1998 Spring Research Conference a Success!
by Rob Easterling

A fine time was had by all who attended the 1998 Spring Research Conference on Statistics in Industry and Technology, held June 3-5, 1998, on the campus of St. John's College, Santa Fe, NM. The conference had outstanding plenary, invited, and contributed sessions, thanks to Bovas Abraham and his session organizers and their speakers; it had commodious accommodations, including panoramic mountain and desert vistas with glorious sunsets, thanks to local arrangements honcho Joanne Wendelberger; and it also featured a well attended data mining workshop put on by John Elder.

A new conference feature was the provision of student scholarships, made possible by funds from the co-sponsoring organizations, ASA/SPES and IMS, and the conference itself. The scholarships, which covered registration and local expenses, were established to encourage student participation in the conference and interest in statistical careers in industry and technology. The recipients, their affiliations, and the titles of their contributed papers are:

• Matt Bursnall, University of Sheffield: "Experimental Design and Analysis for Multivariate Responses"
• Rick Gumina, Colorado State University: "Control Chart Limits for Means Using bootstrap Techniques"
• Edward Kambour, Texas A&M University: "Identifying the Time of a Change in a Production Process"
• Amanda Lane, University of Manchester: "Modeling Domestic Electricity Consumption in the UK"
• Greg Ridgeway, University of Washington:  "A Clustered Discrete Markov Chain Model for Web Site Traversal"

Make plans now to attend the 1999 SRC, June 2-4, in the Minnesota Twin Cities!

SPES Awards for Outstanding Presentations
by Mark Vangel

The Section on Physical and Engineering Sciences is pleased to announce the results of the annual SPES Outstanding Presentation competition. These awards are based on audience evaluation of SPES contributed papers at the Joint Statistical Meetings, and they are intended to encourage improved presentations by providing recognition for at least some of the truly excellent talks given each year. The awards this year, presented at the SPES mixer at the meetings in Dallas for papers given at the 1997 Anaheim JSM, are as follows:

Outstanding Presentation:

Robert W. Mee and Philip D. Yates: "Fractional Factorial Designs With Minimal Numbers of Treatment Combinations for Factor Subsets"

Runner-Up Presentation:

Wendy Meiring, Gary K. Grunwald and Richard H. Jones: "Statistical Challenges in Analyzing Stratospheric Ozone Data"

Honorable Mention Awards:

• Rekha Agrawal, Jerald F. Lawless, and R. Jock McKay: "Variation Reduction in Multi-Stage Processes"
• Barbara Bailey and L. Mark Berliner: "Monitoring the Spatial and Temporal Distribution of Cloud Cover"

Congratulations to all the winners, and thanks to all of the audience evaluators and SPES awards committee volunteers who make these awards possible.

November 1998 Topics

• SPES Seeking Fellow Candidates
• Think Spring! (Spring Research Conference, that is ...)
• Planning for the 1999 JSM Already Underway!

SPES Seeking Fellow Candidates
by Greg Piepel, Chair,

SPES Committee to Nominate Fellows

The SPES Committee to Nominate Fellows is seeking recommendations of SPES members as potential candidates for nomination as a Fellow of the ASA. A nominee must have been an ASA member for the preceding three years according to ASA policy. The SPES Committee to Nominate Fellows will help identify someone familiar with the candidate who can lead the effort to prepare the nomination package. If appropriate, the Committee may also arrange for SPES to submit a supporting letter, or even submit the nomination materials. Please contact Greg Piepel (greg.piepel@pnl.gov or 509-375-6911) with suggestions of SPES members who are worthy Fellow candidates, as well as suggestions of people who could lead the nomination effort for a suggested candidate. The leader of the nomination effort need not be an ASA Fellow. Also needed are contact information (e.g., phone number, e-mail, and mailing address) for the potential candidate and possible nominators.

Think Spring! (Spring Research Conference, that is ...)
by Fred Hulting, 1999 SRC Local Chair

SPES is a proud co-sponsor of the sixth annual Spring Research Conference on Statistics in Industry and Technology, to be held June 2-4, 1999 in Minneapolis-St. Paul. The SRC provides a forum for the presentation and exchange of information on important applications and new technical developments in the use of statistics in industry and in the physical and engineering sciences. The 1999 conference will be held at the Radisson Metrodome on the University of Minnesota campus, only minutes from downtown Minneapolis.

