Society News

To introduce and promote the Reliability Society to the scientific and technology communities in China, Professor Christian Hansen, the society’s President-elect for 2014, and Professor W. Eric Wong (left), the society’s 2013 Vice President for Technical Activities, attended the International Conference on Information Science and Cloud Computing (ISCC 2013) in Guangzhou, China from December 7 to 8. The conference, technically sponsored by Reliability Society, was a great success with more than 200 attendees.

Professor Hansen (pictured below) delivered a keynote address, “BIG Data in the BIG Picture: Challenges and Projections for the Future”. He first reviewed the current status of BIG data and related technology, and what we have gained so far, followed by a discussion of ongoing challenges and areas for new utilization of BIG data, and then concluded with a prediction of whether the growth would continue as in the past. He also explained the benefits of membership in the Reliability Society and encouraged conference attendees to join.

Welcome remarks by Dr. W. Eric Wong (Conference Chair, Professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, and 2013 Vice President for Technical Activity of IEEE Reliability Society)

Keynote speech by Professor Christian Hansen (Professor and Associate Dean of Computing and Engineering Sciences at the Eastern Washington University, and President of IEEE Reliability Society)

Professors Hansen and Wong also organized a roundtable meeting (see Figure 2) at the conference to discuss the establishment of a Reliability Society in Guangzhou. Participants from China Electronic Product Reliability and Environmental Testing Research Institute (CEPREI), VTRON Technologies, Guangzhou University, Sun Yat-Sen University, South China University of Technology, etc., exchanged ideas on how to make the chapter activities more attractive and recruit more members, and how a chapter can benefit from the resources provided by the society. Professors Hansen and Wong also visited Guangzhou Hi-Tech Industrial Development Zone to meet with engineers and discussed related issues

Gathering with engineers from CEPREI.

In addition to paper presentations, ISCC had a poster session as well. Together, they provided an informative platform for university professors and students, researchers from government and industrysponsored institutes, and practitioners engaging in real-life systems to exchange results, ideas, experiences, and practices, and discuss possible solutions to make their work more efficient and effective. ISCC 2013 received about 500 submissions. Each was carefully evaluated by three program committee members on the basis of originality, significance of contributions, quality.