International Conference in
Reliability and Survival Analysis 2003 (ICRSA 2003)
May 21-24, 2003
Specific Aims of Conference
The first goal of the International Conference on Reliability and Survival Analysis (ICRSA), which will be held on May 21-24, 2003 at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, South Carolina, is to provide a forum for researchers to present and discuss recent, current, and future research in reliability and survival analysis, two areas which have evolved somewhat independently, but which have a lot to gain from each other.
The second goal of this Conference is to actively involve advanced graduate students and new researchers in the reliability and survival analysis 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 reliability and survival analysis, a 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.
Objectives and Justifications
The Department of Statistics, and its Center for Reliability and Quality Sciences, at the University of South Carolina-Columbia will organize the International Conference on Reliability and Survival Analysis 2003 (ICRSA2003) to be held on May 21-24, 2003 on the campus of the University in Columbia. This will be the sixth such world-wide conference on these topics since 1994, and the first in the US since 1998. Forthcoming and past conferences that dealt specifically with reliability and survival analysis since 1994 are:
1. Third International Conference on Mathematical Methods in Reliability -- MMR'02, Trondheim, Norway. To be held in June, 2002.
2. Second International Conference on Mathematical Methods in Reliability -- MMR'00, Bordeaux, France, July 4-7, 2000.
3. First International Conference on Mathematical Methods in Reliability -- MMR'97, Bucharest, Romania, September 16-19, 1997.
4. International Conference on Reliability and Survival Analysis 1998, Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL, May 19-22, 1998.
5. International Conference on Reliability and Survival Analysis 1994, Harvard University, Boston, MA, June 14-17, 1994.
The objectives of this conference are to bring together senior and established researchers and young and promising researchers from around the world who are working in the theoretical and applied aspects of reliability, survival analysis, and related topics to share recent and current research work, as well as future trends, in these areas. Through this conference, it is expected that interaction and/or collaborative work among reliability and survival analysis researchers will be fostered, which will enhance and accelerate developments in both areas.
As it currently exists, the reliability and survival analysis disciplines have developed somewhat separately, but there is indeed much to be gained by recognizing similarities between them since both deal with the stochastic modeling and statistical analysis of failure-time data, usually in the presence of incomplete information. Such types of failure-time data are very prevalent when dealing with biological, medical, and engineering studies. Consequently, statistical methods appropriate for such data sets find particular applications in the medical sciences, industry, and the military. This conference, which will be the first since 1998 to be held in the United States dealing simultaneously with reliability and survival analysis, will enable many researchers in the US to participate, especially new researchers, as the cost and accessibility for participation becomes more viable.