The ASA’s Section on Statistics in Defense and National Security (SDNS) sponsored an inaugural Defense and Aerospace Test and Analysis Workshop (DATAWorks) March 20–22 in Springfield, Virginia. Attendees selected their choice of a one-day tutorial on computer experiments, design of experiments, survey construction and analysis, uncertainty quantification, or introduction to R. The next two days of the workshop consisted of shorter tutorials and invited and contributed talks. Analysts from across the Department of Defense and NASA met with leading academics, shared best practices, and gained new ideas.
The newly formed workshop combines the Science of Test Workshop (held in 2016 and 2017) with the Conference on Applied Statistics in Defense (CASD). The Conference on Applied Statistics in Defense, originally the Army Conference on Applied Statistics, was established in 1995 as the successor to the Conference on the Design of Experiments in Army Research, Development, and Testing, a historic series of meetings that formally concluded in 1994 after 40 years of service to the Army.
The new joint workshop seeks to build a community that understands the value that rigorous statistical approaches bring to solving complex problems related to aerospace, defense, and national security. SDNS, the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), NASA, and the Office of the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation in the Office of the Secretary of Defense organized the workshop.
In the workshop opening remarks, David Chu, president of IDA, captured the goal of the workshop: “Our goal … is to build a stronger community [and] bring more rigorous statistical approaches to solving public policy problems. What I am really asking you to do is to help in educating decision-makers about statistical issues.”
Peter A. Parker, team lead for advanced measurement systems at NASA, noted the importance of asking questions as a statistical collaborator in his talk about highly effective statistical collaboration. He said, “Ignorance can be useful. The ability to ask questions and to challenge longstanding opinions in a team tends to reveal unshared information that would not normally come out.”
Marcey Hoover, quality assurance director at Sandia National Laboratories, noted the importance of collaboration between statisticians and subject-matter experts when she said, “Statistics is not a magical solution. Our journey took us … to this middle ground, where we have this mix of subject-matter expertise and data-driven evidence.”
Dave Duma, principal deputy director of operational test and evaluation in the Office of the Secretary of Defense noted the importance of communication in his closing remarks: “Communicate clearly, particularly to non-STEM folks. You have to translate the data into something that the decision-makers can understand, and the decision-makers are varied…. When you are dealing with data … graphs help because not only does it show the specific data but it shows the trend, and that’s important.”
Videos of plenary talks and workshop slides are available online.
Next year’s workshop is scheduled for April 9–11 in Springfield, Virginia. Registration is open.
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