The INFORMS 2014 Annual Meeting will be held In San Francisco from November 9-12; conference hotels are the Hilton San Francisco and the Parc 55 Wyndham.  More than 35 SAS staff will participate, and SAS will have three adjacent booths representing SAS/OR (and all of Advanced Analytics), JMP, and the SAS Global Academic Program.  SAS is well-represented among the presentations at this meeting, with 27 papers involving SAS authors, presenters, or topics. Here are the scheduled talks. Unless otherwise noted, all authors/presenters are from SAS.

Of special note is the entry from SAS and Procter & Gamble in the Daniel H. Wagner Prize Competition in session MC29 on Monday, the result of several years of productive joint work. It's one of only six finalists for this prestigious annual award, which recognizes excellence in operations research practice. It's an honor just to be selected as a finalist, but the team hopes to go even further and win the prize!

Saturday, Nov. 8

From noon to 2:30pm in the Imperial A room at the Hilton San Francisco there will be a pre-conference workshop, "Solving Business Problems with SAS Analytics and OPTMODEL." Bring your lunch and join us!

Sunday, Nov. 9

• Darryl Revenew, "Interactive and Visual Data Analysis with JMP 11 Pro" (software demo, Session SB56)
• James Wilson (NCSU), Emily Lada, Anup Mokashi, "Effective Simulation Warm-up for a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit" (Session SB75)
• James Lemieux, "Estimation of Choice-Based Revenue Management Models" (Session SC18)
• Matt Maxwell, "Customer Choice Model Optimization with Overlapping Consideration Sets" (Session SC18)
• Bahadir Aral, "Launch Price Optimization for Pharmaceutical Products" (Session SC18)
• Kai Huang (McMaster University), Ming Zhao, "Polyhedral Study of Chance Constrained Program -- Implications of Bilinear Representation" (Session SC48)
• Golbarg K. Tutunchi, "An Approximation Algorithm for the Bi-criteria p-median/p-dispersion Problem" (Session SC82)
• James Wilson, Kai-Wen Tien (NCSU), Christos Alexopoulos, David Goldsman (Georgia Tech), Anup Mokashi, "A Sequential Procedure for Estimating Steady-State Quantiles" (Session SD75)

Monday, Nov. 10

• Matt Maxwell, "Optimization Challenges with a Customer Choice Model" (Session MA20)
• Mike Speed, "High Performance Statistical Procedures" (Session MA76)
• Simon Sheather (Texas A&M), "Predictive Analytics for Structured Data Using SAS and JMP" (Session MA76)
• Ivan Oliveira, Rob Pratt, Ming Zhao (SAS), Nats Esquejo, Kevin Miller, Kevin Norwood (Procter & Gamble), "Statistical and Optimization Techniques for Laundry Portfolio Optimization at P&G" (Session MC29--Wagner Prize competition)
• Yan Xu, Joshua Griffin, "High Performance Second-Order Procedures for Dense SVM and Quantile Regression" (Session MD09)
• Wenwen Zhou, "Quasi-Newton Extensions of an Active-Set Approach for Mixed Linear Models" (Session MD09)
• Joshua Griffin, Ben-Hao Wang, "Distributed Hessian-Free Optimization for Data Mining Applications" (Session MD09)

Tuesday, Nov. 11

• Menal Güzelsoy, Imre Pólik, Philipp Christophel, "Using and Reusing Dual Information in Branch and Bound" (Session TA09)
• Jason Chen, "A Simulation Study of BAR by Day Heuristics" (Session TA18)
• Alex Dietz, "Revenue Management in the Big Data Era" (Session TA76)
• Jorge Silva, Jared Dean, Susan Haller, Patrick Hall, Ilknur Kabul, "Ensemble Recommendation and Segmentation for Large Datasets" (Session TB37)
• Mike Speed, Jerry Oglesby, Curt Hinrichs, "SAS Analytics Certificate Programs for Universities" (Session TC57)
• Ed Hughes, Rob Pratt, "Building and Solving Optimization Models with SAS" (software demo, Session TD56)

Wednesday, Nov. 12

• Polly Mitchell-Guthrie, "Creating a Student Case Competition" (Session WA77)
• Ivan Oliveira, Jeff Day, "Choosing Case Studies and Judging Submissions" (Session WA77)
• Shin Woong Sung, Young Jae Jang (KAIST), "Great Opportunity for Students in Business Analytics" (Session WA77)
• Dan Zaratsian, "Sports Analytics - Uncovering Patterns in Social Media" (Session WB08)
• Viswanath Avasarala, Richard Crowell, Praveen Lakkaraju, Saratendu Sethi, David Styles, James Tetterton, "Probabilistic Semantics for Customizable Social Media Analytics" (Session WB08)
• Imre Pólik, "New Features and Improvements in SAS/OR 13.2" (Session WB43)
• Tom Bohannon, Mike Speed, "SAS Global Academic: SAS Visual Analytics" (software demo, Session WB56)

If you'll be in San Francisco for the meeting, please take a look at these talks. I'm sure you'll find many topics that interest you. Also make sure to stop by our booths in the exhibition area. See you in a few days!