Barry Nussbaum, SPAIG Committee Chair

SPAIG is the acronym for the ASA committee with the longest name—Statistical Partnerships among Academe, Industry, and Government. It also has one of the longest reaching of the ASA’s many goals: to encourage, initiate, and reward collaborative efforts across the three main branches of the statistical profession—academe, industry, and government. SPAIG exists to build the diversity of the ASA.

The ability as an association to learn in a cross-disciplinary way can speed up the response of the statistics profession to the issues each branch has, many of which are common to all branches. To turn this insight into a call for action, members of the SPAIG committee need to listen to ASA members. Therefore, the committee will be formulating and distributing a pilot survey. It also will probably use focus groups, reach out at chapter business meetings this fall, and seek member views on the ASA section electronic mailing lists.

Where to start? Well, we have picked two pervasive concerns at the start to get your views (with more perhaps added later):

• Big Data: This “catch phrase” seems to be taking the analytic world by storm. Do statisticians feel their contribution is being circumvented by the IT folks, and how do statisticians remain prominent players?
• Declining Response: Response rates to surveys are on a steep decline. Even our committee’s homegrown salary survey to our fellow statisticians has suffered an ever-decreasing response. No easy answers here?

Clearly, we are in the formulation stage. We are seeking volunteers and welcoming comments and suggestions for next steps. Time matters, which is why we have jumped over several steps to get started. Please address responses to Barry Nussbaum at Nussbaum.barry@epa.gov or (202) 566-1493.