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European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics
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European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics
Home > About > History > Past Presidents
The previous presidents of ENBIS were:
Henry Wynn started his main academic career at Imperial College, London where he was reader for two years and then Head of Statistics, until taking up a Professorship in Statistics at City University, London, in 1984. There, for eight years, he was Dean of Mathematics and co-Director of the Engineering Design Centre. Among six degree courses he helped to start was the MSc in Quality Improvement and System Reliability, the first advanced course of its kind in the UK. He joined the University of Warwick in 1995 and formed RISCU, a research centre in industrial statistics, risk-related areas and new methodologies. Industrial work includes considerable hands-on experience in the automotive, aeronautical and process sectors.
In 2003 he took a position of Professor of Statistics at the London School of Economics, where he leads his own research group, the Decision Support and Risk Group (DSRG), and is a co-Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Time Series (CATS). He was head of the Department of Statistics from 2003 to 2006 and from 2000 to 2005 was also part-time Scientific co-Director of EURANDOM, the international stochastics institute attached to Eindhoven Technical University (TUE), in the Netherlands. He has a BA in honours mathematics from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Mathematical Statistics from Imperial College London. He was the first president of the European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics (ENBIS) and holds the Guy Medal in Silver from the Royal Statistical Society, is an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries and a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.
Henry published over 150 published papers and three books and has a particularly strong record in experimental design and industrial statistics.
Dave Stewardson was President of ENBIS from 2001-2. He is perhaps widest known for setting up pro-ENBIS, the European framework 5 Thematic Network which brought together partners from all over Europe and really established ENBIS as the strong, broad network that it is today.
Dave was one of the visionary people who saw the potential of ENBIS right from the start and attended the first official meeting in Amsterdam in 2000. I went along with him and was impressed at his understanding of the potential of the new network and his continual and focussed networking activity. He networked all the time, not even taking a break to admire the fantastic canals outside the meeting room.
Dave was the Director of the Industrial Statistics Research Unit at Newcastle University from 1997 to 2003 and his proposal writing skills were legendary. At one point he managed to win 30 of the 33 proposals he had written. His writing skills had been developed through an unusual collection of work experiences before he joined ISRU. He and his wife, Jackie, had run a successful pub in London and as aside to absorb his boundless energy Dave had begun to advise people objecting to planning proposals. He defended and won many small claims cases but eventually took on a multi-millionnaire property tycoon and was vapourised. Dave then changed direction and worked with his customary manic dedication to gain a first class degree in Statistics from Northumbria University from where he joined ISRU in 1995.
As Director, Dave was great fun to work with. He had the most unusual ability to combine diplomacy with gifted proposal writing with a deep and lively interest in the subject itself. He wrote papers and conference abstracts continually and was always full of ideas.
Dave was good at galvanising people into action and always saw opportunities. At the same time he was very light hearted and humorous. With his extensive store of incredible tales he was great fun to travel with. The many European projects that Dave won for ISRU involved a lot of travel which was very exciting. It was also very tiring, for example our 6 visits to Wroclaw, Poland in 2003.
Dave should have had many more years as a promoter of business and industrial statistics in practice and general stirrer but was taken ill in 2003. He has retired from the University but is still active, playing a lot of chess and enjoying being with his family.
There should be more people like Dave, but he is definitely a one-off.
Shirley Coleman
Tony Greenfield was formerly head of process computing and statistics at the British Iron and Steel Research Association, Sheffield, and professor of medical computing and statistics at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is now one of the visiting professors to the Industrial Statistics Research Unit (ISRU), the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and is past President of ENBIS.
As a consequence of being a member of ENBIS, he has presented a number of workshops around Europe including the well-received workshops on Communicating Statistics in Barcelona (UPC).
Tony was the founding editor of the ENBIS News and of the ENBIS Magazine which was published as a section of Scientific Computing World for three years.
