Past Conferences Sponsored or Co-Sponsored by the International Statistical Institute Committee on Statistics in Business and Industry (SBI)

One of the activities of SBI is sponsor and co-sponsor conferences relating to the subject of statistics in business and industry. This page contains information about past conferences that were so sponsored.

• Conference on Statistics in Industry, Tel Aviv, September 1991 Organizers of the conference were Vijay Nair and David Steinberg.
• A three-day conference on Statistics in Industry, Science and Technology in Tokyo, Japan on July 11-13, 1994 (organized by Professor Chihiro Hirotsu of the University of Tokyo). It was very successful in attracting both international and local participation with a total of more than 120 participants. There was a scientific tour of Fuji-Xerox and Nissan plants at the end of the conference.
• The International Conference on Statistical Methods and Statistical Computing on Quality and Productivity Improvement (organized by Professor Sung H. Park of the Seoul National University) was held in Seoul from August 17-19, 1995. This conference, cosponsored with IASC, attracted more than 400 participants and more than 120 papers were presented. There was also a Quality Engineering Workshop the day before the conference and a scientific tour of Daewoo Automobile Company during the conference.
• The International Conference on Quality Improvement Through Statistical Methods, 29 December 1996 to 1 January 1997, organized by Bovas Abraham and N.Unnikrishnan Nair and hosted by Cochin University of Science and Technology, Cochin, India. Keynote speakers were George Box "Scientific Learning" and J.K. Ghosh " Industrial Applications and the Relevance of Bayesian Analysis". There were about 135 participants including 65 from outside India representing around 15 countries. About 25% of the participants were from industry and the rest from academia. After the conference, there was a workshop on "Understanding QS9000" led by Bovas Abraham. The conference led to the creation of an international journal "Statistical Methods", and the publication of a refereed volume Quality Improvement Through Statistical Methods based on the papers presented at the conference. The conference also initiated some international collaboration on research.
• ISI satellite meeting in Athens, Greece on "Industrial Statistics: Aims and Computational Aspects" from August 16-17, 1997 (organized by C. P. Kitsos).
• First International Symposium on Industrial Statistics, Understanding Variation: A Key to Successful Quality Improvement, 19-21 August 1999, Linkoping, Sweden was an ISI satellite meeting. Bo Bergman was Chair of the International Organizing Committee.
• MMR 2000, the Second International Conference on Mathematical Methods in Reliability Methodology, Practice and Inference, July 4-7, 2000, Universite Victor Segalen - Bordeaux 2, Bordeaux, France (Mikhail Nikulin and N. Limnios, Chairs of the International Organizing Committee)  MMR2000 was a very successful conference attended by about 300 people from around the world. Both the technical content and organization of the conference were of high quality. Plenary sessions included talks by David Cox, Jerry Lawless, Harry Martz, Bill Meeker, and Igor Ushakov. The conference included a broad range of talks, covering both theory and applications.

• The VIII Seminar on Applied Statistics of the Inter-American Statistical Institute was held at the University of Panama, Panama City, Panama on July 23-27, 2001. The main topic of the conference was Statistical Methods in Quality and Productivity. The conference was sponsored by the Inter-American Statistical Institute (IASI), General Comptrollership of the Panama, as well as SBI.There were more than 100 attendees, including 40 from abroad. There was representation from 15 different countries from 4 different continents. The conference consisted of talks, a poster session, short courses, and panel discussions. The main speakers of the conference were Francisco Aparisi, Estela Bee, Camilo Dagum, Luis Escobar, Evelio Fabbroni, Osvaldo Ferreiro, Nick Fisher, David James, Ramon Leon, Raul P. Mentz, and Vijay Nair.
• The Second International Symposium on Industrial Statistic (ISIS2), was held at Keio University, Yokohama, Japan, 20-21 August 2001. This was a satellite meeting for the Seoul ISI. Chihiro Hirotsu was the local organizer.
• The 2nd International Symposium on Partial Least Squares and Related Methods (PLS'01) took place in Anacapri (Italy) from October 1-3, 2001. In attendance at PLS’01 were 139 participants coming from 19 different countries This Symposium was jointly organized by the Department of Mathematics and Statistics of the University of Naples, the HEC School of Management and the CISIA-CERESTA company. PLS'01 pursued the following objectives: 1) Making the state-of-art of PLS methods, PLS approach and any related methods; 2) Presenting the panorama of the most outstanding reference scientists connected to PLS; 3) Exploring numerous real applications of PLS in different areas of industry.

The scientific program of the Symposium was set up by the Steering Committee in co-operation with the statistical associations that scientifically co-sponsored the event. These were the International Federation of Classification Societies (represented by its President Jean Paul Rasson from the University of Namur in Belgium), the International Association for Statistical Computing (represented by the Chairman of its European Regional Section Gianfranco Galmacci from the University of Perugia), the ISI Committee on Statistics in Business and Industry (represented by Bovas Abraham from the University of Ontario in Canada) and by the Italian Statistical Society. The program comprised 10 invited lectures and 29 contributed papers organized in 6 sessions on the following themes: New PLS-based Methods and Algorithms; Topics related to Multivariate Analysis; Validation, Variables Selection and Subspace Identification in PLS; Multi-Block PLS Methods; Issues in PLS Approach; PLS Industrial Applications. All lectures were delivered in plenary sessions.

The invited lectures were given by Svante Wold (PCA and PLS with Very Large Data Sets),Bovas Abraham (Dimensionality Reduction Approach to Multivariate Prediction), Michele Forina (Weighting Predictors and Objects in PLS), Sijmen de Jong ((Direct) Orthogonal Signal Correction: Comparison of Old and New Algorithms), Harald Martens (Multivariate Analysis of Quality" Garmt Dijksterhuis - "GP-PLSR: An Integrated Technique for Analysing Sensory Science Data), D.L. Massart, (Diagnostics for Application of PLS in Multivariate Calibration), Tormod Næs (Optimised Score Plot by Principal Components of Predictions), Inge Helland (Rotational Symmetry, Model Reduction and Optimality of Prediction from the PLS Population Model), Aloke Phatak (PLS, Conjugate Gradients), and Lanczos Methods. PLS'01 has shown that PLS-based methods have now become a research topic of high interest for statisticians covering a very broad area of statistical methods, from regression to generalized linear models, from data analysis to causal and path modeling, with several theoretical and statistical properties being demonstrated.

• MMR 2002 (Third International Conference on Mathematical Methods in Reliability) was held in Trondheim in Norway, June 17-20, 2002. Bo Linqvist and Kjell Doksum were the organizers of MMR 2002.
• SIB 2003: International Conference on Statistics in Industry and Business was held January 2-4, 2003 in Cochin, India. The conference was organized by Bovas Abraham together with P.G.Sankaran and N.Balakrishna from Cochin University of Science and Technology, which hosted the conference. The Keynote Speaker was Bill Meeker (Reliability: The other dimension of quality). Alan Gelfand, Dipak Dey, Geoff Vining and Bovas Abraham gave plenary talks. There were approximately 90 participants representing 10 countries.  The participants were from academia, business, industry and government. A special volume of the journal Statistical Methods based on some of the papers presented in the conference will be out in April 2004.
• ISIS3-ENBIS3: The Third International Meeting on Business and Industrial Statistics of the ISI-SBI committee was held in Barcelona, Spain from 21-22 August 2003. This was a joint conference with the European Network on Business and Industrial Statistics (ENBIS). The conference program committee was chaired by David Steinberg of the ISI committee and by Soren Bisgaard of ENBIS.