The study of scan statistics and their applications to many different
scientific and engineering problems have received considerable attention
in the literature recently. In addition to challenging theoretical
problems, the area of scan statis- tics has also found exciting
applications in diverse disciplines such as archaeol- ogy, astronomy,
epidemiology, geography, material science, molecular biology,
reconnaissance, reliability and quality control, sociology, and
telecommunica- tion. This will be clearly evident when one goes through
this volume. In this volume, we have brought together a collection of
experts working in this area of research in order to review some of the
developments that have taken place over the years and also to present
their new works and point out some open problems. With this in mind, we
selected authors for this volume with some having theoretical interests
and others being primarily concerned with applications of scan
statistics. Our sincere hope is that this volume will thus provide a
comprehensive survey of all the developments in this area of research
and hence will serve as a valuable source as well as reference for
theoreticians and applied researchers. Graduate students interested in
this area will find this volume to be particularly useful as it points
out many open challenging problems that they could pursue. This volume
will also be appropriate for teaching a graduate-level special course on
this topic.