
W. Eric Wong	Lon Chase
University of Texas at Dallas	Raytheon Company
Chair, Dallas Chapter	Vice Chair, Dallas Chapter
Secretary, IEEE Reliability Society	Member of AdCom, IEEE Reliability Society

The Dallas Chapter of the Reliability Society has had a student outreach event program at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) since 2009. The main objective is to explain the benefits of joining the Reliability Society and encourage students to take a more proactive role in the society’s events and become active volunteers to promote the technologies and practices that are vital to the industry for producing more reliable and trustworthy systems. However, all the events were also open to the public and attracted many attendees from the faculty at UTD and other neighboring universities, as well as industry practitioners form local companies. As a result, due to the popularity and a strong demand, the frequency of the event has been increased from once per year to once per semester.

The outreach for the 2014 spring semester was held on April 11 with Dr. Christian Hansen as the the speaker. In addition to his academic appointment as Professor and Associate Dean of the School of Computing and Engineering Sciences at Eastern Washington University, he is also the 2014 President of the IEEE Reliability Society. Professor Hansen has been active in the reliability profession for over 25 years and published broadly on a variety of engineering applications, mostly related to reliability modeling and failure data analysis for complex electronic systems.

The title of Professor Hansen’s seminar was “Drilling for Useful Information in the Landscape of Big Data,” where he emphasized that in today's business environment, important decisions are usually attempted to be made on the basis of timely and relevant statistical data. However, in the age of Big Data, extracting and analyzing such data very much resembles the process of finding a needle in a haystack. In his talk, Professor Hansen explained some historical trends in the growth of Big Data and discussed the challenges that today’s business decision-makers face in a world where the complexity of the available data is increasing at a much higher rate than the growth in useful information contained within the data.

The one-hour seminar, followed by many interesting questions and a good discussion, was a great success. There were more than 60 attendees, including faculty and students from the Computer Science Department and the Electrical Engineering Department at UTD, as well as engineers from local industry in the Dallas Fort-Worth metropolitan area such as Raytheon, Texas Instruments, Lockheed Martin, and HP. There were also two special guests: Dennis Hoffman, Junior Past President of RS, and Greg Breiland, Chair of the IEEE Dallas Section.

A professionally-made video of Professor Hansen’s seminar has been posted at Youtube. The following figure gives photographs taken during the seminar.

Welcoming remarks by Dennis Hoffman Junior Past President, Reliability Society	Seminar by Professor Christian Hansen (President, Reliability Society)
Seminar by Professor Christian Hansen (President, Reliability Society)	Professor Christian Hansen and members of RS Dallas Chapter

Photographs for the seminar by Professor Christian Hansen
at UT-Dallas on April 11, 2014

The Dallas Chapter would like to thank the Department of Computer Science, and the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at UTD for their generous support, as well as students in Professor Eric Wong's research group at UTD for assisting with all the logistics.