Program Chair Bill Meeker is putting together a strong program, featuring keynote speaker Gerry Hahn, and plenary speakers Pramod Khargonekar and Diane Lambert. The invited sessions will cover a range of topics, including Advanced Manufacturing, Product and Process Reliability, Process Monitoring and Control, Computer Experiments, Experimental Design, Drug Discovery, IC Manufacturing, and Tolerancing. The latest information on the program may be obtained from the web site at http://members.aol.com/fhulting/src99/index.htm. The deadline for contributed papers is February 1, 1999. Instructions for submitting abstracts may be obtained from the web site, or by contacting the Contributed Paper Chair Luis Escobar (luis@stat.lsu.edu).

June is a wonderful time to visit Minnesota. Through our web site you'll find more than 10,000 reasons (one for each lake!) to come to the Twin Cities. Whatever you like - art, theater, nightlife, shopping, outdoor activities, or sports - we'll have something for you! See you in June!

Planning for the 1999 JSM Already Underway!
by Ron Fricker, SPES Publicity Chair,

Even though the Dallas JSM has just passed, SPES is already working on the 1999 JSM in Baltimore. Darryl Downing is the SPES program chair and wants to let people know that poster sessions are being emphasized this year. SPES intends to push poster sessions to a new level of importance and Darryl encourages people to consider submitting a poster. He also would like people who might be interested putting together special contributed sessions or in chairing sessions at the JSM to contact him (darryl_j_downing@sbphrd.com). Sessions in keeping with the Baltimore JSM theme, statistics at the interface, are particularly encouraged.

January 1999 Topics

• SRC Contributed Paper Deadline is February 1st!
• Participate in the 1999 JSM in Baltimore
• Nominations sought for the Statistics in Chemistry Award

SRC Contributed Paper Deadline is February 1st!
by Fred Hulting

Don't forget to submit your contributed paper abstract to the sixth annual Spring Research Conference on Statistics in Industry and Technology. The conference will be held June 2-4, 1999 in Minneapolis-St. Paul at the Radisson Metrodome on the University of Minnesota campus. The SRC provides a forum for the presentation and exchange of information on important applications and new technical developments in the use of statistics in industry and in the physical and engineering sciences. Any paper pertaining to the conference theme is welcome. The deadline for submissions is February 1, 1999. Authors are encouraged to submit their abstracts by email to the Contributed Paper Chair Luis A. Escobar at luis@stat.lsu.edu. Instructions for submitting abstracts may be obtained from the web site at http://members.aol.com/fhulting/src99/index.htm or directly from Professor Escobar. Alternatively, you can contact Fred Hulting (fhulting@pillsbury.com; 612/330-8239; 612/330-1893 fax) for more information.

April 1999 Topics

• Svante Wold to present Chemometrics Invited Session at 1999 JSM
• SPES Announces Invited Sessions for 1999 JSM
• 1999 Spring Research Conference Is Just Around the Corner!

Svante Wold to present Chemometrics Invited Session at 1999 JSM
by Kwan Lee

This year's chemometrics invited session, "Chemometrics for Pharmaceutical Research and Development", will feature Professor Svante Wold, who is one of the worlds leading experts in chemometrics. He coined the term chemometrics in 1971 and cofounded the International Chemometric Society together with Professor Bruce Kowalski in 1974. His research interests cover multivariate modeling, design and analysis with application to structure-activity relationships, dynamic modeling of chemical processes, and much more. Some of his methodological contributions have gained classic status within chemometrics and related fields, for instance SIMCA and PLS method for multivariate classification and regression. The tile of his talk is "The Selection of Representative Sets of Compounds for Lead Finding and for Drug Optimization with Combinatorial Libraries" and should be of interests to many statisticians working in pharmaceutical industries. The session will include two other talks by leading chemometricians, Nouna Kettaneh-Wold of Umetrics Inc. and Weifan Zheng of SmithKline Beecham, on the related chemometrics applications to pharmaceutical research and development.

