The Sixth Stu Hunter Research Conference was held March 6 – 8, 2018 at the Roanoke Hotel in Roanoke, Virginia. The Hunter Conference strives to provide thorough talks followed by a robust discussion among the speakers, discussants and other participants to advance the research field. During the conference, six keynote speakers were given a forum of 90 minutes to present their ideas, after which two discussants challenged the ideas, and provided an excellent basis for the open discussion with all participants. The last session of the conference was devoted to the late Søren Bisgaard who had a tremendous impact on the field of industrial statistics.
This special issue provides full-length papers of all six keynote speakers. Each of these papers is complemented by at least two discussion papers that are provided by the discussants at the conference, as well as by some additional authors who are well respected in the field. The speakers, their topics, and the discussants included the following:
Dennis Lin, Penn State, “Design and Analysis for Order-of-Addition Experiment”
Discussant 1: Joe Voekel, Rochester Institute of Technology
Discussant 2: David Steinberg, Tel Aviv University
Laura Freeman Institute for Defense Analysis, “Design of Experiments for Reliability”
Discussant 1: Doug Montgomery, Arizona State University
Discussant 2: Zhisheng Ye, National University of Singapore
Sandy Fogel, Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, “Doctors are not pilots and patients are not airplanes: Quality improvement in medicine”
Discussant 1: Stefan Steiner, University of Waterloo
Discussant 2: Victoria Jordan, Emory Health Care
Stephanie Kovalchik, Tennis Australia, “Gaining an Edge: Promoting Statistical Thinking in the Sports Industry”
Discussant 1: Karl Pazdernik, North Carolina State University
Discussant 2: Steve Rigdon, Saint Louis University
Ross Sparks, CSIRO, “Disease surveillance: Disease counts or Time between disease events?”
Discussant 1: James D. Wilson, University of San Francisco
Discussant 2: Fadel Megahed, Virginia Tech
Geoff Vining, Virginia Tech, “Søren Bisgaard’s Contributions to Quality Engineering”
Discussant 1: Murat Kulahci, Technical University of Denmark
Discussant 2: Roger Hoerl, Union College
We thank Murat Caner Testik, past editor of Quality Engineering, Marcus Perry, the current editor, and the staff at Taylor and Francis for allowing us the opportunity to serve as guest editors and to present these papers in this issue.
We are also grateful to the Hunter Conference managing committee, which consists of Stefan Steiner and Murat Kulahci, and the local committee which included Anne Driscoll, Geoff Vining, Ron Fricker, Kortni Lindsay, and Jeneen Preston. Finally, we are grateful to all sponsors of the conference, including the Statistics Division of ASQ, the Chemical and Process Industries Division of ASQ, the Quality and Productivity section of ASA, and JMP®.
KU Leuven
Steven E. Rigdon
Saint Louis University
Changliang Zhou
Nankai University