SPES Sessions at the Joint Statistical Meetings
Denver Aug 3-7, 2008

Randy Tobias, SAS Institute Inc.
2008 SPES Program Chair
Jeffery Luner, The Boeing Company
2009 SPES Program Chair

Main JSM 2008 Page

SPES is going to Denver!  Here are all the different ways that the Section on Physical and Engineering Sciences  is involved at the Joint Statistical Meetings this summer.  Review the various areas of the program below, and then within an area click on the links for more details.  For your convenience we've even assembled the schedule of all SPES activities in one easy-to-use table.

• Special Memorial Session in Honor of Randy Sitter
• Invited and Topic Contributed Sessions
• Contributed Sessions
• Posters
• Roundtable Topics
• Short-course: Optimal Designs
• Joint SPES/Q&P Mixer
• Schedule of SPES sessions at JSM2008

Special Memorial Session in Honor of Randy Sitter

At this year's Joint Meetings, SPES is proud to co-sponsor the special memorial session in honor of Randy Sitter, on Sunday at 4:00 PM.  Randy's tragic loss last fall shocked many in our field for whom he was a good friend and a vital collaborator. The talks in the session organized by Derek Bingham of Simon Fraser University would have been interesting to Randy himself. Jeff Wu will speak about the side of Randy’s work most familiar to SPES folks—the innovations in industrial statistics that were a hallmark of Randy's tenure as the editor of Technometrics. Randy also made important contributions in survey analysis, and in this vein, J. N. K. Rao of Carleton University will discuss Randy's contributions to survey resampling methods; and Jiahua Chen of the University of British Columbia will present recent research to which Randy contributed, concerning weight adjustment in sample surveys.

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Invited and Topic Contributed Sessions

The four invited sessions for the SPES program at JSM 2008 combine new methods with exciting applications. We've made every effort to organize sessions that will present new opportunities for industrial statisticians while remaining relevant to the work they already do. The sessions are as follows:

• Recent Advances in Computer Experiments: New Methods with Diverse Applications, organized by Zhiguang (Peter) Qian, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Sun, 8/3/08, 2:00 PM - 3:50 PM
  Computer experiments are definitely a hot topic, with new applications and new approaches springing up all the time. As exciting as the new methodologies presented in this session is the diversity of problems to which they are applied. Derek Bingham of the Simon Fraser University, Shane Reese of the Brigham Young University, Brian Williams of the Los Alamos National Lab, and Jeff Wu of the Georgia Institute of Technology will apply new methods to IT date center thermal modeling, cosmology, pollution source detection, and radiography.
  
• Warranty and Other Field Reliability Data, organized by Luis A. Escobar, Louisiana State University
  Mon, 8/4/08, 10:30 AM - 12:20 PM
  Field data provides a vast, messy, and often underutilized resource for reliability analysis. This session will explore important issues of collecting and analyzing such data. The speakers are a mix of academic and industrial statisticians that are contributing importantly to the warranty and field data modeling analysis methodology, including Necip Doganaksoy of GE Global Research, Marc Fredette of HEC Montréal, Bill Meeker of Iowa State University, and Jeffrey Robinson of General Motors.
  
• Theory and Applications of Generalized Confidence Intervals, organized by Richard K. Burdick, Amgen, Inc.
  Tue, 8/5/08, 8:30 AM - 10:20 AM
  These methods provide a straight forward and very general approach for interval estimation and have been used to form limits on functions of variance components, functions of means, and to provide tolerance intervals. Hari Iyer of Colorado State University will first discuss general theoretical and empirical justifications of the methodology, followed with applications in a variety of fields, from bioassays to bullets, by Thomas Mathew of the University of Maryland, Connie Borror of Arizona State University, and Jorge Quiroz of the Schering Plough Research Institute.
  
• Design and Analysis of Industrial Split-plot Experiments: Best Practices, organized by Bradley Jones, SAS Institute Inc.
  Wed, 8/6/08, 2:00 PM - 3:50 PM
  Modern methods of design and analysis have vastly expanded the scope of split-plot experimentation. This session will explore some of these new methods while seeking to clear up confusion about them. After an overview from Chris Nachtsheim of the University of Minnesota of recent literature, Peter Goos of the University of Antwerp and Oliver Schabenberger of SAS Institute Inc. will present state-of-the-art methods currently available in commercial software. Discussant Jose Ramirez of W.L. Gore & Associates, Inc. will critique these presentations based on his considerable experience applying split-plot methods in industry.
  

