Mindy Hotchkiss and Daksha Chokshi, 2018 FTC General Committee Co-Chairs

The 62nd Annual ASA/ASQ Fall Technical Conference (FTC) was held October 4–5 in West Palm Beach, Florida. The goal of this conference—jointly sponsored by the ASA’s Physical and Engineering Sciences (SPES) and Quality & Productivity (Q&P) sections and the American Society for Quality’s (ASQ) Chemical and Process Industries Division (CPID) and Statistics Division—is to bring together researchers and practitioners across a variety of industries to promote a more effective use of statistics to improve quality and foster innovation. This year’s theme was “Statistics and Quality: Riding the Big Data Wave.”

The conference generated a great deal of interest, with the most contributed abstracts received for consideration in recent years and a large number of new participants.

The conference format is three parallel sessions with a mix of contributed and invited talks held between four plenary sessions. A day of short courses preceded the conference, including the following:

• 21st Century Design of Screening Experiments, with Peter Goos of KU Leuven, Belgium
• Bayesian Statistics for Better Process Understanding and Prediction, with Katherine Giacoletti of SynoloStats
• Bridging Statistics and Data Science, with Ming Li of Amazon and Hui Lin of Netlify
• Strategies for Formulations Development, with Ronald D. Snee of Snee Associates and Roger Hoerl of Union College

The first plenary session, chaired by Q&P, honored the recipient of the Gerald J. Hahn Q&P Achievement Award, Wayne Nelson, who gave the morning plenary address, “Collaboration.” The achievement award recognizes an individual who has demonstrated outstanding and sustained achievement and leadership in developing, promoting, and successfully improving the quality and productivity of products and organizational performance using statistical concepts and methods over 20 or more years. Nelson is a renowned expert and prolific author in reliability data analysis, including methods for recurrent events and accelerated testing. He is the author of books such as the widely used resource Applied Life Data Analysis, first published in 1982. During his talk, he discussed highlights and historical perspectives of his successful and long-lasting career (including 24 years of working with Gerry Hahn at GE) and lessons learned while collaborating. He also shared recommendations for success.

The second plenary session, a luncheon chaired by CPID, was given by Jerry Tarnacki, a retired senior vice president of Aerojet Rocketdyne with 37 years of experience in the aerospace industry. His talk, “Aerospace Technologies: Past, Present, and Future,” was about the history of aerospace technology in Palm Beach County, with insights into ongoing work and future directions.

CPID also announced the winners of the Shewell Prize and two awards for papers published in Technometrics: the Frank Wilcoxon and Jack Youden prizes. The Shewell Prize is awarded to the best contributed FTC talk from the prior year, based on real-time rankings from session participants and follow-up assessments by a panel of judges. This year, it was given to presenting author John Szarka of W.L. Gore and coauthors Willis Jensen and Kevin White for their talk, “Stability Assessment with the Stability Index.”

The Frank Wilcoxon Prize is awarded to the author(s) with the paper containing the greatest value of application to practical problems. It was given this year to Matt Pratola, Ofir Harari, Derek Bingham, and Gwen Flowers for their paper, “Design and Analysis of Experiments on Nonconvex Regions” (Vol 59, Issue 1, 2017).

The Jack Youden Prize is given to the best-written paper on a topic of current interest that provides a thorough overview and review of a research area or topic, making the paper invaluable for anyone who might want to understand or pursue research in that area. The Youden Prize was awarded to Anil Damle and Yuekai Sun for their paper, “A Geometric Approach to Archetypal Analysis and Nonnegative Matrix Factorization” (Vol 59, Issue 3, 2017).

The first day of the conference concluded with the Jack Youden Memorial Address at the session chaired by the Statistics Division. This year, the Youden Address was given by L. Allison Jones-Farmer of the Miami University of Ohio. Her talk, “Leveraging Industrial Statistics in the Data Revolution,” explored how the role of the “data scientist” has evolved, comparing it to the evolution of the role of the “industrial statistician.” She also discussed how we can leverage modern technologies to transform our roles and better meet the needs of the data economy from an educational and an implementation standpoint.

The Statistics Division also announced the winners of several other prestigious awards at this session, including the Nelson Award, Bisgaard Award, and Hunter Award. The Lloyd S. Nelson Award recognizes the article published in the Journal of Quality Technology this year considered “of greatest immediate impact to practitioners.” Recipients were Peter Goos and Steven G. Gilmour for the paper, “Testing for Lack of Fit in Blocked, Split-Plot, and Other Multi-Stratum Designs.”

The Søren Bisgaard Award recognizes the article published in the journal Quality Engineering considered to have the “greatest potential for advancing the practice of quality improvement.” Recipients were Murat Kulahci and Anil Menon for their paper, “Trellis Plots as Visual Aids for Analyzing Split Plot Experiments.”

Open access to these articles will be available soon.

The William G. Hunter Award, named for the founding chair of the Statistics Division, recognizes people with outstanding accomplishments in the field of applied statistics who have multi-faceted strengths, like Bill Hunter. The award recognizes people who are communicators, consultants, and educators with a focus on practitioners, innovators, integrators of statistics with other disciplines, and implementers who obtain results. This year’s recipient was James M. Lucas, formerly a senior consultant at DuPont’s Quality Management and Technology Center and now principal consultant at J.M. Lucas and Associates.

The final plenary was given by Lisa LaVange, current ASA president. Her talk, “Leading in a Data Science World,” focused on how statisticians as leaders play an essential role in understanding and explaining the uncertainty arising from the use of real-world data in novel applications. She discussed how training statisticians to lead, formally and informally, is essential for the future of our profession and highlighted planned initiatives of the ASA Statistical Leadership Institute.

The conference concluded with a reception and special panel session coordinated by SPES. The topic was “Statistical Engineering: What Is It and Where Is It Going?” with panelists Roger Hoerl of Union College, William Brenneman of Procter & Gamble, and Geoff Vining of Virginia Tech. They showcased three talks they gave at the September 2018 meeting of European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics (ENBIS) in Nancy, France, and discussed the development and incorporation of the International Statistical Engineering Association (ISEA), which is working to develop and promote statistical engineering as an engineering discipline. The first ISEA summit was held in conjunction with the FTC in West Palm Beach just prior to the conference.

Several student and early-career registration and travel grants are available by application and awarded by the Statistics Division. This year, CPID joined in the program and sponsored their first student. Awardees were Shane Bookholtz, Sean Carter, Ziyu Hu, Katherine Allen Moyer, and Ching-Chi Yang. The purpose of these grants is to provide opportunities for the next generation to gain conference experience, encounter new developments, and network with technical leaders in the field.

Next year’s conference will be held September 25–27 at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Maryland. It will be chaired by Adam Pintar of NIST, a past chair of the ASQ Statistics Division. The theme of the conference is “Statistics: Setting the Standard for Success in Quality.” Session categories have been expanded from statistics, quality, and experimental design to also include topics in big data/data science and machine learning. A call for papers has been posted, along with conference information. The deadline for contributed abstracts is February 28, 2019. Online abstract submission is available on the website.