SPES Announces Invited Sessions for 1999 JSM
by Darryl Downing

Hear Ye, Hear Ye, Hear Ye, the JSM invited sessions for the Section on Physical and Engineering Sciences (SPES) are now in place! There will be five SPES invited sessions at Baltimore covering topics in regression, reliability, Bayesian techniques, spatial statistics, and chemometrics:

• "Topics in Multiple Response Experimentation", organized by Geoff Vining, will feature Tom Bingham, Andre Khuri, and Doug Montgomery as speakers with Ray Myers as the discussant.
• "Statistical Modeling of Growth and Degradation Processes" will feature Leslie Moore, William Meeker, and Keith Baggerly. Growth and degradation processes occur in numerous application areas as physical phenomena age or change as a function of time or some other aging variable. Organized by Joanne Wendelberger, this session is intended to motivate the development of statistical theory to aid in the modeling of growth and degradation processes.
• Spatial statistics has exploded over the last 10 years and Noel Cressie has put together a very interested session titled "Spatial Methodology for Minefield Detection." Believe it or not, the problem of mine detection is very real and a hard problem to solve. The use of mines in regional conflicts is a cheap, but effective way to provide defense of land or sea. Unfortunately, long after the conflict has stopped, the mines can remain an indiscriminate danger to all who happen into uncleared minefields. The speakers in this session are Carey Priebe, Robert R. Muise, John Goutsias, and Daniel Walsh.
• "Chemometrics for Pharmaceutical Research and Development", organized by Kwan Lee, will feature Svante Wold, Nouna Kettaneh-Wold, and Weifan Zheng. Chemometrics is the application of statistical and mathematical methods to chemistry and is involved in extracting chemically relevant information from data produced in a chemical experiment.
• Historically, frequentist methods have dominated physical measurement. But Bayesian methodology is swiftly becoming more common, partly as a result of ISO-9000 guidelines for industry. Therefore the session, "Bayesian Methods in Physical Measurement", organized by Mark Vangel, surveys key Bayesian contributions in three areas of metrology science: uncertainty analysis, calibration, and combination of information.

All five invited sessions will be informative and invigorating!

1999 Spring Research Conference Is Just Around the Corner!
by Fred Hulting

This year's Spring Research Conference will be one of the largest yet, with nearly 90 papers being presented. While all of these papers relate to the use of statistics in industry and technology, the topics are amazingly varied, and touch on nearly all important aspects of this vital area of application.

The variety of the conference is illustrated by the topics to be covered in the keynote and plenary addresses. Gerry Hahn of General Electric will address the role of "The Proactive Statistician" in his keynote address. This talk will highlight what statisticians need to do to help industry develop new products that delight customers with their performance and reliability. Plenary speaker Pramod Khargonekar, from the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Michigan, will explore the latest research on the interface between statistics and control theory. The final plenary speaker, Diane Lambert will explore the analysis of "Really Big Datasets." Such datasets are now routinely amassed by many companies, and a key challenge is how to make use of this valuable information.

The conference will be held June 2-4, 1999 in Minneapolis-St. Paul at the Radisson Metrodome on the University of Minnesota campus. Additionally, a short course on "Bayes/Empirical Bayes Methods in Data Analysis" will be taught by Professor Brad Carlin on June 1. Complete information about the conference, including registration forms, program listing, and abstracts, may be obtained at the conference web site, http://members.aol.com/fhulting/src99/index.htm or from Fred Hulting (fhulting@pillsbury.com; 612/330-8239; 612/330-1893 fax). A registration form was also published in the March issue of the Amstat News.

A Preview of SPES Roundtable Discussions at Baltimore
by Robert N. Rodriguez, 1999 JSM Program Chair Elect

The SPES Roundtable Discussion topics for 1999 will offer an outstanding menu of food for thought. A quick tour of the kitchen reveals seven master chefs, each preparing his own haute cuisine: For patrons who have never tried wavelets, Bhavik Bakshi will lead a discussion of what they offer the industrial statistician as a solution for process control and related problems. Richard De Veaux will offer his guests a discussion of the uses of neural networks for industrial process modeling and improvement, while those at Kwan Lee's table will consider how chemometrics, which has made significant contributions in analytical chemistry, can be leveraged to impact other areas of industry.

