Discovery Summit

John Sall is the founder of JMP Statistical Discovery LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of SAS. As the primary architect for JMP^® software, Sall heads the R&D team that creates interactive and highly visual statistical discovery software designed for scientists and engineers.

Prior to leading JMP, Sall joined Jim Goodnight and two others in 1976 to establish SAS. He designed, developed and documented many of the earliest analytical procedures while also leading research and development efforts. In the late 1980s, Sall noticed a niche to fill for researchers and engineers whose jobs didn't revolve solely around statistical analysis. JMP launched in 1989 to dynamically link statistical analysis with the graphical capabilities of Macintosh computers. Now running on Windows as well, JMP continues to play an important role in modeling processes across industries as a desktop data visualization and analysis tool.

The goal of JMP, Sall said, is to make statistical modeling as friendly, accessible and informative as possible, and to increase the efficiency of experimentation. “The value of statistics is realized when it is translated, taught and delivered with accessible computing environments to the scientists and analysts who use it,” he added.

Sall is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society. Reflecting his passion for global conservation and environmental issues, he has served on the World Wildlife Fund board. Having completed his term on the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History advisory board, Sall is now part of the NMNH's board alumni group. He is also a former member of The Nature Conservancy Africa Advisory Council and the Friends of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences board. Sall is a former trustee of North Carolina State University, where he studied graduate-level statistics. In 1997, he and his wife, Ginger, joined Jim and Ann Goodnight in founding Cary Academy, which integrates technology into all facets of education for students in grades six to 12.

Sall earned a bachelor's degree in history from Beloit College and a master’s degree in economics from Northern Illinois University (NIU). Both NIU and NC State awarded him honorary doctorates.

Galit Shmueli, PhD, is Director of the Center for Service Innovation and Analytics at National Tsing Hua University’s College of Technology Management. Previously she was the SRITNE Chaired Professor of Data Analytics and Associate Professor of Statistics and Information Systems at the Indian School of Business. Shmueli’s research focuses on statistical and data mining methodology with applications in information systems and health care. She is author of six books, including the popular textbook Data Mining for Business Intelligence, and over 60 publications in peer-reviewed journals and books. Her papers To Explain or to Predict? and Predictive Analytics in Information Systems Research have attracted much attention and won several research and best paper awards.

Shmueli was Visiting Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Statistics Department when she first became involved in early biosurveillance research and efforts. Her working collaboration with the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab received a three-year award from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Shmueli’s work in information systems started in 2002, when she joined University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business to focus on electronic commerce and online auctions. Shmueli is Senior Editor at Decision Sciences Journal (Analytics section) and associate editor for the top journals Annals of Applied Statistics, JASA Reviews and The American Statistician Reviews. In addition to her academic work, Shmueli has provided consulting services to private companies and to US government and state agencies.

Ron S. Kenett, PhD, is an applied statistician who has made recognized contributions to statistical methods and applications in a range of areas, including industrial statistics, biostatistics, design of experiments, statistical process control, customer surveys, performance appraisal systems and risk management. His latest book on information quality is used in data science programs worldwide. Kenett is Chairman of the KPA Group, Visiting Professor at the Hebrew University Institute for Drug Research and Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is editor of StatsRef and StatisticsViews, as well as Editor-in-Chief of the Wiley Encyclopedia of Statistics in Quality and Reliability.

He is a Fellow and the 2013 Greenfield Medalist of the Royal Statistical Society, Senior Member of the  American Society for Quality and Past President of the Israeli Statistical Association and the European Network for Business and Industrial Statistics (ENBIS). As a Professor of Management at the State University of New York, he was awarded the General Electric Quality Management Fellowship. For nine years he served as Director of Statistical Methods for Tadiran Telecommunications Corporation and, previously, as a researcher at Bell Laboratories. His 200 publications and 12 books are on topics in industrial statistics, biostatistics, process control, design of experiments, customer surveys and quality management. He has consulted for many companies, including Intel, AT&T, National Semiconductors, Motorola, Dun & Bradstreet and Teva.

Pedro Manuel Saraiva has been a professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Coimbra since 1993. He has also served as Vice Rector of the university, in charge of quality, innovation, entrepreneurship and technology transfer. Saraiva is President of the Regional Agency for the Development of the Centre of Portugal and a former member of the Portuguese National Parliament. He collaborates with the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development and the European Commission to develop and apply a platform for evaluating the innovation and entrepreneurial environments and initiatives carried out by higher education institutions. He was the first recipient of the American Society for Quality’s Feigenbaum Award. His research interests are in the areas of process systems engineering, applied statistics, quality management, and innovation and entrepreneurship. He is author and co-author of several books, articles and conference presentations in the fields mentioned, including the following: Entrepreneurship: From Concept to Application, Idea to Business and Technology to Value; Chemical Product Design and Engineering; The Future of Quality in Portugal; Multivariate and Multiscale Data Analysis; and Innovation and Quality. Saraiva is the founder of a number of associations and companies, such as QUAL (in the field of quality), NETCON (microalgae biotechnology), SPI Ventures (innovation and entrepreneurship) and Creative Wings (business angels). He received a diploma from the University of Coimbra (1987) and a PhD in chemical engineering from MIT (1993).