In ENBIS News 4(1)2006, Shirley Coleman wrote:
“Tony Greenfield was President of ENBIS in the academic year 2002/03. He is probably widest known for his writing skills. He started the original monthly ENBIS newsletter and has been the honorary editor of the ENBIS Magazine in Scientific Computing World since it was set up in 2003. He was editor of the Royal Statistical Society’s RSS News for many years and is the editor and co‐author of Research Methods for Postgraduates published by Arnold.
“Among important stations in his career are those of a technical journalist, Head of Process Computing and Statistics in British Steel’s research laboratories, and Professor of Medical Computing and Statistics at Queen’s University in Belfast. While in Belfast (his time there marked by the troubles in Northern Ireland) he rewrote the curriculum and spent many hours perfecting new teaching material. He also rewrote the guidelines for Ulster’s research ethics committee and was joint author of the UK government’s report into medical effects of the seat belt legislation. He resigned when the troubles became too much for him.
“I first became aware of Tony at the 1982 RSS conference in York where he spoke up from the audience about the need for quality assurance in statistical software. I was impressed by his eloquence and humour that have in later years also added so much to ENBIS. The RSS Quality Improvement Committee which he chaired when I first joined has now evolved into a full RSS section.
“Tony works with many different groups of people both within and outside ENBIS. He is a regular visitor to Barcelona (working with Xavier Tort‐Martorell), has presented workshops in Tel Aviv and Budapest (with Ron S. Kenett), in Coimbra, San Sebastian and Ljubljana. He is a Visiting Professor at the Newcastle University. He contributes his time and effort freely, which is probably why such an erudite and unusual man prides himself in living in the Derbyshire Peak District in an ancient cottage that would fit into my living room.
“With Xavier, Tony has recently developed interactive software that demonstrates SPC and DoE using simulation of the manufacture of aluminium wheels and of oil filters. He contributed this software to partners of pro‐ENBIS, the European 5th Framework Thematic Network, and presented workshops and demonstrations in Norway, UK, and other parts of Europe. He enjoyed company visits and, with Oystein Evandt, Tony and I had a brilliant visit to Hydro Aluminium Rolled Products in Holmestrand (Norway).
“Prominent figures in Tony’s life – well known to ENBIS members ‐ are his wife, Liz, and son Lance who always accompany him to ENBIS conferences. It is great fun to sit with them all. He has two daughters and another son. The best description of Tony is that of a commentator, agent provocateur and general deep thinker. There should be more people like him, but I suspect he is a one‐off.”
Sadly Poul Thyregod passed away in July 2008. ENBIS 8 was dedicated to him memory. In Andrea Ahlmeyer-Stubbe’s words:
“We lost a former President, a great colleague and lovely person. He had the capability to link statistics to real problems and focus on the real added value of statistics – in order to help us understand the real world a bit better. Poul’s modesty and empathy was an inspiration to us all. He always found a good compromise in situations where this was needed and always kept his promises.”
Besides an outstanding working life with lots of scientific and applied highlights, great teaching and networking with colleagues, his personality made his contributions unique.
He had the capability to link statistics to real problems and focus on the real added value of statistics – in order to help us understand the real world a bit better. Poul’s modesty and empathy was an inspiration to us all. He always found a good compromise in situations where this was needed and always kept his promises.
His fields of interest were:
He was a member of:
Poul was awarded the prestigious Box Medal in 2007 at Dortmund. From ENBIS News 2-3(2) 2007,
“The Box Medal is named after George Box and is awarded to recognise an extraordinary statistician who has contributed to development and application of statistical methods in European business and industry.
“This year’s recipient is Poul Thyregod, Professor of Industrial Statistics at the Technical University of Denmark, President of ENBIS in 2003‐2004, a keynote speaker at ENBIS‐3 in Rimini (Italy), and a Conference Chair of ENBIS‐4 in Copenhagen (Denmark).
