The Section on Statistics in Defense and National Security cosponsored the Conference on Applied Statistics in Defense (CASD), which took place October 20–24, 2014, at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington, DC.

The CASD continues the traditions of the Design of Experiments Conference (1955–1994) and Army Conference on Applied Statistics (1994–2013). It is a forum for the presentation and discussion of theoretical and applied papers related to the use of probability and statistics in solving problems of interest to the defense community. It provides a unique opportunity for interaction between academia, industry, and government researchers.

The principal theme was reliability, with a secondary focus on text analysis. One of the distinctive characteristics of CASD is an inclusive two-day tutorial, which was on applied reliability and given by William Meeker of Iowa State University. Also, as part of the theme, John Eltinge of the Bureau of Labor Statistics gave a clinical session presentation titled “Prospective Application of System Reliability Concepts and Methods to Analysis of Survey Participation” and Meeker and Shane Reese of Brigham Young University provided discussion.

The keynote, “Shape Metrology,” was given by Antonio Possolo of the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Other invited talks focused on model-based clustering of large networks, a time series analysis of Twitter graphs, and applications of the extremogram to spatial processes. Special sessions on network science, heavy-tailed distributions, and network science also were given.

Selected papers will be published in the 2015 JSM Proceedings. In the meantime, slides have been posted to the conference website.