There are two major aims of this project: The first is to organize an International Conference on Reliability and Survival Analysis to be held on May 21-24, 2003 at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, which will provide a forum for researchers to present and discuss recent, current, and future research in survival analysis and reliability. These two areas have evolved somewhat independently, but have a lot to gain from each other. The second goal is to actively involve advanced graduate students and new researchers in the survival analysis and reliability areas and facilitate their interaction with established senior researchers. The major benefits to the scientific infrastructure envisioned from this conference are the synthesis and advancement of stochastic and statistical methods in survival analysis and reliability, fruitful interaction among active investigators which will enhance research, and the involvement and interaction of new researchers, especially advanced-level graduate students, with established senior researchers in the areas. In particular, a potential benefit of this conference is that new stochastic models and new statistical methods will be developed through the interactions among participating researchers that will have applicability in cancer and in other medical and public-health related studies. Currently, twenty-two internationally-recognized and active researchers have agreed to organize or have already organized an invited session on a topic relevant to the conference with the session having three speakers with each speaker presenting a 25-minute invited talk. Six very prominent researchers in survival analysis and reliability have agreed to present plenary talks with each talk lasting 40 minutes. Several other active researchers have agreed to give invited talks, and contributed talks are either being submitted or currently being solicited Funding is requested to partially support the registration, lodging, and subsistence expenses during the conference of the 70 invited speakers, and the registration fees of 10 graduate students and 10 faculties from the University of South Carolina.