“Poul was a student of Anders Hald, a Professor Emeritus of the Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Copenhagen. Hald authored a landmark book on Statistical Theory of Sampling Inspection by Attributes (Academic Press, 1981) that includes Poulʹs earlier work on Bayesian Sampling (Thyregod, P.: Bayesian single sampling acceptance plans for finite lot sizes. Journal. Roy. Statist. Soc., B 36, 1974 pp. 305‐319).
“Following the work of Poul is a fascinating journey into the application of statistics. At ENBIS‐3 in Rimini (Italy), he presented the now famous ice cream example showing how understanding the context enables children to provide critical insights into data analysis. The data consists of daily ice cream sales in Denmark. The question is what days are Sundays. Danish kids know that on Sundays they go out with their parents to buy ice creams. When in possession of this information, associating peak sales with Sundays is trivial (see Kenett, R. and Thyregod, P.: “Aspects of statistical consulting not taught by academia”, Statistica Neerlandica, 60, 3, pp. 396‐412, August 2006).
“Poul contributed to our profession in many ways. The list of his publications is very long and includes articles in journals such as International Statistical Review, Journal of Applied Statistics, Journal de Physique, Journal of Chemometrics, Journal of Quality Technology, Journal of the Royal tatistical Society (Series B), Journal of Statistical Computation and Simulation, Quality and Reliability Engineering International, Scandinavian Journal of Statistics, and Technometrics.
“The ability to work with engineers and scientists, to be part of the discovery process, and to be able to communicate so clearly what statistics is all about, is clearly a gift. Poul has that gift. His career is a prime example demonstrating how statistics develops by integrating theory and applications. We are all very proud to have him as our 2007 Box Medalist and to have had him as our president.”
I was President of ENBIS from 2004-5. It was a great honour to be elected to this position and I enjoyed my year immensely. I was fortunate enough to be at the kick-off meeting for ENBIS held in Amsterdam in 2000 and was immediately attracted by the energy and enthusiasm of the people there. I have been involved in the running of ENBIS by helping in various ways such as nomination committee and audits and chair the Quality Improvement Special Interest Group. I have been able to attend all the yearly conferences.
ENBIS is fascinating because it provides a forum to meet and talk with people who are enthusiastic about statistics and are practitioners applying statistical analysis to a wide range of subject areas. There is the interest from discussing the details of the applications and there is also the interest in seeing how people work in different countries. ENBIS presents a real pan European experience and has enriched my life as an applied statistician.
After the retirement of Dave Stewardson in 2003, I took over the co-ordination of pro-ENBIS, the European framework 5 Thematic Network which Dave had set up in 2002. pro-ENBIS brought together partners from all over Europe and really established ENBIS as a viable community. Following on from pro-ENBIS, partners and other statistical practitioners contributed their expertise to a statistical handbook published by Wiley. I was privileged to co-edit this book with Tony Greenfield, Doug Montgomery and Dave Stewardson. “Statistical Practice in Business and Industry” was published in March 2008 and is an excellent tribute to the diversity and knowledge represented in ENBIS.
ENBIS conferences are informative, inspiring and enjoyable. During my presidency, we held the 5th International ENBIS conference in Newcastle. There was an excellent response in terms of contributed papers and posters and invited speakers and key notes all accepted enthusiastically which was gratifying and a testament to the high status that ENBIS now enjoys.
The tradition of holding conferences is important for face to face contact. Web communication is increasingly important and it is pleasing that ENBIS has been able to keep up to date with a new website recently launched. ENBIS has a great future and I look forward to being a part of it.
Fabrizio Ruggeri (B.Sc. University of Milano, M.Sc. Carnegie Mellon University, Ph.D. Duke University) is currently Research Director at the Institute of Applied Mathematics and Information Technology of the Italian National Research Council (CNR IMATI) in Milano.
