Two workshops on statistical methodology in quality and product improvement are to be conducted. The first workshop will focus on the identification and exploration of a broad range of research problems involving statistical science and its use in addressing problems in process quality and productivity. Typical problems range from the development of process diagnostics to detect processes out of control or deterioration of machines or tools used in these processes to new experimental design techniques to improve the quality of processes having a large number of control variables to techniques related to the development of large scale software products and project management. The workshop will look at specific problems involving response surface methodology in very high dimensions with vector outcome variables and will address the issues arising in combining observational data analysis with designed experiments to learn the shape of the response surface and optimize the production process. Statistical graphics techniques as well as computer science methods of artificial intelligence (e.g., neural networks ) will be explored.
