Xinwei Deng, Former Section Chair

The Quality and Productivity Section sponsored two invited sessions, two topic-contributed sessions, one student best paper competition session, and five contributed sessions at the 2022 Joint Statistical Meetings in Washington, DC. The in-person presentation and discussion appeared to have been more effective for exchanging ideas. Unfortunately, Q&P did not organize its section mixer due to time constraints, but the section mixer will return for JSM 2023 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Another important activity for the section is nominating members to become ASA Fellows. In 2022, members of the Q&P Fellow Nominations Committee put forth three nominations and one was successful. Q&P will continue to develop a list of strong candidates each year.

The section honored Sharad Prabhu, treasurer, with an outstanding service award for making the financial processes for the Fall Technical Conference as consistent as possible with those of the Quality and Productivity Research Conference.

The Q&P Section is now the primary sponsor of both QPRC and FTC, which are targeted to those engaged in engineering statistics. The financial status of both conferences is healthy, and the Q&P Executive Committee will continue to increase the impact of the conferences on the ASA community and beyond.

The Q&P Executive Committee has continued to embrace virtual meetings for their flexibility in terms of location and time. Virtual meetings will continue in combination with occasional in-person meetings at the Joint Statistical Meetings, QPRC, and FTC.

The Q&P Executive Committee also established a task timeline document, which lists the section’s major activities with their corresponding personnel and deadlines. The document will make deadlines much clearer, and the executive committee will try to associate each major activity with two or three officers for better coordination.

Q&P Past Chair Richard Warr completed the charter revision, and the updates are well documented in the GitHub repository. Annie Zangi provided meeting minutes to enable officers to efficiently make progress on their agendas.

Recruiting volunteers and young personnel, such as junior faculty and researchers, into the Q&P community and leadership positions would further improve the section. Enhancing the section’s diversity and outreach to a range of areas related to quality and productivity, especially AI and data science, would also be beneficial.

The Q&P Section is in an outstanding position to thrive under 2023 Section Chair Sarah Burke.