After graduation, Fabrizio has been working in the research centre at Alfa Romeo and then as a computer consultant. In the last twenty years he has been working for CNR and has spent long periods abroad, mainly in the USA. Fabrizio is interested in Bayesian statistics and its applications, mostly industrial ones. He is author of more than 100 papers, from peer-reviewed journals to scientific magazines. He is the editor of two books on Bayesian robustness, Editor-in-Chief of the Encyclopedia of Statistics in Quality and Reliability, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industryand Editor of the journal Bayesian Analysis. He has also a long teaching record, focussed on Master and Ph.D courses in the last decade.
Fabrizio has been member of many award and conference committees, being the BISP (Bayesian Inference in Stochastic Process) workshop and the ABS (Applied Bayesian Statistics) summer school the ones in which he is involved the most.
During his year as ENBIS President, he managed the transition of ENBIS from a partially supported (by a EU project, Pro-ENBIS, obtained by early ENBIS pioneers) to a self-supported organisation. Fabrizio tied the cooperation between ENBIS and other organisations (ISBIS, first); he launched the specialised Spring workshop (with a Data Mining workshop organised by Andrea Ahlemeyer-Stubbe, followed by the DEINDE07-ENBIS meeting the next year). He organised an ENBIS reliability workshop at the conference MMR2007 and a course on SPC by Anne De Frenne in Benin at SADA07. He promoted the timely preparation of the ENBIS Newsletter which, indeed, could have not been possible without the great efforts by the Editor, Irena Ograjensek. He had in mind an ENBIS which could provide services to its members, from a Funding Committee which should explore funding possibilities and put together research teams to educational activities, including the possibility for companies to get in touch with ENBIS and choose out of a “catalogue” possible courses of their interest. Fabrizio tried also to give impulse to local networks and special interest groups.
After studies in Mathematics and Statistics at Imperial College, Stanford University and the Weizmann Institute, Ron took a teaching position at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, was a researcher at Bell Laboratory, Director of Statistical Methods for a major Israeli Telecom, Professor at the State University of New York in Binghamton and is currently Professor at the University of Torino, Italy and Adjunct Professor at Bar Ilan University in Israel. In parallel with his academic activity, he is Chairman and CEO of the KPA Group, a management consulting firm with affiliates in Italy, Norway and Turkey. This combination of academic interest, industrial experience and consulting expertise is the basis of an holistic view of statistics represented, for example, in a paper with Poul Thyregod entitled: “Aspects of statistical consulting not taught by academia” (Statistica Neerlandica, 60, 3, pp. 396-412, 2006). The paper with Poul demonstrates what ENBIS can offer: a common interest in the application of statistics, friendship and opportunities for collaborative work with outstanding people. Ron also co-authored, with Shelley Zacks, Modern Industrial Statistics: Design and Control of Quality and Reliability, Duxbury Press, 1998, Spanish edition 2000, 2nd paperback edition 2002, Chinese edition 2004. He is Editor in Chief, with Fabrizio Ruggeri and Fred Faltin of The Encyclopedia of Statistics in Quality and Reliability published by John Wiley in 2007 and author of four other books and over 150 papers on statistics and management methods.
ENBIS initiatives: Some of the initiatives I was involved with in ENBIS included developing the statistical consulting special interest group after John Shade and before Anne de Frenne, promoting the Best Manager Award, heading the Box Award nominating committee that awarded the Box Medal to Sir David Cox, planning the conference workshops and the conference program of ENBIS5 in Newcastle, establishing the Academic Publication Panel to encourage publications of ENBIS members, organizing the ENBIS-DEINDE spring conference in Turin, launching ENBIS special issues in international journals such as QREI, ASMBI, MCAP and QTQM, and promoting ENBIS special sessions in 7 international conferences. On the “business side”, despite difficult times, ENBIS membership grew during my term as president by over 200 members and the number of corporate sponsors reached a record of 11. Perhaps my biggest contribution to ENBIS was to initiate the transition to turn ENBIS into a pluralistic, participative, open and transparent society. This was first discussed in a special strategic planning meeting in ENBIS6 followed by a bumpy process which was supported by many individuals including, Andrea, Irena, Alessandro, Anja, Winfried, Shirley, Anne, Fabrizio, Tony, Henry and many others. We achieved a lot, but have many challenges on our journey “from good to Great”. I am glad we are moving ahead.
