President's Message

The recent International System Safety Conference (ISSC) in Albuquerque, New Mexico was a thought-provoking event. Professor Edward Gibson gave the first keynote address. He described the engineering programs at Arizona State University (ASU) and some possible relations with the system safety discipline. Members of the Executive Council (EC) had additional meetings with Dr. Gibson to explore including system safety concepts in the school’s engineering curriculum, as well as the relationship between ASU and the ISSS. One of the most venerable members of our Society, John Rankin, gave several presentations on hazard analysis. He also provided a viewing of the movie Fate is the Hunter and explained how it helped inspire him to invent Sneak Circuit Analysis. The Conference featured many excellent papers and tutorials. One that received a good deal of positive commentary was on the topic of “gamification” in teaching software safety analysis. The authors, Brian Connell and David Musgrave, have developed an entertaining and effective way to train on this topic.