Jeff Luner, SPES JSM Program Chair

Thousands of statisticians from all corners of the world took part in the great democratization of statistics at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Washington, DC, this past summer. The Section on Physical and Engineering Sciences (SPES) was well-represented throughout the six days of statistics (from evidence to policy).

SPES was the primary sponsor of 17 sessions, including four invited, four topic-contributed, seven contributed, and six roundtable. We also had a great mixer, held as a joint session with the Quality and Productivity Section (Q&P). Additionally, there were four SPES short courses and 14 contributions to the poster sessions. And last but not least, SPES nominee Randy Tobias of the SAS Institute was one of 57 ASA members named Fellow.

SPES Roundtables

George Ostrouchov, SPES JSM Program Chair-elect
The roundtables took place in a particularly beautiful venue on the top floor of the convention center, with great views of the city. They were all well-attended; in fact, most sold out. As always, the food was excellent and the conversation was great. It is not too early to start making plans for JSM 2010 in Vancouver. If you have an idea about a roundtable you would like to lead, contact Kary Myers, SPES JSM 2010 program chair, at kary@lanl.gov.

SPES Awards

Allison Rajakumar, SPES Awards Chair
The section is pleased to announce the results of its annual competition for contributed papers. The Outstanding Presentation Award encourages excellence in presentation and has helped raise the SPES contributed sessions to a higher level of quality. All awards are based on audience evaluations of each speaker. Winners receive a certificate recognizing their accomplishment and a cash award. The 2009 awards will be presented at the SPES mixer during the 2010 meetings in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

• Outstanding Presentation Award to David M. Steinberg of Tel Aviv University for “Sequential Design of Experiments for GLMs”
• Outstanding Presentation Award (runner-up) to Herbert Lee of the University of California, Santa Cruz, for “Treed Gaussian Processes for Computer Model Emulation”
• Outstanding Presentation Award (honorable mention) to Morris H. Morgan of Hampton University for “Statistical Response of Chaotic Networks to Structured Noise”
• Outstanding Presentation Award (honorable mention) to Christopher Tong of Merck & Co., Inc. for “Simple Linear Regression When Both Variables Are Random”
• Outstanding Presentation Award (honorable mention) to Sanjib Basu of Northern Illinois University for “A Unified Competing Risks Cure Rate Model for Failure Data”
• Outstanding Presentation Award (honorable mention) to Ta-Hsin Li of IBM T. J. Watson Research Center for “A Robust Nonlinear Method for Spectral Analysis”

In an effort to encourage excellence in the JSM poster program, SPES began the outstanding poster presentation awards program at JSM 2007. The section is pleased to announce the results of its third competition for contributed posters. As with the paper presentation awards, all awards are based on audience evaluations. The awards will be presented to the winners at the SPES mixer during JSM 2010.

• Outstanding Poster Presentation Award to Maria Weese of The University of Tennessee for “The Use of T-Squared Control Charts for Process-Driven Studies”
• Outstanding Poster Presentation Award (runner-up) to Yang Yang of the University of Michigan for “Inference with Censored Degradation Data”
• Outstanding Poster Presentation Award (honorable mention) to Ritaja Sur of the University of Maryland for “Statistical Analysis of Eye Movement Data”

Congratulations to all the winners. Start preparing now for JSM 2010 and you may see your name listed among the award winners next year.

SPES Executive Council Meeting

Phil Scinto, SPES Past Secretary, and Elizabeth Schiferl, SPES Secretary-Treasurer

Highlights of this year’s meeting include the following:

The SPES budget continues to be in the black. While dues have declined, revenues from continuing education courses sponsored by SPES at both JSM and FTC have been good. This year, SPES sponsored four courses at JSM.

The Marquardt program sponsors speakers from industry to give talks to those in academia. There was discussion about leveraging SPES visibility at these presentations by encouraging mixers with refreshments following the presentations. Other ideas were to distribute the SPES brochure at the mixer, follow up with attendees, award ASA SPES membership to some attendees (discretion of presenter), and to make a formal presentation about SPES at the mixer.

More publicity is needed for the Statistics in Chemistry Award. There was no award this year because of a lack of nominations. Funded by DuPont in 2009, the award is $2,000, which will be used to fund the 2010 award.

SPES is allotted a full-page ad per year in Amstat News, and we are looking for ideas about how to best use this space to promote SPES activities. Our current publicity chair, Stephanie Pickle, is in charge of this activity.

Volunteers are needed to fill SPES positions in 2010. Openings include a publications chair, FTC steering committee representative, and operating manual committee chair.

2010 Joint Research Conference

Will Guthrie, SRC Program Committee
The 17th Spring Research Conference on Statistics in Industry and Technology and the 27th Quality and Productivity Research Conference will be held jointly at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland (just outside Washington, DC), from May 25–27.

The goal of the conference is to stimulate interdisciplinary research among statisticians, scientists, and engineers in quality and productivity, industrial needs, and the physical and engineering sciences. Statistical issues and research approaches drawn from collaborative research will be highlighted. You are invited to contribute papers on these topics for presentation. Submit title, authors, and a short abstract to jrc2010cp@nist.gov for consideration. The deadline for abstract submission is March 15, 2010.

Student scholarships for participation in the conference include the Mary G. and Joseph Natrella Scholarship and JRC student scholarships.

Conference sponsors include SPES, Q&P, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, NIST, The Boeing Company, and the Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. For further information, contact Will Guthrie at will.guthrie@nist.gov.