Personal statement: In my view, the main challenges currently facing statistics and statisticians are 1) poor communication with other disciplines, 2) low emphasis on generating added value derived from statistical analysis and 3) deriving an integrated holistic perspective that enables statisticians to tackle effectively a full life cycle, from problem elicitation up to effective presentation of findings with follow up focused actions. I believe ENBIS is a unique environment for anyone interested in addressing such challenges. I trust current and future ENBIS presidents will continue to grow and expand the scope of the society.
Andrea first became involved at the ENBIS founding conference in Amsterdam (2000). Most recently she has had the important roles of President 2007‐2009 and Treasurer 2009‐10. Previously, she was co‐chair of the work package in data mining and was a guiding force in our three‐year thematic network EU-funded pro‐ENBIS project (http://pro.enbis.org/about.html ).
Andrea, who is a graduate statistician (a degree similar to masters from the University of Dortmund), has combined her ENBIS work with a demanding career, managing her own data mining company, ANTZ21, as well as several academic positions. She has been an independent consultant and trainer, working internationally since 1999, and has more than 15 years of professional experience in data mining and data warehousing. Her company is based in Germany and provides business intelligence, database marketing (DBM) and customer relationship management (CRM), all tailored to customer‐and project‐specific requirements.
These are some of her current activities:
– Vice President ECDM (European Center for Database Marketing) (since 1999).
– Leader of ENBIS -SIG Data Mining (since 2001)
– Co‐Chair of ICDM (Industrial Conference on Data Mining) (since 2001).
– Lecturer at the University of Applied Sciences in Offenburg and Aalen for data mining, database marketing, market research and marketing (since 2001).
– Auditor of the German Direct Marketing Association (DDV) (2010‐2011).
In the past she held the following positions:
– President of ENBIS (2007‐2009).
– Vice‐President of ENBIS (2003‐2004).
– Member of the National Examination Committee of the Chamber of Commerce for the new profession of certified IT consultants IHK (2003‐ 2008).
– Director of studies at the Academy in Frankfurt ECDM (2002‐2004).
– Schmid group (Printus, plus office, Office Discount, techno), 1997‐1999, Database Manager.
– Baur Versand, 1994‐1997, Group Leader Marketing Database.
– Hospital Hagen, 1993‐1994, freelancer for the mathematical validation of survival scoring.
– Institute of Journalism, University of Dortmund, 1989‐1993, free associate for marketing research.
The first period of her time as president was dominated by the transition phase and the escorting difficulties that must be handled on legal, administrational and process levels. Together with Alessandro, Anja and Winfried, she managed to save ENBIS. Under her leadership, ENBIS got a new logo, redesign of the website, new auditing processes, design of workflows, documents, and accounting standards. With the new website, ENBIS got the opportunity to be much more interactive. During her presidentship, the mandate of ENBIS executive and council members doubled. We established a formal list of benefits for corporate members, worked out by members. We also created a set of sponsoring opportunities for separate events or conferences or within ENBIS . Together with Shirley and Ron, Andrea persuaded JMP to be a main sponsor of ENBIS for three years. This helps ENBIS to remain a society without a membership fee. She initiated the ENBIS Challenge. The first winner of the ENBIS Challenge was announced at ENBIS9 in Goteborg. Based on the work of former presidents and executive members, we strengthened relationships between ENBIS and other statistical societies.
Andrea is a great example of the energy and enthusiasm in ENBIS. Professionally, her approach is solution‐oriented, always using the best methods to extract meaning, give sensible recommendations and move into positive action. Andrea applies this way of thinking to all her involvement in ENBIS.
ENBIS gratefully acknowledges Andrea’s many contributions and hopes she will remain an active member.