Robert Wilkinson, SPES Representative; Jim Wisnowski, Fall Technical Conference General Conference Chair; and Stephanie P. DeHart, SPES JSM Program Chair
The Fall Technical Conference will take place October 17–18 in San Antonio, Texas, and consist of sessions covering a range of topics based on the theme “Spurring Innovation,” including statistical process control, reliability, and applied statistics. John Sall, executive vice president and co-founder of SAS is the keynote speaker, and ASA President Marie Davidian will give a talk during lunch.
Additionally, there will be a luncheon tribute to George Box and a celebration of Stu Hunter’s 90th birthday, with a special session on Hunter’s contributions to statistics. There is also a Technometrics invited session on screening strategies when interactions are present and panel discussions on the current and future state of industrial statistics and successful experimental planning. The talks will cover a range of topics, including dimensional analysis, accelerated testing, big data, and health care quality.
Following are a list of one-day short courses offered on October 16:
- Methods for Designing and Analyzing Mixture Experiments, taught by John Cornell of the University of Florida and Greg Piepel of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
- Introduction to Text Mining and Natural Language Processing, taught by Heath Rushing of Adsurgo LLC
- Experiments for Reliability Achievement, taught by Steven Rigdon of Saint Louis University, Connie Borror of Arizona State University, and Rong Pan of Arizona State University
- New Methods for Design of Experiments and How to Use Them, taught by Douglas Montgomery of Arizona State University and Bradley Jones of SAS Institute
The conference hotel, Hyatt Regency, is located in the heart of the famous Riverwalk. The Alamo is a short walk away, along with hundreds of world-class dining and entertainment options. A block of rooms is available at the special conference rate through September 26. For information about the program, hotel, short courses, and San Antonio, visit the conference website.
SPES Activities in Montréal
At this year’s Joint Statistical Meetings in Montréal, SPES is the primary sponsor of three invited sessions, four topic-contributed sessions, six contributed sessions, one contributed poster session, and four roundtable discussions. SPES also is co-sponsoring several sessions, including “A Celebration of J. Stuart Hunter’s Contributions to Technometrics and Statistics” on Tuesday at 2 p.m.
Also, the joint business meeting/mixer of SPES and the ASA’s Quality and Productivity Section will be held Tuesday evening. This is an opportunity to meet section officers, hear the latest section news, congratulate winners of the best paper and best posters from JSM2012, eat, drink, and enjoy one another’s company. Door prizes will be given. If your organization wishes to donate door prizes for the mixer, contact Liz Schiferl at Elizabeth.Schiferl@lubrizol.com.
SPES topic-contributed sessions include the following:
August 4, 2:00 p.m.
Computer Models in Environmental Research
Organizer: Pritam Ranjan, Acadia University
Speakers: Stephan Sain, Joslin Goh, Michael Dowd, Matthew Pratola, and William Welch (discussant)
Many environmental phenomena that direct scientific experiments are either impossible or impractical, due to time and cost constraints. As a result, mathematical and computer models are used often to build a realistic representation of these phenomena, enabling experimentation. The field of computer experiments is fairly new in statistics and has applications in areas such as astrophysics, climatology, oceanography, engineering, and drug discovery. This session will include environmental applications such as climate modeling, biological ocean models, and solar energy extraction.
August 6, 8:30 a.m.
International Perspectives in Advanced Methodologies for Spatiotemporal Information Processing
Organizers: Alexander Kolovos, SpaceTimeWorks LLC, and Andreas Langousis, University of Patras
Speakers: Hannes Kazianka, Pavel Chernyavskiy, Emilio Porcu, Hwa-Lung Yum, and George Christakos (discussant)
Spatiotemporal statistics has been a vibrant field with increasing visibility in recent years. Among reasons for this popularity is the availability of space-time–referenced measurements and observations of various natural attributes. These data are generated by a growing interest in projects that engage interdisciplinary sets of experts across scientific areas, prominently so from physical and many engineering fields. Such projects involve, for example, climate change studies, environmental engineering applications, and energy resources investigations. Improvement of our technological ability to digest the massive volume of big data—mainly produced by automated monitoring devices in the context of such studies—has been the epicenter of much contemporary methodological work. In the presence of many information types, it is also equally important to focus on advancing methodologies for the statistical processing of information. This session places itself at a more basic research level and focuses on methodologies for meaningful and physically inspired stochastic analysis of spatial and space-time data.
August 7, 8:30 a.m.
Statistical Practice: Challenges Encountered in Government and Industrial Applications
Organizer: Ananda Sen, University of Michigan
Speakers: Willis Jensen, Arthur Fries, Joanne Wendelberger, Winson Taam, and Vipin Arora
Over the past couple of decades, statistics as a discipline has transformed from being exclusively academic to highly collaborative. While the recent advances in statistical computing have made it possible to come up with sophisticated solutions to challenging statistical problems, data acquisition and planning subsequent analytical strategies face unique challenges within a given industrial environment. The speakers in the session will share their experience in dealing with the special challenges they encounter in their practice of statistics.
August 8, 10:30 a.m.
Highlights from the Conference on Data Analysis
Organizer: Kary Myers, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Speakers: Bryan Stanfill, Michael Luvalle, Emily Casleton, David Robinson, and Amy Hoeksema
The five speakers in this session presented posters at the Conference on Data Analysis, which was sponsored in part by SPES.
SPES invited session details can be found in the June issue of Amstat News, and the complete online program.
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