Two further invited sessions that will be of interest to SPES members are

• Statistical Problems in Wireless Sensor Networks, organized by Liza Levina, University of Michigan (sponsored by the Section on Statisticians in Defense and National Security)
  Wed, 8/6/08, 2:00 PM - 3:50 PM
• Advanced Modeling in Remote Sensing of the Inner Earth, organized by Ping Ma, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (sponsored by the American Geophysical Union)
  Thu, 8/7/08, 10:30 AM - 12:20 PM

Of course, there are lots of other invited sessions that will be of interest to SPES members; these two actually passed through SPES’s fingers, as it were, and we worked with other sections and organizations to get them onto the program.

In addition to these invited sessions, your fellow members of SPES prepared three topic contributed sessions.

• Reliability in aerospace poses unique problems, namely with non-traditional censoring and recurrent lifetimes, and I-Li Lu of Boeing Phantom Works has organized a session to examine these issues. Presentations will consider non-traditional censorship, latent and evident lifetime features, superimposed lifetime processes, unobservable degradation paths, sporadic and sparse demand patterns, and unconventional recurrent events.
  Mon, 8/4/08, 8:30 AM - 10:20 AM
  
• Differential equation models are widely used to describe dynamic systems in many scientific fields such as engineering, physics, econometrics, and biomedical sciences. The session assembled by Hulin Wu of the University of Rochester will explore statistical aspects of estimation and inference for such models. Contributors to the session will discuss a variety of methods, with applications in many areas, from modeling viral fitness to modeling seismic activity.
  Wed, 8/6/08, 8:30 AM - 10:20 AM
  
• Robert Shumway had over 30 students during his 40 year career in academia. Watnik and Joshua Kerr of California State University, East Bay have put together a session involving Bob’s collaborators, to celebrate his academic work, particularly in the areas of time series, state-space models and geostatistics and his impact—both theoretical and practical—within statistics and his subfields of interest.
  Thu, 8/7/08, 8:30 AM - 10:20 AM

Let me take this opportunity to step up on my soapbox. Do you plan to submit a contributed abstract to JSM2009? Don't just throw your work in the hat, to suffer the arbitrary whim of a chair who (as I recognize only too well) may know little about your subject and whose primary task is just to fill up so many contributed paper sessions somehow! If you can conceive and organize a session including your paper and at least four other related ones, then for just that bit of legwork on your part you can get about 40% more time on the program, in a session that is guaranteed to treat your topic coherently. Send your offers to organize JSM2009 topic contributed sessions to Jeffery Luner.

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Contributed Sessions

Over 70 independent abstracts were submitted to the Section on Physical And Engineering Sciences for the 2008 Joint Statistical Meetings in Denver. The SPES program chair, with the help of fellow members of the JSM program committee, strives to put these various abstracts into coherent sessions that reflect broad themes. About half of the 11 contributed sessions thus constructed reflected the general statistical problems that SPES members are typically concerned with—Experimental Design and Analysis, Reliability, Computer Experimentation. Many of the remaining contributions involve novel applications of statistics to problems in physical and engineering sciences, and so several contributed sessions were organized around applied themes. Some of these applications are isotope identification for detecting nuclear threats, wireless sensor network design, disaster recovery planning, and predicting surface roughness in a micro-cutting process.

In addition to traditional paper presentations, more and more JSM participants recognized that a poster is a great way to present contributed work to as many colleagues as possible, without the time constraints of a contributed talk. Thirteen posters were contributed to SPES for the Denver meetings, and they will be presented in the regular poster sessions on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. Topics run from theoretical to applied, including “Numerical error in ODEs,” “Equivalency criteria in pharmaceutical versus in engineering applications,” “Software to support Weibull inference,” and “Parameter estimation in astrophysical accretion disk models.”

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Posters

Allison Rajakumar, SPES Awards Chair

JSM 2007 in Salt Lake City was the inaugural year for SPES Poster Presentation Awards and the Outstanding Poster Presentation Award went to William Brenneman, Procter & Gamble, for the SPES contributed poster, “Consumer Product Optimization Through a Mixture-of-Mixtures Experiment”.

Be sure to check out this year’s contributed posters in Denver. Attend the poster sessions during the times below and vote for your favorite posters. It is your evaluations that determine the selection of the Outstanding Poster Presentation. You can print out the attached voting ballot (an MS Excel spreadsheet) or pick up a ballot at any of the posters. You will be able to leave your completed ballots at any of the posters or email them to Allison Rajakumar, the SPES Awards Chair, at allison.rajakumar@lubrizol.com. Please return any ballots by email by Thursday, August 14^th. There are some very exciting posters this year.  Make sure that you get to see them.

