Top European honour for world-class reliability scholar
Professor Xie Min, Chair Professor in the Department of Advanced Design and Systems Engineering and the School of Data Science at City University of Hong Kong (CityU), has been elected to the European Academy of Sciences and Arts (EASA) in the Technical and Environmental Sciences class.
Professor Xie has been active in research on reliability and systems engineering for over 30 years. He has developed mathematical models for software and system reliability, contributed significantly to statistical process control, and published over 300 international journal papers and 10 books on those topics, including one of the first books on software reliability modelling, in 1991, and another on computing system reliability in 2004.
“Our group currently focuses on the reliability and safety of intelligent systems, a topic that is of growing importance and urgency,” he said. He is a keen advocate for making safety and reliability issues central to the design stage rather than after a product has already reached the market or has malfunctioned. “Issues such as measurement errors, sensor failures, degradation, etc., should be modelled and analysed as early as possible at the design stage to prevent serious accidents,” he said.
Collaborations with outstanding students are among the most rewarding aspects of research at CityU, he said. “I am grateful to my many bright students and to CityU,” said Professor Xie. “Together we have carried out research in many aspects of system reliability and quality engineering, which has provided students with abundant opportunities in industry and academia.”
He recently co-authored the book Cyber-Physical Distributed Systems: Modeling, Reliability Analysis and Applications, which delivers a “detailed exploration of the modeling and reliability analysis of cyber physical systems through applications in infrastructure and energy and power systems”. The lead author is Professor Xie’s former PhD student from CityU, now a senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales.
Like many of our international faculty, Professor Xie maintains extensive linkages with collaborators overseas, particularly with European partners. “I went to Sweden in 1979 where I received my MSc in Engineering Physics and a PhD in Quality Technology,” he said. Before his move to Scandinavia, he took the national admission examination for the junior class at the University of Science and Technology of China in 1978, and received the highest score.
Professor Xie taught at the National University of Singapore for 20 years, and was one of the first recipients of the prestigious Lee Kuan Yew research fellowship in 1991. He was elected Fellow of the IEEE (2006) for his work on systems and software reliability, and is among the top 2% of the world's most highly cited scientists, according to metrics compiled by Stanford University.
The EASA is a non-government European academic organisation and is a member academy of the InterAcademy Partnership, a global network consisting of over 140 national and regional member academies for science, engineering, and medicine. It was founded in 1990 and serves as a transnational and interdisciplinary network to connect about 2,000 elected members worldwide, including 34 Nobel Prize laureates.