This special issue of Quality Engineering is devoted to talks and discussions from the fourth annual Stu Hunter Research Conference held in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, March 7–9, 2016. The goal of the Hunter conference is to provide an opportunity for an open exchange of ideas about the current state of business and industrial statistics. As in past years, the conference consisted of six 90 minute plenary talks with each talk followed by two invited discussants and considerable time for further discussion from all the conference participants. This special issue consists of papers based on all six of the plenary talks and 12 invited discussants, as well as a number of additional discussions.
The plenary talks and invited discussants at the conference were
Bill Woodall, Virginia Tech
“Basic Statistical Process Monitoring: Reassessing the Gap between Theory and Practice”
Invited Discussants: Fred Faltin, The Faltin Group; Ronald Does, University of Amsterdam
Christine Anderson-Cook, Los Alamos National Lab
“Optimizing in a Complex World”
Invited Discussants: Ron Kenett, KPA Group; Brad Jones, SAS
Galit Shmueli, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan
“Analyzing Behavioral Big Data: Methodological, Practical, Ethical and Moral Issues”
Invited Discussants: Roger Hoerl, Union College; Kwok Tsui, City University of Hong Kong
Dave Woods, University of Southampton
“Bayesian Design of Experiments for Industrial and Scientific Applications via Gaussian Processes”
Invited Discussants: Derek Bingham and Ofir Harari, Simon Fraser University; Geoff Vining, Virginia Tech
Alyson Wilson, North Carolina State University
“Bayesian Reliability: Combining Information”
Invited Discussants: Tim Davis, University of Warwick; Rong Pan, Arizona State University
Richard Jarrett, Visiting Research Fellow, University of Adelaide
“Does Theory Work in Practice? Two Case Studies”
Invited Discussants: Jeroen de Mast, University of Amsterdam; Fernando Camacho, University of Waterloo and DAMOS
We wish to thank all the participants of the Fourth Stu Hunter Conference, including Stu Hunter himself, for their contributions to making the conference very enjoyable and stimulating. We also are grateful to Murat Caner Testik, the editor of Quality Engineering, for inviting us to serve as guest editors for this special issue. In addition, we thank the conference sponsors that included: Minitab Statistical Software, SAS Institute Inc., the Canadian Statistical Sciences Institute (CANSSI), the Institute for Industrial and Business Statistics, University of Amsterdam and the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science and the Business and Industrial Statistics Research Group, University of Waterloo.