Interest. Do you trust your product to perform as intended when you push the on- button? Do you trust your cell-phone to reliably connect you to your intended recipient when you have a critical need for communication? Do you trust your company's management protocols and procures to protect human life and liability? Do you trust your security software to protect your privacy and financial assets when you engage in transactions over the internet? The Reliability Society is a community of people all concerned about various aspects of trust.
As a member of the Reliability Society, you have access to a wide variety of resources that will help you in your professional life and hopefully allow you to contribute to bring trustworthiness to your home organization, whether that is a competitive business or a non-profit research facility or academic institution. Please take some time to browse our website rs.ieee.org to learn more about conferences and publications that we sponsor. Consider becoming an active member of the society if you are not already one. Join a local Reliability Society chapter if there is one in your geographical area, or join one of our many technical committees or on-line communities. Contact me or one of our VP's and let us know how we can better serve you or how you would like to contribute to our society.
This year I am particularly excited about hosting the annual PHM conference on my home campus at Eastern Washington University. I strongly encourage you to attend the conference which is held in June - one of the best times of the year to visit the beautiful Pacific Northwest, see www.PHMConf.org for details.
Extending my sincere wishes for a productive and trustworthy 2014, and I hope to see you at an RS sponsored professional meeting or conference soon.
Christian K. Hansen, PhD
2014 Reliability Society President
From the Editor
Welcome to the first edition of the 2014 IEEE Reliability Society Newsletter. You will see from the entries that we are a very active organization with our new President, Christian Hansen, taking an active role in many of those activities. (There may be two of him!)
At January RAMS Symposium in Colorado Springs, the Awards Banquet celebrated two outstanding engineers and leaders for the “Engineer of the Year” and the “Lifetime Achievement Award." Society officers, past an present were also acknowleged at the banquet.
Eric Wong, 2013 Technical Activities VP (now Secretary), traveled with Christian Hansen to China for a member outreach in Guangzhou, China. You will see that there was outstanding response to this effort. There are chapter summaries from two chapters, both have web sites they are updating.
Our Publications VP, Phil Laplante, provided the rsults from our 2013 Membership Satisfaction. Also, included in this newsletter is an update of the IEEE Standards effort being led by Lou Gullo.
This year our leadership is planning to take a layered approach to our technical papers. Besides the Transactions on Reliability Engineering (“T-REL”), Shiuhpyng Shieh will be developing a “Reliability Digest” for short technical papers (1-3 pages long) for papers received throughout the year. The plan is for the Digest to be published at the end of the year in a single publication that would be included in IEEE Xplore. These short papers would still be vetted, but on a shorter review cycle to allow timely publication. We will also continue to present “Letters in Reliability” in this Newsletter to allow timely reliability related articles of interested to be provide news-worthy and thought-provoking ideas in a less formal setting. With these three layers of papers, the plan is to develop a timely and energetic dialogue across the Society.
On a personal note, this is my first “At Bat” in publishing this Newsletter. Please feel free to provide me feedback, so this little piece of the RS web site can be as interesting and useful as possible. Just write me at joechilds@ieee.org
Joe Childs
2014 Newsletter Editor-in-Chief
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