IAS Visiting Professor Prof Jeff Wu explains the role of quality professionals play in the high-tech age and address the question “Will there be a paradigm shift and what to expect?".
Traditional work in quality control and improvement had its main impetus from needs in manufacturing like autos, electronics and chemicals. As the economies in developed countries are increasingly dependent on high value-added products, it is natural to ask what role can quality professionals play in the high-tech age. Without the benefit of crystal gazing, the speaker will use several research examples to search for hints to the future. He would describe the essence of some research projects, including the study of nano-mechanical properties, computer-aided design and management of data centers, and electronics packaging. The following features distinguish these problems from traditional quality technology. The experiments are more elaborate and the responses can be sensitive to input conditions; they often require complex modeling; how to scale up from lab conditions to industrial productions; they often use extensive computer modeling (e.g., finite element analysis) before conducting (or even foregoing) physical experiments for verification. Based on these new features, the speaker will try to address the ultimate question: “Will there be a paradigm shift and what to expect?"
About the speaker
Prof Jeff Wu received his PhD in Statistics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1976. He was formerly the H. C. Carver Professor of Statistics and Professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan, the GM/NSERC Chair in Quality and Productivity at the University of Waterloo. He also taught in the Statistics Department at the University of Wisconsin. He is currently Professor in Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, where he holds the Coca-Cola Chair in Engineering Statistics.
Prof Wu’s work is widely cited in professional journals as well as in magazines, including a feature article about his work in Canadian Business and a special issue of Newsweek on quality. He has served as editor or associate editor for several prestigious statistical journals like Annals of Statistics, Journal of American Statistical Association, Technometrics, and Statistica Sinica. He has published more than 130 research articles in peer-reviewed journals.
Prof Wu is a Member of the US National Academy of Engineering, Academia Sinica, Honorary Professor at Chinese Academy of Sciences, and an Honorary Doctor of Mathematics at University of Waterloo. He is a Fellow of the American Society for Quality, Institute of Mathematical Statistics, and American Statistical Association. Prof Wu has won numerous awards, including the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies (COPSS) Presidents Award, Taiwan’s Pan Wenyuan Technology Award, the Wilcoxon Prize for the best paper in Technometrics, the Brumbaugh Award for the single most important paper to quality control among the publications sponsored by the American Society for Quality Control, and the Jack Youden Prize twice for best paper in Technometrics. He was the P. C. Mahalanobis Memorial Lecturer at the Indian Statistical Institutes with widely cited research work and a listing as an “ISI (Institute for Scientific Information) Highly Cited Researcher”.
