After two consecutive years at NIST (the National Institute of Standards and Technology) in Gaithersburg, Maryland, SERE 2014 (the Eighth IEEE International Conference on Software Security and Reliability) was held on the West Coast of the U.S., in San Francisco, California, from June 30 to July 2.

With its increasing use in many large, complicated systems such as those in transportation, medicine, finance, and nuclear power generation, software has become an essential factor in our everyday lives. Assuring the secure and reliable operation of these systems is of the highest priority, since a failure of these systems can lead to a significant financial loss or even to human casualties. In response to this, Software Quality Assurance was selected as the special theme of SERE 2014.

The conference brought together a broad spectrum of researchers and practitioners who presented on-going ideas, experiences, and most recent research. They exchanged best practices for developing reliable, secure, and trustworthy software systems more effectively and efficiently. This gave the academic community an increased awareness of areas vital to the industry while also presenting practitioners an opportunity to express their needs.

The conference had three major tracks: research papers, fast abstracts and the student doctoral program. It also had four distinguished keynote addresses on emerging topics related to the scope of the conference:

Adversarial Machine Learning

Doug Tygar, Professor
Department of Computer Science
University of California − Berkeley, U.S.
“Imagineering” an Internet of Anything

Jeffrey Voas, Computer Scientist
National Institute of Standards and Technology, U.S.
Constraint-Based Reasoning in Static Analysis and Testing

Jian Zhang, Professor & Assistant Director
Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
Software Fault Tolerance

Kishor Trivedi, Chair Professor
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
Duke University, U.S.

In addition to the main conference, there were four co-located workshops:

International Workshop on Information Assurance
International Workshop on Trustworthy Computing
International Workshop on Safety and Security in Cyber-Physical Systems
International Workshop on Hardware-Software Co-Design

These workshops focused on carefully selected topics yet were still closely related to the theme, making the conference an even more attractive platform for researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and students to exchange ideas and results, share experiences and suggestions, and discuss solutions and practices appropriate for their challenges at work.

SERE 2014 was a three-day event with more than 100 attendees. Professor Christian Hansen, the society’s president, also participated in the meeting and gave welcoming remarks. The following photographs were taken at the opening session and at the keynotes.

Welcoming remarks by Professor Christian Hansen President, IEEE Reliability	Opening remarks by Professor W. Eric Wong Chair, SERE Steering Committee
Keynote address by Dr. Jeffrey Voas National Institute of Standards and Technology	Keynote address by professor Doug Tygar University of California − Berkeley
Keynote address by Professor Jian Zahng Chinese Academy of Sciences	Keynote address by Professor Kishor Trivedi Duke University

Please visit the conference website http://paris.utdallas.edu/sere14 for more details.

SERE 2014: An Impactful Conference on Software Security and Reliability

W. Eric Wong Chair, SERE Steering Committee Secretary of IEEE Reliability Society

W. Eric Wong
Chair, SERE Steering Committee
Secretary of IEEE Reliability Society