This special issue of Quality Engineering is devoted to talks and discussions from the fifth annual Stu Hunter Research Conference held near Copenhagen, Denmark March 5-8, 2017. Named in honor of Stu Hunter, the goal of the conference is to provide an opportunity for an open exchange of ideas about the state-of-the-art in current methodologies and new challenges in business and industrial statistics. As in past years, the conference consisted of six 90-minute plenary talks. Each talk was followed by three invited discussants, with considerable time for further contributions from the conference participants. The 2017 Stu Hunter Research conference hosted 60 partecipants, from 18 countries (America, Asia and Europe), among the leaders in promoting statistical methods and practice in scientific, enginereering and industrial settings. The plenary talks and invited discussions at the conference were:
| 1) | Pedro Saraiva, University of Coimbra, Portugal Quality and statistical thinking in a Parliament and beyond Discussants: Ronald Does, University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands); Geoff Vining Virginia Tech, (USA) and Bo Bergman, Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden) | ||||
| 2) | Bianca Maria Colosimo, Politecnico di Milano, Italy Modeling and monitoring methods for spatial and image data Discussants: David Steinberg, Tel Aviv University (Israel); Judi Jin, University of Michigan (USA) and Inez Zwetsloot, University of Amsterdam(the Netherlands) | ||||
| 3) | Christopher Nachtsheim, University of Minnesota, USA Design augmentation for response optimization and model estimation Discussants: Peter Goos, KU Leuven (Belgium); David Woods, University of Southampton (UK) and Bradley Jones, JMP Division of SAS Institute (USA) | ||||
| 4) | John Sall, JMP Division of SAS Institute, USA Scaling up process characterization Discussants: José G. Ramírez, Amgen, Inc. (USA); William H. Woodall, Virginia Tech (USA) and Douglas Montgomery, Arizona State University (USA) | ||||
| 5) | Peihua Qiu, University of Florida, USA Jump regression, image processing and quality control Discussants: Alistair Forbes, National Physical Laboratory (UK); Wei Jiang, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (China) and Guido Masarotto, Padua University (Italy) | ||||
| 6) | Fugee Tsung, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong Statistical transfer learning: A review and some extensions to statistical process control Discussant: Bart De Ketelaere, KU Leuven (Belgium); Changliang Zou, Nankai University (China) and Panagiotis Tsiamyrtzis, Athens University (Greece) | ||||
This special issue consists of articles based on all six of the plenary talks, as well as at least one discussion of every article. We want to thank all the participants of the Fifth Stu Hunter Conference, especially including Stu Hunter himself. Everyone contributed and made the conference both stimulating and enjoyable. We are also 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 SAS Institute Inc., the Institute for Industrial and Business Statistics, University of Amsterdam, Minitab Statistical Software, and The Department of Applied Mathematics and Computer Science, Technical University of Denmark.