The General Motors Corporation Technical Education Program and the Department of Statistics at Iowa State University (ISU) have a partnership under which General Motors (GM) employees can earn a non-thesis M.S. Degree in Statistics taking regular courses from the department via video tape. The degree requirements include a research component that results in a formal paper (creative component). Students from GM will have co-major professors, a statistician from GM and a statistician from ISU. The purpose of this proposal is to create opportunities for visits and interactions that will help the GM students with this creative component research and introduce ISU faculty to research problems of interest to industry. This project will fund interactions of two different but related types: 1) site visits by ISU personnel with GM students and co-major professors and 2) collaborative research with scientists at GM Research Labs. In the summer of 1997, one ISU statistician will visit GM students and co-major professors, discussing company interests and areas for collaboration, and identifying appropriate topics for creative component research. In the summer of 1998, this person will spend 1 additional month doing collaborative research with GM scientists. In the summer of 1998 a second faculty member will spend two months engaged in visits and collaborative research. As part of their visits with GM research scientists, these faculty members will give seminars for GM statisticians and engineers on modern statistical methods. This proposed interaction will produce topics for publishable creative components, research ideas for ISU faculty members and solutions for real industry problems. The educational experience of the students at GM will be greatly enhanced through the proposed interaction. The GM students will be exposed to both academic and industrial approaches to research. Ideally, their creative components will both answer a particular q uestion for GM and raise new questions for the ISU faculty members, that can serve as subsequent topics for both personal research and for that of future ISU graduate students. The end result will then be the advancement of knowledge in directions important to industry practice. Since the projects at GM will likely combine statistics and engineering, many will serve as focal points to bring together ISU faculty members from Statistics and Engineering. Additional collaborative research at ISU is thus likely to follow from this project. This GOALI project is jointly supported by the MPS Office of Multidisciplinary Activities (OMA) and the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS).
