Plenary Session

Session Chair: Raghu Kacker, NIST

Statistics in Industry: Research Opportunities & Challenges

Vijayan N. Nair
Dept. of Statistics, Univ. of Michigan

Industrial statistics covers a broad range of areas in science and technology, including hardware manufacturing, software production, business, marketing, and service industries. All of these areas are experiencing an explosion in the amount and complexity of data that are routinely collected. There is a need to transform the massive amounts of data in a timely manner for efficient decision making. Since statistics is the science that transforms data into information, all of this naturally leads to exciting and important challenges and research opportunities in industrial statistics. For successful collaboration in such a cross-disciplinary environment, however, it is critical that statisticians work closely with engineers and scientists from other disciplines. This talk will outline some of the research issues and models for collaboration based on my own experience.