IEEE Reliability Society Newsletter

President's Message

Dear Reliability Society Member,

As I begin my second elected term as President of the Reliability Society (RS), I first and foremost want to thank the RS AdCom for their confidence in me. I am truly honored to be able to serve a distinguished technical society and community of people with passion for the various disciplines related to reliability engineering.

2014 was an exciting year for the society and jointly we have made many accomplishments that we can be proud of. I truly believe that the many technical journals and conferences that the RS publishes or sponsors are continuing to offer great value to our members. The RS leadership team want to ensure that we continue to develop new content and keep adding value to our members.

During 2015, the RS will go through its five-year periodical and society review processes. This month the RS Vice-President for Publications and the Editor-in-Chief for the Transactions of Reliability met with the IEEE Periodicals Review and Advisory Committee (PRAC) during the IEEE general meeting series in New Orleans. We are pleased to have a competent group of IEEE publication professionals review our flagship journal and we are thankful for many constructive suggestions that will allow us to continue to improve the journal. In the following months I will be leading a team to prepare the documents for our society review that will take place during the June IEEE meeting series. I am excited about the ongoing and upcoming reviews. It allows us to gain an outside perspective of the society’s operation and an opportunity for us to reinvent ourselves and discover new ways in which we can serve our membership in the face of an ever-changing technological world.

Having said that, I also recognize that real change cannot come from a small group of society volunteers, but must come from a broader understanding of the society’s members’ needs. For this reason, I am asking all of our members to contribute to this process by sharing your input with the society’s leadership. I want to keep this input open-ended and therefore I have not developed a formal survey to be completed. Rather, I am asking members to share informally anything that you believe will be useful for the upcoming society review. We encourage you to tell us your unique story.

What technical discipline do you represent and how does the RS help you in your daily job or research activities?
What prompted you to join the society and what would you like to see added that would provide further value of your membership?

Please share whatever you believe would be useful to us. If you know people who are not members, but perhaps should be, please encourage them to also email us and tell us what we would need to provide or develop to motivate them to join us.

For many of us, myself included, email has become the primary means by which we communicate and conduct our everyday business. In order for me to not miss out on important emails on this topic, I have set up a dedicated email address for this purpose alone as follows: RS2015review@ieeereliability.com. This email address will be monitored periodically, but I will not be replying to emails sent to this address unless there is a specific question for me to answer. I do promise to carefully consider every suggestion sent to this address.

I look forward to hearing from you and discussing any suggestions you may have with the RS leadership team. Your input is important and greatly appreciated.

With best wishes for an exciting and productive 2015,
Christian K. Hansen, PhD
2015 Reliability Society President


Reliability Society Newsletter
Vol. 61, No. 1, February 2015
Table of Contents Front page: President's Message From the Editor Society News: RS Banquet at RAMS: Lifetime Achievement and Engineer of the Year Awards RS Banquet at RAMS: New ExCom Slate and AdCom Electees Members & Chapters Boston Chapter Dallas Chapter Arizona Chapter RS Chapter Outreach: China Meetings & Conferences Call for Abstracts: 2015 ASTR Conference, Boston, MA Announcing 2015 IRPS, Monterrey, CA PHM-2015 Announced: Austin, TX Call for Papers: 2015 QRS, Vancouver, Canada Letters in Reliability Revisiting Perception of Reliability: Uninteroperability in US Power Grid Links: Reliability Society Home RS Newsletter Homepage	President's Message Dear Reliability Society Member, As I begin my second elected term as President of the Reliability Society (RS), I first and foremost want to thank the RS AdCom for their confidence in me. I am truly honored to be able to serve a distinguished technical society and community of people with passion for the various disciplines related to reliability engineering. 2014 was an exciting year for the society and jointly we have made many accomplishments that we can be proud of. I truly believe that the many technical journals and conferences that the RS publishes or sponsors are continuing to offer great value to our members. The RS leadership team want to ensure that we continue to develop new content and keep adding value to our members. During 2015, the RS will go through its five-year periodical and society review processes. This month the RS Vice-President for Publications and the Editor-in-Chief for the Transactions of Reliability met with the IEEE Periodicals Review and Advisory Committee (PRAC) during the IEEE general meeting series in New Orleans. We are pleased to have a competent group of IEEE publication professionals review our flagship journal and we are thankful for many constructive suggestions that will allow us to continue to improve the journal. In the following months I will be leading a team to prepare the documents for our society review that will take place during the June IEEE meeting series. I am excited about the ongoing and upcoming reviews. It allows us to gain an outside perspective of the society’s operation and an opportunity for us to reinvent ourselves and discover new ways in which we can serve our membership in the face of an ever-changing technological world. Having said that, I also recognize that real change cannot come from a small group of society volunteers, but must come from a broader understanding of the society’s members’ needs. For this reason, I am asking all of our members to contribute to this process by sharing your input with the society’s leadership. I want to keep this input open-ended and therefore I have not developed a formal survey to be completed. Rather, I am asking members to share informally anything that you believe will be useful for the upcoming society review. We encourage you to tell us your unique story. What technical discipline do you represent and how does the RS help you in your daily job or research activities? What prompted you to join the society and what would you like to see added that would provide further value of your membership? Please share whatever you believe would be useful to us. If you know people who are not members, but perhaps should be, please encourage them to also email us and tell us what we would need to provide or develop to motivate them to join us. For many of us, myself included, email has become the primary means by which we communicate and conduct our everyday business. In order for me to not miss out on important emails on this topic, I have set up a dedicated email address for this purpose alone as follows: RS2015review@ieeereliability.com. This email address will be monitored periodically, but I will not be replying to emails sent to this address unless there is a specific question for me to answer. I do promise to carefully consider every suggestion sent to this address. I look forward to hearing from you and discussing any suggestions you may have with the RS leadership team. Your input is important and greatly appreciated. With best wishes for an exciting and productive 2015, Christian K. Hansen, PhD 2015 Reliability Society President	From the Editor Welcome to the first issue of our 2015 IEEE Reliability Society Newsletter! We offer a little for everyone in this issue... Announcements of upcoming conferences and events A most intriguing article about the "continuing uninteroperability" of the US Power Grid, by Dr. Robert Mathews in our Letters in Reliability section Announcements of two Lifetime Achievement Awards and the Reliability Society Engineer of 2014 The beginnings of a brand new Chapter and the goings-on of our existing chapters. The RS is continuing to develop its new IEEE Digest with another special issue on Software Quality. We included a Call for Papers for any interested in contributing. The Letters in Reliability are more general interest articles such as the Power Grid article in this issue. They will be compiled by year in our RS site along with the past "Annual Technical Reports" from years past. Editing this newsletter is a fun job, because I work with nearly all those who contribute the most to this Society and I can see the enthusiasm and hard work that go into the events, reports, and papers that make this one of the most active societies in IEEE! You don't have to commit your whole life to volunteering in this society, but if you have an idea or something you'd like to contribute here, please just let us know. Enjoy! Joe Childs 2015 Newsletter Editor-in-Chief joechilds@ieee.org The content in this publication is protected by all applicable copyright laws. Links to this website from commercial websites is permitted and encouraged, however, content may not be copied without use of proper citation. (c) 2015 IEEE Reliability Society

Table of Contents

President's Message