Vol. 63, No. 2, May 2017

Front page:

• President's Message

• From the Editor

Society Announcements:

• Adcom Candidates Sought

• ASTR Conference

• CFP TRel Special

• RS Mentoring Survey

Members & Chapters:

Dallas Chapter Activities:

• Dallas Seminar

• Software Contest

Boston Chapter Activities:

• Newsletter

RS Events & News:

• Jeff Voas in China

Links:

• Reliability Society Home

• RS Newsletter Homepage

President's Message

Dear Society Members,

I hope this message finds you well.

It's hard to believe that we are midway through 2017. We just held our 2nd of 3 ADCOM meetings in Anchorage, AK, and I'd like to bring you up to date on a few items.

To begin, our overall budget surplus for 2016 was $192.8K. The Society's net worth has increased to $1,536K, an increase of $68K from 2015.

Prof. Pradeep Lall, VP of Publications, has written a Letter of Intent to the IEEE Periodicals Committee stating our interest in creating our own Reliability Magazine. Creating a new publication is a very long process in IEEE, and it'll take probably 2 years to get approval, if successful. This is the easiest and first step in that process.

In terms of conferences, we are doing well. It is interesting to note that the Society has sponsored 63 events in the past three years, reaching nearly 6000 attendees each year, and we have published 3000 Proceedings PDFs. We have three financially sponsored conferences in 2017 outside of North America, and our conferences are split nearly equally between software and hardware. A few upcoming 2017 conferences that we completely own or are major owners of include:

• ISSRE, in Toulouse, France, in October (http://issre.net/)
• QRS, in Prague, in July (http://paris.utdallas.edu/qrs17/)
• ICPHM, in Dallas, TX, in June (http://www.phmconf.org/)
• PHM-China, in Harbin, China, in July (http://www.phm2017.org/)

The Society wrote a "seedling" IEEE Future Directions Committee (FDC) proposal for Blockchain (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockchain) which was approved for funding for $20K. This will give us funds to hold a one or two-day workshop on Blockchain for all interested OUs in IEEE. Prof. Angelos Stavrou (GMU), a recent Reliability Society Engineer of the Year, will lead this effort for the Society. This allows us to be the "lead" society within IEEE on this new technology going forward, should the IEEE New Initiative Committee opt to fund a larger 3-year effort starting in 2018.

But not all news is good news. Unfortunately, we have had a decrease in membership from 2016. Please encourage your IEEE colleagues to look at our website (http://rs.ieee.org/) and consider joining. However, on a brighter side, the Society now has six chapters in China with one more being formed. The chapters have all been active in organizing conferences in China thanks to the extraordinary efforts of Prof. Eric Wong (EIC, IEEE Transaction on Reliability).

The IEEE Sections Congress (http://sections-congress.ieee.org/) will be held in Sydney Australia in August. The Society will be represented in the Division VI area of the venue and I will give a short "Ignite" talk there explaining our successes in creating chapters in China. We believe we have a 'secret sauce' that we can teach to other OUs in IEEE.

Our annual ADCOM elections will occur soon. If you are interested in running, please contact Prof. Christian Hansen (c.k.hansen@ieee.org) or see the announcement in this Newsletter. Further, if you have nominations for our annual Engineer of the Year award or Lifetime Achievement award, please contact Christian for how to nominate. These awards are given out in January each year.

In summary, your ADCOM/EXCOM is working hard to support our membership, grow our field of interest and portfolio, stay financially well, and continue to align our goals and interests with those of IEEE.

Have a great Summer!

Jeff
j.voas@ieee.org

From the Editor

This is the second Reliability Society newsletter for 2017 and we are well underway in activities this year. The society is very active in conferences, publications and chapters. This RS Newsletter remains the primary medium for conveying society announcements, news, and chapter activity to the society members. Members and organizations have much knowledge and information to share. This sharing strengthens our disciplines, members and the society. Our sponsored conferences, publications and chapters all form a part of this information sharing and are critical in future society growth.