Department of Statistics, Iowa State University, Ames, Iowa, USA

William Meeker is Professor of Statistics and Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Iowa State University. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association (ASA) and the American Society for Quality (ASQ) and a past Editor of Technometrics. He is co-author of the books Statistical Methods for Reliability Data with Luis Escobar (1998), and Statistical Intervals with Gerald Hahn (1991), 14 book chapters, and of numerous publications in the engineering and statistical literature. He has won the ASQ Youden prize five times and the ASQ Wilcoxon Prize three times. He was recognized by the ASA with their Best Practical Application Award in 2001 and by the ASQ Statistics Division’s with their W.G. Hunter Award in 2003. In 2007 he was awarded the ASQ Shewhart medal. He won the 2012 Jerome Sacks Award for Cross-Disciplinary Research and the 2014 ASQ Brumbaugh Award. He has done research and consulted extensively on problems in reliability data analysis, warranty analysis, accelerated testing, nondestructive evaluation, and statistical computing.

STATISTICS, SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Professor Emeritus in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science, University of Waterloo.

Jerry Lawless is Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science at the University of Waterloo. He was a faculty member there from 1972-2007, serving as Chair from 1979-84, and in 1987-88 and 2004-05. His research interests include biostatistics, industrial statistics, survival and event history analysis, reliability, and regression methodology. He is the author of numerous papers and the books Statistical Models and Methods for Lifetime Data (John Wiley and Sons, 1982; second edition, 2003) and The Statistical Analysis of Recurrent Events (with R.J. Cook, Springer, 2007). He is a past editor of Technometrics and has served as a consultant to government, industry and the legal profession. He is a recipient of the Gold Medal of the Statistical Society of Canada and of the Shewhart Medal of the American Society for Quality, is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and the Royal Society of Canada, and is an Honorary Member of the Statistical Society of Canada.

SOME INFERENTIAL ISSUES FOR ONE-SHOT DEVICE TESTING

McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

Professor Narayanaswamy Balakrishnan is a Distinguished University Professor in McMaster University, Hamilton, Canada, and is a Professor of Statistics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and is an Elected Member of the International Statistical Institute. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of Communications in Statistics and Encyclopedia of Statistical Sciences.

SURVIVAL AND QUALITY OF LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Department of Mathematics, University Paris Descartes, Saints-Pères, Paris.

Catherine Huber is professor at the university of Paris Descartes, a member of the team 8145 of the National Center of Scientific Research (CNRS), and a member of the unit U1181 of the National Institute of Health and Medical Research (INSERM), specialized in Biostatistics, and she was during several years the head of the Biostatistics Research laboratory at this same university. She was an expert at the NSF in 2005 and 2007. She is a member of ISI and is associate editor of several journals, among which Lifetime Data Analysis and Journal Afrika Statistika, and is editor of several books in probability and statistics series by Birkhauser and Springer. Apart from her universitary cursus, she has done research for L'Oreal company, studying the hair lifetime and the agents that could impact it at the individual level. Though the main activity of this company is supposed to be cosmetology it frequently keeps close to medicine (which drives some critics to the company), for example when they study the androgenetic alopecy. Several patents were obtained as results of this work.

RELIABILITY BIG DATA FOR QUALITY ASSURANCE

Department of Informatics, University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan.

Kazuyuki Suzuki is a professor at the Dept. of Informatics at the University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo. He has been working on Reliability Engineering and Quality Management for over three decades. He has served as both the president of the Japanese Society for Quality Control (JSQC) in 2010 and 2011, and the president of Reliability Engineering Association of Japan (REAJ) in 2012 and 2013, besides a member of the Deming Prize Committee.

He is the author of more than 70 research publications and thirty books besides 22 key note speeches and plenary invited talks. He won 15 prizes from several academic societies including the Deming Prize for Individual in 2014, and Wilcoxon Prize in 1999 from the American Society for Quality (ASQ) and American Statistical Association (ASA).