Shu Lianjie, a professor of decision science from the University of Macau (UM) Faculty of Business and Administration, recently received the Best Application Paper Award in the IISE Transactions Focus Issue on Quality and Reliability Engineering for 2018. His paper, titled ‘A False Discovery Approach for Scanning Spatial Disease Clusters with Arbitrary Shapes’, is co-authored by Prof Li Yanting from the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Prof Tsung Fugee from the Department of Industrial Engineering and Decision Analytics at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

Identifying unusual events that are spatially scattered is a challenging problem commonly seen in a large variety of applications. Aimed at automatically and simultaneously detecting multiple clusters of any shapes, this paper explores the false discovery approach that originated from multiple hypothesis tests.

This jointly published paper was selected by an examining committee from a pool of papers published between 1 July 2016 and 30 June 2017 (issues 48:7 through 49:6) in the IISE Transactions. As the flagship journal of the Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers, IISE Transactions publishes original high-quality papers with a strong methodological focus motivated by real problems.