Message from the Program Chairs

Abstract

This year, we have an excellent program. The program covers academic approaches as well as empirical studies from the industry. Especially new technologies such as AI, IoT, cloud and blockchain had become high attention by the submissions. We received 125 submissions to the regular paper track and 31 to the short paper track. After the process of desk rejection, all remaining papers were reviewed by three or more program committee members. Following an extensive online discussion, six regular-track accepted submissions were recommended to the IEEE Transactions on Reliability and thirty submissions had been accepted as regular papers. This represented an acceptance rate of 28.80%. No specific acceptance rate was communicated as a guideline to the program committee members. They were free to accept any paper deemed strong and novel. Based on the review comments, the program chairs selected six papers and invited their authors to submit the corresponding revised versions that had addressed the reviewers’ comments to the IEEE Transactions on Reliability for further evaluation and possible publication. We invited the original reviewers of these QRS submissions to review these revised papers using the standard of the Journal for paper acceptance. In addition, the abstracts of these six selected papers were published in the QRS 2020 conference proceedings. We will further invite authors of high quality QRS 2020 papers to submit their extended versions to a special section on QRS in the Reliability Society Section of IEEE Access. QRS has also established a partnership with IEEE Transactions on Reliability to include journalfirst papers into the technical program. Authors of journal-first papers accepted in the Journal will be invited to present their work at QRS, allowing them to interact with the QRS attendees for further discussion and explore possible collaborations.