For nouvelle cuisine, participants can join David Olwell to discuss successful and potential applications of self-starting control charts which support management decisions in a variety of non-manufacturing arenas ranging from sexual harassment to network security. Those who prefer meat and potatoes can join Jose Ramirez to discuss techniques and tools for analyzing split-plot designs that can be applied in a wide variety of industrial settings. For dieters who require lean sample sizes, Keith Muller will offer a discussion of anxiety-reducing strategies, such as appropriate tables and plots, for defensibly incorporating and explaining highly speculative values in power calculations. Finally, for diners concerned with multiplicity issues in industrial screening experiments, Stan Young will offer a discussion of the pros and cons of controlling familywise Type I error, along with practical methods and alternatives.

Join us at Café SPES!

SPES 1999 JSM Invited and Contributed Sessions
by Darryl Downing

SPES will have an outstanding program which includes five invited sessions, four topic (used to be called special) contributed sessions, and seven regular contributed sessions. This amounts to 84 individual talks in all!

The invited sessions cover a wide breadth of statistical topics; reliability theory, spatial statistics, chemometrics, Bayesian methods, and multiple response experimentation. The session "Statistical Modeling of Growth and Degradation Processes" was organized by Joanne Wendelberger and is concerned with processes which age or change as a function of time or some other aging variable. The session is intended to motivate the development of statistical theory to aid in the modeling of growth and degradation processes. The session entitled "Spatial Methodology for Minefield Detection" was organized by Noel Cressie and is concerned with the serious problem of minefield detection. The use of mines in regional conflicts is a cheap, but effective way to provide defense of land or sea. Unfortunately, long after the conflict has stopped, the mines can remain an indiscriminate danger to all who happen into uncleared minefields. Clearing of minefields is thus a major concern for U.S. defense forces. To do this, one has to find the mines and due to the variety of types of mines, both in shape and composition of materials, this problem is a difficult one. Come and learn what people are doing in this important area of applied spatial statistics. The Chemometrics session, organized by Kwan Lee, titled "Chemometrics for Pharmaceutical Research and Development," is concerned with the application of statistical methods to chemistry to enable the extraction of chemically relevant information produced in chemical experiments. Those wishing to know more about the applications of techniques such as PCA, Partial Least Squares, and Projection to latent structure (PLS) should attend this session. "Bayesian Methods in Physical Measurement" was organized by Mark Vangel. and is concerned with Bayesian contributions in three area of metrology science: uncertainty analysis, calibration, and combining of information. It is my prior belief that this session will hold interest for Bayesian's as well as frequentists. The final invited session is "Topics in Multiple Response Experimentation," was organized by Geoff Vining. Most engineering experiments involve several characteristics of interest. Classical approaches treat each response independently, which is simplistic, but easy. This session deals with ways of handling such data, including experimental design, optimization, and a commercial application using multiple responses. The invited sessions are all very interesting and I would like to personally thank the organizers for putting them together.

There are four Topic Contributed sessions: "Statistical Challenges in the Geosciences," organized by Doug Nychka, "Current Issues in Statistical Analysis and Modeling of Automotive Emissions, Parts I and II," both organized by Tim Coburn, and "Statistics Application in Army R&D," organized by Barry Bodt. A nice mix of topics on problems and areas of great concern.

The Regular Contributed sessions cover a wide breadth of statistical areas from general applications, design of experiments, response surface and regression methods, reliability, estimation-testing-classification, time series analysis, and applications to national and international security.

Visit the SPES Poster Sessions in Baltimore
by Cory Atwood

The poster session at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Baltimore this August ought to be a great one! This year all JSM posters will be grouped by topic (e.g. experimental design, quality control, spatial statistics, linear models, teaching statistics, web applications, etc.) rather than by sponsoring society or section. Please see http://www.amstat.org/meetings/jsm/1999/jsmposter.html for more details. Of course, SPES members will have their share of interesting posters to contribute to the JSM poster session. There will be several nice methods-applications to the physical and engineering sciences, as well as a poster on the "Engineering Statistics Internet Handbook" by Paul Tobias. The interactive nature of posters should make for a relaxing and enjoyable learning session with your fellow statisticians.

