As the QSR section moves into the second decade of its existence, it has been considered as one of the active and growing sections within INFORMS. Along the way, our section made many significant progresses, providing a home section for faculty and students in the departments of industrial and operations engineering, system engineering, statistics, and business/management who are interested in research and education in the field of QSR. A number of QSR highlights are:

QSR sponsors a cluster of technical sessions in the INFORMS annual conference. QSR maintains, on average, 35+ sessions for the four-day annual conference and approximately four papers per session, which makes QSR one of the most active subdivisions within INFORMS. QSR’s paper sessions cover a broad spectrum of topics related to Quality, Statistics, and Reliability research and many of them address emerging research topics such as emerging manufacturing and service systems, sensor network, biological systems, and homeland security.

The Best Student Paper Competition has generated significant interests in QSR community. Most of the papers in the competition were eventually published in top-tier journals in our field. Many awardees and finalists joined reputable academic programs in engineering, statistics, and business schools, including Harvard University, University of Wisconsin at Madison, Georgia Tech, Purdue, Rutgers, Iowa, Arizona State, to name but a few.

QSR has been organizing a number of journal sponsored paper sessions as well as journal special issues. The journals include Technometrics, IIE Transactions, Naval Research Logistics, Journal of Quality Technology, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science & Engineering, and Quality & Reliability Engineering International (QREI). In 2009, QREI has organized special issue from the selected papers presented in the QSR cluster of INFORMS.

QSR has a very visionary advisory board of 12 distinguished senior individuals, including (current & former) journal editors, National Academy members, Elected ISI members, ASA/ASQ Fellows, INFORMS Fellows, IIE Fellows. These leaders in the community contributed significantly to the development and growth of QSR section by providing timely guidelines on the initiative and activities and nurturing the junior researchers in the QSR field. Professor Jeff Wu, after eight years’ distinguished service as the chair of the advisory board, will step down this year. During these years, professor Wu has enthusiastically supported our section and provided tremendous guidance to the healthy development of QSR. We really appreciate his significant contributions. We are in luck to have Professor Russell Barton be our next advisory board chair. Professor Barton has been a longterm advisory board member and has been actively supporting and involved with the QSR development. With his leadership and guidance, we will be on the fast development track.

QSR co-sponsored a number of sessions with other societies / sections within INFORMS, such as with Data mining Section, Simulation/Computing Society, and Health Applications Section. QSR also has a close connection with relevant organizations in our field such as ASA, ASQ, IIE, and IEEE. High profile panel discussion sessions are usually featured in QSR track as well. Distinguished researchers and industrial leaders are invited as the panelists to discuss the future promising research directions in QSR.

The people who are active in this section feel the passion for growing this section into a larger organization within INFORMS. The growth of our cluster membership would remain a priority for the next few years. In recent years, we have identified two areas of potential membership growth areas: international members and industrial members. In 2009, under the leadership of our previous chair, Professor Satish Bukkapatnam, we established the International Leadership Council (ILC) within the section. We have invited distinguished researchers from various parts of the world to on this council. They will use their influence to help growth the influence of our section internationally. Another thrust of activities has been aimed at enhancing industry participation. During the past few years the QSR section has built a close relationship with IBM and researchers at IBM have been working with our section in multiple ways. Each year, QSR sponsor high profile panel discussion sessions consisting of leaders in industries to provide a forum for exchanging ideas between industries and academic researchers. This will lead to more concrete set of activities to enhance industry participation in our section.

Shiyu Zhou
INFORMS QSR Chair 2010
Associate Professor
Department of Industrial Engineering
University of Wisconsin
Madison, WI 53706