MMR 2015, Tokyo

The 9^th international conference on Mathematical Methods in Reliability, MMR2015, was held at the Tokyo Campus of the University of Tsukuba, from June 1st to June 4th 2015. The conference was organized by the University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, in collaboration with the Institute of Statistical Mathematics, University of Tsukuba, and the Reliability Engineering Association of Japan. The conference exceeded expectations, welcoming more than 200 participants from a total of 27 countries. The participants enjoyed a wide variety of presentations by eminent researchers and scholars from across the world.

The main theme of MMR2015 was exploring how to achieve reliability and safety in the rapidly evolving era of 'Big Data'. The conference explored a number of key processes which are vital in developing future computing systems: grasping both the latent and revealed needs of customers and society, establishing new product development processes, and ensuring the reliability and safety of such systems. In particular, due to the rapid development of ICT (information and communication technology) in recent years, Big Data can now be used as a resource in itself to validate new products in terms of their reliability and safety.

Yukio Hatoyama, former Prime Minister of Japan, and Way Kuo, eminent researcher at the City University of Hong Kong, China, were invited to share their perspectives at the opening ceremony. Five keynote lectures were also given by visiting professors: William Meeker (Department of Statistics, Iowa State University Ames, Iowa, USA), Narayanaswamy Balakrishnan (McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada), Jerry Lawless (Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, University of Waterloo, Canada), Catherine Huber (Department of Mathematics, University Paris Descartes, France), and Kazuyuki Suzuki (UEC-Tokyo, Japan). In total, 177 research papers were submitted for the conference, and each talk covered both theoretical and practical aspects of current research surrounding reliability in the era of Big Data.

The conference was highly successful, informative and productive, providing a great opportunity to exchange ideas and promote discussion. Future research will no doubt benefit greatly from new collaborations and contributions made at this conference.