IEEE Reliability Society Newsletter    Vol. 61, No. 3, August 2015

In 2015, the SERE conference (IEEE International Conference) on Software Security and Reliability; http://paris.utdallas.edu/sere14) and the QSIC conference (IEEE International Conference on Quality Software; http://paris.utdallas.edu/qsic14) merged into one large conference, QRS, with Q representing Quality, R for Reliability, and S for Security. This enhanced platform, sponsored by the IEEE Reliability Society, can better serve the scientific community as well as industry. It draws scientists and engineers from both academia and industry to present their ongoing work, relate their research outcomes and experiences, and discuss the best and most efficient techniques for the development of reliable, secure, and trustworthy systems. This presents an excellent opportunity for the academic community to become more aware of subject areas critical to the software industry as practitioners bring their needs to the table.

This year’s conference had three major tracks: research papers, fast abstracts and tutorials. Included were five keynote addresses, an IoT panel, and two tutorials on emerging topics related to the scope of the conference. Six additional workshops, more intensely focused, were also held concurrently. The following are pictures taken at the QRS conference.

Opening session on August 3, 2015	Keynote address by Professor Lionel Briand (University of Luxembourg , Luxembourg & Editor-in-Chief, Empirical Software Engineering - EMSE)
Keynote address by Professor Elisa Bertino (Purdue University, USA & Editor-in-Chief, IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing - TDSC)	Keynote address by Professor Jifeng He (East China Normal University, China & Member, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Keynote address by Professor Shaoying Liu (Hosei University, Japan)	Keynote address by Professor Tsong Yueh Chen (Swinburne University of Technology, Australia)
Panel on IoT (Moderator: Professor Steve Yau, Dr. Jeff Voas, Dr. Tim Grance and Professor Elisa Bertino)	Best paper award at QRS conference banquet
Professor Christian Hansen and Ms. Kelly Hansen at the QRS Conference Banquet	Student helpers, Ms. Beth Keithly, and Professor Eric Wong (Steering Committee Chair)

We thank Professor Christian Hansen, General Chair, and Professor Jian Zhang and Professor Bhavani Thuraisingham, Program co-Chairs, for their leadership in organizing this conference. We are also grateful to the Program Committee members and reviewers for investing their time to evaluate and comment on papers, which helps authors to improve the quality of their work. We would especially like to acknowledge the authors for sharing their advanced research and innovative ideas with all the conference attendees, as their contribution adds great value to the conference.

We also extend our appreciation to other organizing committees, including Professor Pete Clarke, Professor Zhenyu Chen, Professor Fei-Ching Kuo, Professor Jose Maldonado, Dr. Karama Kanoun, Professor Yu-Lun Huang, and Professor Karthik Pattabiraman.

Thanks also go to Xuelin Li, Yihao Li, Ruizhi Gao, and Shou-Yu Lee at the University of Texas at Dallas for designing, implementing, and maintaining the conference website and for other organizational tasks.