Reliability Society Newsletter

 

Vol. 61, No. 2, May 2015

Table of Contents

Front page:

President's Message

From the Editor

 

Society News:

Call for AdCom Candidates!

RS Tutorial Update

 

Members & Chapters

Changsha Chapter

Taiwan Chapter Outreach

Dallas Chapter

Boston Chapter

 

Meetings & Conferences

PHM Conference

ICCE Announcement

IRPS Report

 

Letters in Reliability

Nihal Sinnudai Shares Lifetime Achievement Award Ideas

Sam Keene's "Lessons Learned in Testing Components"

 

Links:

Reliability Society Home

RS Newsletter Homepage

President's Message

Dear Reliability Society Member,

As I mentioned in my previous newsletter message, this year the RS will be completing its five-year review and on June 18, our Senior Past President Dr. Jeff Voas and I will be meeting with the IEEE Society Review Committee (SRC). During the last several months, Dr. Voas and I have been working with the rest of our ExCom and AdCom preparing the society review documents which was recently submitted to the SRC.

While a society review may feel a bit like a visit to the doctor’s office and rightfully may cause some level of anxiety, I choose to approach this process from a more positive perspective. For those of us in the academic world who have sat through ABET visits for accreditation of engineering programs, we may see a review as a tool for continuous improvement which fits nicely within the mission of our society. Just like our society helps develop methods for continually improving performance and reliability of physical systems, we may think of our society as a system for which we wish to continue to improve its performance and reliability.

However, improving a system’s performance and reliability cannot be done without fully understanding the specific function that the system is designed to perform. To that effect, we have our Field of Interest (FOI) and also we have developed specific goals that we may use to describe the particular function that this society is designed to perform. The society’s FOI has remained constant throughout most of the society’s 65+ year history and it reads: The Society is concerned with the strategies and the best practices for attaining, assessing, assuring, and sustaining system reliability throughout its life cycle.

As part of our strategic planning efforts, we have identified six strategic goals, which we will work towards over the next five years:

Goal # 1: Increase member awareness of the society and its benefits

Goal # 2: Expand dissemination of technical material to members

Goal # 3: Expand focus on reliability of emerging technologies

Goal # 4: Increase membership participation, globally

Goal # 5: Extend collaboration with other IEEE Societies and Technical Communities

Goal # 6: Increase Annual Non-Investment Revenue

You will notice that the word “member” appears in some variation in three of the six stated goals. If we interpret membership in the broad sense of past, present and prospective (future) members, one could argue that all of these goals relate to an overarching goal of building our society membership and providing value to the entire community of reliability engineering professionals, a community that represents both our current and prospective members. The 6th goal relates specifically to building a financially strong society. Our society is presently in strong financial shape, however, we will continue to improve the society’s financial strength, not for the sake of finances themselves, but for the purpose of generating opportunities to grow our memberships and make investments that will improve the value of membership.

To all of our members, I thank you for choosing to be part of our society. If you are a member of the broad reliability engineering community, but you are not a member of the RS, I personally invite you to join us. I will work hard to earn your trust and continue to provide value for your membership.

Christian K. Hansen, PhD
2015 Reliability Society President

 

 

 

From the Editor

This is the May, 2015, issue of the Reliability Society Newsletter. It is time again for us to select six members for the Administrative Committee. Our past presidents, Dennis Hoffman and Jeff Voas are organizing these elections and have provided details for any of our members interested in helping the Society to continue to be the dynamic organization that it is.

Eric Wong, our Publications VP, provided an article updating information on the RS Tutorial Certificate Program on System and Software Reliability, as well as the other technical activities on-going in the Society.

Our world-wide activities are described by our ambitious chapter officers in their reports and their own newsletters

We are providing you with the locations and dates of key upcoming conferences: ICCE in Berlin and PHM in Austin, TX. Also the IRPS provided us a summary of technical information from their conference in Monterrey, CA.

Two very experienced and expert engineers Nihal Sinnadurai and Sam Keene provided outstanding papers, outlining some of their many lessons-learned.

Please take time to look over these articles. These activities don't "just happen." It takes a lot of hard work and detailed thought to make this Society what it is. If this sounds interesting to you, why not consider running for AdCom and see what you can do?

Joe Childs
2015 Newsletter Editor-in-Chief
joechilds@ieee.org

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