Description: The Department of Statistics, with its Center for Reliability and Quality Sciences, of the University of South Carolina, Columbia, is organizing the International Conference in Reliability and Survival Analysis 2003 to be held on May 21-24, 2003 on the university's historic campus. USC, which is South Carolina's flagship university, has just celebrated its bicentennial year in 2001. The objectives of this conference are to bring together senior researchers, young researchers, and practitioners from around the world who are working in the areas of reliability theory and its applications, survival analysis, and related topics to learn about current work and future trends for research in these areas. The theme of the ICRSA2003 will be "Advances, Current and Future Research in Reliability and Survival Analysis." There will be both invited and contributed paper sessions with a mix of senior and junior scientists. In addition, it is planned to have six plenary sessions during the two and a half days, each featuring a special invited speaker. Also, there will be sessions devoted to poster presentations by graduate students and beginning researchers. These sessions will provide the students and young investigators an opportunity to discuss their work at length with other participants and to closely interact with leaders in the focal areas of the conference. The general focal areas of the ICRSA 2003 are important in engineering, industrial, medical, public health, pharmaceutical, and biological settings, among others. Partial funding for the Conference is being requested from the National Science Foundation and other agencies.

Website: http://www.stat.sc.edu/~padgett/ICRSA2003. This website will contain detailed information about conference registration, lodging, travel information, support for graduate students, abstract submission, invited plenary speakers, invited session organizers, major topics of the conference, scientific program, and information about the University, the City of Columbia, and South Carolina.

Invited Plenary Talks: Invited speakers for the plenary sessions are Prof. Henry Block (Univ. of Pittsburgh), Prof. Myles Hollander (Florida State Univ.), Prof. Jerry Lawless (Univ. of Waterloo), Prof. Ross Prentice (Univ. of Washington), Prof. Nozer Singpurwalla (George Washington Univ.), and Prof. L.J. Wei (Harvard Univ.).

Invited Session Organizers: Some of the organizers of invited sessions are Prof. Odd Aalen (Norway), Prof. Terje Aven (Norway) and Prof. Uwe Jensen (Germany), Dr. Martin Crowder (United Kingdom), Prof. Nader Ebrahimi (USA), Prof. Luis Escobar (USA), Prof. Nancy Flournoy (USA), Prof. Niels Keiding (Denmark), Prof. John Klein (USA), Prof. Lynn Kuo (USA), Dr. Robert Launer (USA), Prof. Mei-Ling Ting Lee (USA), Prof. Ian McKeague (USA), Prof. William Q. Meeker (USA), Prof. Xie Min (Singapore), Prof. David Oakes (USA), Prof. Louise Ryan (USA), Prof. Frank Samaniego (USA), Prof. Tom Savits (USA), Prof. Robert Strawderman (USA), Prof. Jane-Ling Wang (USA), and Prof. Mei-Cheng Wang (USA). Each of these researchers will organize a session with three speakers on a topic of major relevance to the theme of the Conference. A few additional invited sessions and contributed paper sessions will be included by the Conference Organizers.

To Contact Organizers: Send e-mail to Prof. Edsel A. Pena (pena@stat.sc.edu) or Prof. William J. Padgett (padgett@stat.sc.edu), call 803-777-7800, or write to: ICRSA2003, Department of Statistics, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC 29208.