1999 Fall Technical Conference: Applied Statistics in the 21st Century
by Connie Borror

SPES is proud to co-sponsor the 43rd Annual Fall Technical Conference, with the theme of "Applied Statistics in the 21st Century," to be held October 14-15, 1999 at the Wyndham Greenspoint Hotel in Houston Texas. Sessions will offer the latest developments in statistical methods as they relate to quality improvement and quality decision making. The chemical and process industries and the physical and engineering sciences are the application areas widely represented on the program. You'll have the opportunity to meet informally and exchange views with speakers and colleagues during breaks and the always-friendly hospitality suite. Four awards sponsored by ASQ divisions will be presented at the conference. The Shewell Award for the best presentation at the 1998 Fall Technical Conference, the Wilcoxon Prize for the best practical application paper, and the Youden Prize for the best expository paper published in the previous year's Technometrics. On Thursday afternoon, at the W.J.Youden Memorial Address, the Hunter Award will be presented to a person who demonstrated creative development and application of statistical techniques to problem solving in the quality field.

SPES Presents Optimization Short-Course at JSM
by Ron Fricker

James C. Spall of The Johns Hopkins University, Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL) will present a short-course entitled "Stochastic Optimization and the Simultaneous Perturbation Algorithm." This half-day course will discuss the "simultaneous perturbation stochastic approximation" (SPSA) algorithm for optimization of multivariate systems. SPSA has recently attracted considerable attention in areas such as statistical parameter estimation, pattern recognition, nonlinear regression, neural network training, adaptive feedback control, and experimental design. The audience will be introduced to the fundamental issues in stochastic optimization with special emphasis on cases where the classical gradient-based methods (Robbins-Monro SA, steepest descent, Fisher scoring, neural network backpropagation, etc.) do not apply. These cases include many important practical problems. For purposes of contrast, brief discussion will also be included on other modern approaches such as simulated annealing and genetic algorithms.

The aim of this course is to introduce statistical practitioners and researchers to a relatively new optimization approach (SPSA) that has attracted considerable international attention in a variety of problems. SPSA has not yet received wide publicity among statisticians although it has direct applications in many problems with a significant statistical component (the genesis of the approach has been in engineering, although the applications span virtually all areas of the physical and social sciences as well). It is expected that the class participants will come into the class with a working knowledge of probability and statistics at the undergraduate level and knowledge of multivariate calculus (at a level of understanding the basic principles in deriving and using gradient vectors).

The 1/2-day course will be held on the afternoon of Tuesday, August 10 in the Baltimore Convention Center.

Joint Research Conference on Statistics in Quality, Industry and Technology
by Andrew Booker

A Joint Research Conference on Statistics in Quality, Industry and Technology will be held in Seattle, Washington from June 26th to 28th, 2000. This is a joint conference of The Spring Research Conference on Statistics in Industry and Technology and the Quality and Productivity Research Conference. The conference is jointly sponsored by ASA/Q&P, ASA/SPES, and IMS and will be hosted by The Boeing Company and held on the campus of the University of Washington. Local arrangement co-chairs are Rita Lai and Andrew Booker, The Boeing Company. Please send suggestions for invited paper topics and speakers to Andrew Booker  by September 1, 1999. Watch the Q & P  and SPES web sites for more information.

SmithKline Beecham Reception at JSM
by Darryl Downing

SmithKline Beecham will hold their annual reception at the Baltimore JSM. Last year's reception was a great success with over 600 people attending. Frank Rockhold, Vice President and Director of Biostatistics and Data Sciences, encourages attendance at this years meeting and reminds attendees that SB will also be meeting with and interviewing candidates for their statistical and SAS programming positions. The time and place of the reception is to be determined, but will be announced prior to the meeting. Further information can be found on SB's web sites at either sb.com or biometrics.com. Information concerning positions at SB can be obtained by contacting Rosemary Cassidy.

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