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.