The SPES Contributed Posters are as follows:

Mon, 8/4/08, 8:30 AM – 10:20 AM

• Impact of a Regional Trend on the Estimation of Unconventional Natural Gas Resources using Local Nonparametric Prediction Models
  Timothy C. Coburn, Abilene Christian University

Mon, 8/4/08, 2:00 PM – 3:50 PM

• Comparisons Of The Uses Of Logistic And Probit Regression In The Aerospace And Biomedical Fields
  Peter Hovey, University of Dayton
• Equivalency criteria in pharmaceutical versus in engineering applications
  Elizabeth Whalen, The Boeing Company
• Neural Network Monitoring of Poisson Data
  Benjamin M. Adams, University of Alabama

Tue, 8/5/08, 2:00 PM – 3:50 PM

• Parameter estimation in Astrophysical accretion disk models through the application of "modified" genetic algorithms
  Elizabeth Martínez-Gómez, Institute of Astronomy, National Autonomous University of Mexico
• Estimating Critical Micelle Concentration (CMC) via Change-Point Regression Modeling
  Tom Filloon, Procter & Gamble
• Response Surfaces, Blocking and Split Plots: An Industrial Experiment Case Study
  Willis Jensen, W. L. Gore & Associates
• Investigating the Use of Computational Algorithms for Constructing Nonregular Robust Parameter Designs
  Latia Carraway, Arkansas State University
• Software to Support Weibull Inference
  John I. McCool, Penn State Great Valley

Wed, 8/6/08, 8:30 AM – 10:20 AM

• Using the Bootstrap to Select Active Factors in unreplicated Factorial Experiments
  Gerald Shaughnessy, University of Dayton
• Numerical error in ODEs
  Clyde Martin, Texas Tech University
• Classification of Closed Contours
  Fu-Chih Cheng, North Dakota State University

See you in Denver!

Roundtable Topics

Would you like to have an interesting discussion along with your lunch at JSM? We’ll be offering two opportunities this year in Denver with the following menu items:

• On Monday, Joanne R. Wendelberger of Los Alamos National Laboratory will discuss statistical issues in cybersecurity.  New attacks on electronic systems and information are being developed all the time, calling for new ways to investigate, analyze, and prevent increasingly sophisticated cybersecurity threats.  Roundtable participants will explore alternative statistical and computational techniques for handling potential threats.
  
• On Wednesday, Dan Fitzsimmons of Boeing Commercial Airplanes will discuss how quality evaluation can impact product reliability models. In some industries, when nonconforming product is discovered, it is replaced with a carefully inspected item, thus having a positive impact on the outgoing quality of the production stream. You’ll have the chance to discuss cases where the increased probability of conformance might affect the product’s reliability budget, and conversely how high product reliability requirements might constrain the application of product sampling.

If you’d like more information on the upcoming luncheons, don’t hesitate to contact SPES Program Chair-Elect Jeffery Luner.

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Short Course: "Optimal Experimental Designs"

Saturday, August 2, 2008, 8:30 AM - 5:00 PM

If you are going to the Joint Statistical Meetings this year mark your calendar for the one day short course on "Optimal Experimental Designs" sponsored by the Section on Physical and Engineering Sciences , offered on August 2nd, 2008, 8:30am-5:00pm. It is taught by Alex N. Donev, School of Mathematics, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK and Randy Tobias, SAS Institute Inc., Cary, NC USA. The course is designed for statisticians and experimenters who need optimal designs as one tool in their kit, for handling non-standard experimental situations.  The emphasis throughout will be on the practical aspects of these methods, from using practical software tools to construct optimal designs to understanding the practical ramifications of their theoretical characteristics.

The course material will be based on the recent book, Optimum Experimental Designs, with SAS, by A. C. Atkinson, Alex N. Donev and Randy Tobias (Oxford University Press, 2007).

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Joint SPES/Q&P Mixer

Don’t forget the joint business meeting/mixer of SPES and Q&P (Quality and Productivity). It will be held in Capitol Ballroom 6 in the Hyatt Regency Denver, on Tuesday evening (Aug. 5) at 5:30 PM. We’ll meet the section officers, hear the very latest section news, congratulate the winners of the best paper and best posters from JSM2007 (see last December’s issue of the SPES/Q&P Newsletter for who they were), eat and drink, and generally enjoy one another’s company. And don’t forget the fantastic door prizes!

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Schedule of SPES sessions at JSM2008

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