Business and Industrial Section

The BIS Section promotes the advancement and the application of statistical techniques (methods and thinking) to all aspects of business and industry through organising meetings or conferences on relevant topics. The meetings or conferences may involve presentations, discussions, demonstrations or the reading of papers. The Committee may form (with the permission of Council) study groups for the examination and study of particular problems. The BIS welcomes opportunities to organise meetings jointly with other organisations, sections or groups. It works with or notifies other sections when there are meetings relevant to them.
 
COMMITTEE MEMBERS
 
Chair: Housh Mashhoudy (Coventry University)
Vice Chair: Giuliana Battisti (University of Warwick)
Secretary: Kirsty Horrocks (LifeScan Scotland Ltd, a Johnson & Johnson Company)
Meetings Secretary: Jake Ansell (Edinburgh University)
Ordinary Members: Dean Fletcher (Office for National Statistics), Ben Torsney (Glasgow University), Heiko Grossman (Queen Mary University); Trevor Duguid Farrant (Kraft Foods), Steve Ellison (Laboratory of Government Chemists); Kostas Triantafyllopoulos (University of Sheffield); Giovanni Montana (Imperial College London), ONE VACANCY
Co-opted members: John Clarke, Elizabeth Pilling (Astra Zeneca)
 

FORTHCOMING EVENT:
 
Half day seminar
Title: ‘’Quantitative methods in hedge funds: statistical contributions and challenges’’
Date: 28 November 2012 3-6pm
Speakers:
1.Carol Alexander (University of Sussex) 'VIX Futures and their Exchange-Traded Notes
2.Gunnar Klinkhammer (Man Group) 'Managing money at a 'quant' fund is a bold application of statistics: a practitioner's perspective'
3.Kostas Triantafyllopoulos 'Algorithmic pairs trading: some recent developments and statistical challenges'
Venue: Council room, RSS Headquarters, Errol street, London
Registration: To register please contact Kostas@sheffield.ac.uk
 
PAST EVENTS:

2012
 
Special session at the RSS conference organised by the BIS section
Session Title: Experimental design challenges in industry
Speakers:
1) Alexander Donev and Liam Brown (Manchester Univeristy)
2) Peter Goos (Antwerp)
3) Steven Gilmour (Southampton University)
Time: 6 September 2012, 1.30-2.50pm
Venue: RSS 2012 Conference, Telford, UK
 
 
BEST PAPER AWARD – sponsored by the BIS section- at the BRITISH NETWORK OF INDUSTRIAL ECONOMISTS 2nd Doctoral Student Colloquium.
Time: Friday 29 June 2012, 10-4pm.
Venue:  Nottingham University Business School, The University of Nottingham.
Further details:
THE BEST PAPER AWARD – sponsored by the BIS section for the best contribution to the advancement and use of statistical methods in Economics
was awarded to Alessandro Iaria (University Warwick) for his paper "An empirical model of (super)market choice with learning".
 
Measurement uncertainty & statistical error - Half day seminar
Speakers:
Maurice Cox has lead editorial responsibility for the revision of the GUM. He chairs several related BSI and ISO committees.
Steve Ellison is head of IT & Training at LGC and has been teaching measurement uncertainty for over 15 years.
Roland Caulcutt is a very experienced statistical consultant who has trained six-sigma black-belts in both the chemical and engineering industries. He has lectured in three universities and written several books in applied statistics.
Time: 7 February 2012 4-6pm
Venue: Royal Statistical Society, 12 Errol Street, London EC1Y 8LX 

2011

4 April 2011
Title: “Measurement Systems”   
Speaker: Chris Ashman (AstraZeneca)
Time: 15.30-17.00
Location:RSS headquarter, Errol street, London
 
28 June 2011
(joint with RSS South Wales Group)
Title:  “Hot Topics in Business and Official Statistics”
Time 14.00-18.00     
Location: ONS, Newport
Speakers: Paul Allin (ONS Director of Measuring National Well-being Programme)
Professor Keith Whitfield (Cardiff Business School) ; Michael Blastland (BBC Journalist & Writer)
 
Paul Allin (ONS Director of Measuring National Well-being Programme): “Measuring National Well-being”. Synopsis: How is ONS making progress with its programme to measure progress more widely than by GDP? Paul Allin, the program's director, gave some early findings from the national debate on measuring well-being. And asked is there more to quality of life and social progress than GDP and happiness?
 
Professor Keith Whitfield (Cardiff Business School): “Measuring Well-Being:
Lessons from the Workplace”. Synopsis: Interest in measuring well-being at the national level is relatively recent, but there has been considerable research undertaken examining well-being at the workplace. Most of this has related to work examining Karasek's Job Demands/Employee Control/Work Stress (JDCS) Model. The talk was based on the paper which reviews this research with an explicit aim to link it to the work focused on developing a national measure of well-being for the UK.
 
Michael Blastland (BBC Journalist & Writer): “Recession Stories - How has recent economic data been reported?” Synopsis: Writer and journalist Michael Blastland looked at some examples of the use and abuse of data, in news coverage and political comment, about the recession and the public finances.
 
1 July 2011
One day meeting (jointly organized with Coventry University and Business & Decision UK)
Title: Event in support of getstats about Statistics in Business and Industry.
Event organized for 300 local school children (schools master class) in Coventry.
Speakers: various including Salma Rehouma, a Graduate consultant.
 
28 November 2011
Speaker: Ray Lambert (Deputy Director of the Science & Innovation Analysis Unit of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills) and Marion Frenz (Birbeck College) 
Title: “Connected Innovation - An international study using innovation survey data"
Time: 15.30-17.00
Location:RSS headquarter, Errol street, London

2010
3 February 2010 
Half-day meeting (jointly organized with the Advanced Institute of Management)
Speakers: Andy Neely (Cambridge), Jonathan Haskell (Imperial) and Keith Smith (Business, Industry and Skills department).
Title: ''Innovation and firm performance in services: are we measuring them correctly?
Time: 13.00-17.00
Location: The University of Nottingham
 
6 May 2010
(jointly organized with the West Midlands Local Group)
Speaker: Michael Denham (GalaxoSmithKline)
 Title: '' Applications of Bayesian methods to medicinal product development’’
Location: Warwick University
 
9 September 2010:
Speaker: Giuliana Battisti (University of Nottingham)
Title: '' Testing for sequential innovation and path dependency: the diffusion of service innovation’’
Time: 15.30-17.00
Location: RSS headquarter, Errol street, London
 
13-17 September
Special session on ‘’Industrial Risk’’ at RSS 2010 conference
Speakers/title: Jake Ansell ‘’Optimal Asset Management’’; Martin Newby ‘’Product Development’’
Location: Brighton