This is the first blog post in a series that highlights portions of an interview by Chris Gotwalt, JMP’s Chief Data Scientist, with award-winning, highly published reliability expert, William Q. Meeker, Professor of Statistics and Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts at Iowa State University.
The interview was conducted in part as a special dialogue to accompany the plenary talk Bill recorded for Discovery Summit Japan last year. We are featuring sections of the interview as a blog post series to call more attention to Bill’s many contributions to statistics, as well as two recent books he has co-authored.
Bill co-authored the first book, Achieving Product Reliability: A Key to Business Success, with Necip Doganaksoy and Gerald J. Hahn. It is the latest in the ASA-CRC series on Statistical Reasoning in Science and Society, which promotes how to reason statistically to the general public. We are pleased to share an excerpt from this book. The second book is the recently released edition of Statistical Methods for Reliability Data, which Bill co-authored with Luis A. Escobar and Francis G. Pascual.
Chris has worked closely with Bill over the years to incorporate new methods for reliability analysis into JMP software. It is an honor for JMP to have this collaborative relationship with Bill to further advocate newer and better methods to enable better product reliability.
First, Bill shares different approaches to dealing with reliability and the importance of “proactive reliability.”
Next, Bill talks about how machine learning, IoT, and Industry 4.0 are changing the way that reliability is done, resulting in some powerful implications for maintenance and improved reliability.
In the next post, we’ll hear Bill’s views on statisticians’ contributions and how statistics education may evolve.