The symposium was organized by the International Organizing Committee chaired by C. Hirotsu (Meisei University) as a satellite meeting to the 53rd Session of the International Statistical Institute which was held in Seoul after this event. It was a continuation of ISIS1 in Link .
o oping in 1999 and the series of the preceding symposiums on the same topics. On this occasion, Prof. Teugels, the Editor of the Journal asked our interest in publishing the papers presented at the Symposium as a special volume.
Chihiro Hirotsu as a chair of the Organizing Committee and Nobuo Shinozaki of the Keio University accepted to act as guest editors for a special issue. They decided that about a dozen papers would be enough to encourage such a process. The refereeing was done according to the usual journal standards and we thank all referees who fulfilled their task, usually under severe time constraints. Finally, we accepted 13 papers out of 19 submitted papers. These papers cover a wide range of topics which shows how broad is the field of business and industrial statistics. The papers cover topics such as the design and analysis of experiments in the very wide sense, statistical process control, reliability analysis, non-parametric method as well as distribution theory, neural networks and problem solving of some specific and very important business and industrial problems.
The goal of the symposium was to exchange information on recent research directions in business and industrial statistics and to give prospects for future research. The application areas covered under 'business and industrial statistics' are a rich and important source for crossdisciplinary statistical research including new statistical theories and methodologies motivated by the new type of data, design and analysis of experiments in a wider sense and applications to industry, reliability, business and finance. An important role of the conference was, therefore, to give a forum to stimulate technical interactions among business and industry practitioners, research scientists from subject matter area and statisticians. The number of participants rose over 80 from 15 countries in 4 continents. In total, 47 talks including 17 invited talks were presented in two parallel sessions. The inclusion of representatives from both academia and industry has provided excellent opportunities for discussion and interaction.