Officers of the RS Dallas Chapter and the society’s past president, Dennis Hoffman, met with students who attended the 2014 REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) summer program at the University of Texas at Dallas on July 31. The objective was to provide students a chance to directly communicate with practitioners to help them better understand how knowledge learned in the classroom can be applied in practice to real-world applications. The meeting also encouraged students to pursue a career in computer and information technology related areas by providing them with a first-hand account of work environments and professional expectations in the industry.

President Hoffman gave an introduction to the Reliability Society, focusing on why we join and why we stay. Figure 1 shows the photographs taken at the meeting and the slides Dennis used for his presentation.

Part (a) Presentation at the meeting with REU students

Part (b) Direct interaction with REU students

Part (c): Why we join and why we stay

Part (d): Why we join and why we stay (cont’d)

Figure 1: Photographs and slides from the meeting with REU students at UT-Dallas, July 31, 2014

The REU site at UT-Dallas, directed by Professor W. Eric Wong, has been funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) since 2009. Although the subject of the program is “Software Safety: Methodology, Practice and Research,” students gain proficiency in a broadly applicable skill set, including oral and written communication, research methods, critical thinking, and problem solving. This is important to their future success, even if they pursue an alternate research focus or career path.

The REU program at UT-Dallas has established a very close collaboration with local industry in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, working with companies such as Raytheon, Lockheed Martin Aeronautics, and HP. The RS Dallas chapter and the Computer Science Department at UT-Dallas provide a series of training and lectures not only to the REU students but also to all chapter members who are interested in the subjects discussed.

Please refer to Figure 2 and visit the REU website http://paris.utdallas.edu/reu for more details.

Figure 2: Home page of the REU program at the University of Texas at Dallas