Reliability Society Newsletter

 

Vol. 58, No. 4. November 2012

President's Message



Reliability Society Members,

Hi. This year is almost over, but it is time for major holidays with time for family and friends get togethers. For US members, have a Happy Thanksgiving. For all members, have a Merry Christmas and a great New Year.

Congratulations

As you are well aware, the annual AdCom election has just been completed. There were 10 high quality technical experts who are nicely qualified persons that ran for the election of 6 AdCom members. The elected 2013-2015 AdCom members are:

Marsha Abramo
Loretta Arellano
Lon Chase
Rex Sallade
Shiuhpyng Winston Shieh
Alfred Stevens

Thanks for the great election results and congratulations to the elected AdCom members. For the four who were not elected, please remain active in the RS. Let me know your interest and please consider the newly arranged Director positions.

RS Topic Directors

As you are aware, the Reliability Society (RS) is broad and covers the Specialty Engineering disciplines (everyone that enhances reliability / availability / dependability). Based on that, the RS AdCom has approved the appointment of Directors for each discipline / specialty topic area. The Director is to be focused on their topic area, know a lot of contacts / experts for their area, and help identify / gain involvement with those persons to be active in a technical area within the RS. Each Director will help to expand the technical aspects (conferences, technical committees, webinars, special section for T-Rel publication, Standards, etc) and works with and gains the approval from the appropriate RS Vice President. In each case, the Director's area is broad covering everything from Systems Engineering requirements, design and development, testing, and operational monitoring from enhanced reliability aspects. The main aspects are for a person who is very willing to be active within the RS, knows loads of contacts and gains their involvement in a technical function, and helps to expand their technical area. The Director is appointed by the President, and the Director interfaces / supports the RS Vice-Presidents.

RS Topic Area Director Description:

Each specific RS Topic Area Director must be a real Reliability Society plus! Needed by each RS Director, as a must, is being a knowledgeable / expert in his / her technical topic area with known expert contacts. The Director must have good leadership capabilities and must have good interface / interaction capabilities. Each one must be an active beneficial person for the RS to be and to remain in an assigned Director position. Each Director is assigned to aid the ExCom Officers in establishing, beefing up, and/or maintaining their assigned specific topic area. Each Director shall support the applicable ExCom Officers by assuring that his / her topic area is beneficial and important for the Society. Each Director shall report to and support each applicable ExCom Officer. Each Director needs to be IEEE and RS members.

Each Director shall be a key source of identifying experts in his / her field and obtaining their participation / involvement in their aligned area. Each Director shall support the applicable ExCom Officers by identifying and gaining approval to establish a specific technical committee, a special section topic for publication within a RS document, a new conference, a needed Standard, a webinar topic, etc resulting in activity expansions.

Each Director can be specifically identified / recommended by anyone. Each proposed Director will be agreed with by the ExCom, approved by the AdCom, and appointed by the RS President.

Annually, each Director shall attend scheduled joint ExCom and AdCom meetings (as requested by the ExCom) to present their Topic Area status, plans, issues, needs, etc. Their travel expense will be at the same maximum level as the AdCom defined allowable travel expense amount.

The following are the planned topic Director positions to be appointed:

Director Topic Positions:

System / Product / Unit Reliability RS ROI / Affordability
Device Reliability Human Factors / HSI
Failure Analysis System Safety
RS System Engineering Integrity
SW Reliability Risk Management
System Security / Privacy / Trust Supportability
Maintainability Quality Assurance
Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) / Testability PHM SW

I hope that a number of RS members are interested in one of these Director positions or can recommend someone to be a Director. Let me know your interest or if want to discuss with me. Email me at d.hoffman@ieee.org. Presently, one person has been approved for the RS ROI / Affordability Director position, who is a Six-Sigma Black Belt rated industry person. In addition, a PhD industry person is interested in being the Risk Management Director, and another person is interested in being the SW Reliability Director, who is a university professor. Both of these want to be approved for appointment.

Other Topics:

Thanks to RS Standard Development Working Group Chair Professor Mike Pecht and Vice Chair Sony Mathew, University of Maryland CALCE, for leading the development of the IEEE Standard Framework for Prognostics and Health Management of Electronic Systems. If you would like to get involved in the Standard development, check with Sony or if you want to register, use this link: http://www.calce.umd.edu/phmstandardmeeting.htm

Thanks to RS Standard Development Working Group Chair Professor Mike Pecht and Vice Chair Dr. Diganta Das, University of Maryland CALCE, for leading the development of IEEE Standard 1413.1, Guide for Developing and Assessing Reliability Predictions Based on IEEE Standard 1413, which is nearing completion.

Thanks again to Zhaojun (Steven) Li, our Chicago RS Chapter Chair, for keeping the Chicago RS Chapter active. Their third meeting was held on September 13 at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Also thanks to Dr. Zhiling Lan, an associate professor of Computer Science at Illinois Institute of Technology, who gave her presentation, entitled "System Monitoring, Diagnosing, and Predicting for Extreme-Scale Computing". I do appreciate.

Thanks to Dr. Suzanne Zhang, professor at Beihang University in School of Reliability and Systems Engineering, for leading the establishment of the first China RS Chapter in Beijing and thanks to Professor Eric Wong, our RS Technical Activities VP, for extending his visit in China in mid-October to go meet Suzanne and meet with the available RS members in the Beijing area.

Thanks to Professor Eric Wong, our RS Technical Activities VP and Dallas RS Chapter Chair, for his University Of Texas - Dallas' (UTD) Computer Science Colloquium in collaboration with the Dallas RS Chapter and the Reliability Society. For this UTD CS Colloquium, also thanks to Dianxiang Xu, an Associate Professor at Dakota State University, who gave his "Model-Based Software Security Testing" presentation on November 2.

Visit our RS web site (http://rs.ieee.org) often. It is the gateway to the many resources that the RS makes available in the broad aspects of reliability. The Reliability Society can and does help create a win-win situation for you and the RS in this current dynamic, world-wide technology environment. By being active within the RS, you receive access to the Society's many resources along with opportunities for professional growth by interacting with many of the "movers and shakers" in this broad reliability discipline. The Reliability Society provides its members with networking opportunities for technical exchange with leading experts around the world. Involvement and participation within local chapters or national technical committees is encouraged. All reliability and trustworthiness professionals can benefit from membership in the Reliability Society.

As a reminder, conference proceedings are available for access in the Reliability Digital Library (RDL). As an RS member you get complete and free access to everything in the RDL. The RDL can be accessed at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/guesthome.jsp. Sign in with your IEEE user id and password and then click on "What can I access?". Then select the IEEE Reliability Society Conference Digital Library. This will bring up links to all the conference proceedings that are available.

As I stated before, my request to our RS members is to please consider being involved at some level within the Reliability Society. Your involvement can be in your local RS Chapter, in RS Conference Management Committees, within one of the RS ExCom Officer Committees, in being a Chair or active member in a Technical Committees, in a Standards development team, etc. It is also very great for our RS members to be an author for our RS publications or LOR (annual advanced technology report). Please do consider.

Thanks to each of you for your Reliability Society membership.

Best regards,

Dennis Hoffman
2012 RS President
d.hoffman@ieee.org

 

From the Editor

In this November issue of Reliability Society Newsletter, President Dennis Hoffman begins with seasonal greetings as the end of 2012 is approaching. I personally would also like to send seasonal greetings to the families and friends of reliability society newsletter readers. As we know that the annual AdCom election is just completed, and the president also sent out congratulation messages to the six elected AdCom members. President Dennis Hoffman also explains the role of topic directors, and the director topic positions for those RS members who shows interest or recommendations in one of the mentioned topics. If you are interested, would like to recommend a friend, or have further inquiries, please do not hesitate to contact the president.

The regular article by Senior Member Saha in this November issue talks about Internet Privacy Issues. A concept map about Internet Privacy/Online Privacy concept relations was depicted to describe the meanings and the risks of Internet Privacy/Online Privacy. The concept map served as quick references to find out the concepts linked to Internet Privacy/Online Privacy.

The Newsletter has been the society's primary media for sharing thoughts on reliability related issues and announcements of events of interest to our members. This newsletter will publish content deemed appropriate for and of interest to members of the IEEE Reliability Society and members of the reliability profession in general. Accepted content includes announcements and reports of activities sponsored by the Reliability Society including chapter meetings, workshops and conferences. Technical papers including reviews, opinions, case studies or new ideas for the reliability professional are welcomed and accepted without external review. Authors are solely responsible for the correctness of results presented and proper citation of work by others. For submissions to Prognostic Health Management (PHM) section, please contact Dr. Pradeep Lall who is the editor handling the PHM section. For further information please contact Dr. Lall.

Deadlines for submission of content:

Feb. 10 (Issue No. 1/2013)
May 10 (Issue No. 2/2013)
Aug. 10 (Issue No. 3/2013)
Nov. 10 (Issue No. 4/2013)

I would like to thank the RS Officers, AdCom members, Chapter chairs and members at large who have contributed to this issue. I sincerely hope our members can continue sharing your thoughts through our newsletter.

If you have any suggestions or comments on the newsletter, please feel free to contact me at your convenience.

Sincerely,

Shiuhpyng Winston Shieh, PhD
Newsletter Editor-in-Chief

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(c) 2012 IEEE Reliability Society