SAS will be represented by more than 20 attendees at the INFORMS Annual Meeting at the George R. Brown Convention Center (GBCC) in Houston, Texas. Officially the conference runs from Sunday, Oct. 22 through Wednesday, Oct. 25, but our activities in Houston start even earlier.

Technology Workshops on Saturday, October 21:

• "JMP Pro and the Predictive Modeling Workflow," (1:00-3:30pm, room 330A)
• "Solving Business Problems with SAS Analytics and OPTMODEL," (4:00-6:30pm, room 330A)

Software Tutorials on Tuesday, October 24 (individual presentation time indicated):

• "Building and Solving Optimization Models with SAS," Ed Hughes and Rob Pratt (TD71, 2:00-2:45pm, room 371F)
• "JMP Pro: Top Features That Make You Say 'Wow!'," Mia Stephens (TD71, 2:45-3:30pm, room 371F)

Other SAS-related talks (session time indicated):

Sunday, October 22:

• "Tuning a Bayesian Framework for B2B Pricing," Fang Liang, Maarten Oosten (Vistex) (SB78B, 11:00am-12:30pm, room 380B)
• "Time Series Classification using Normalized Subsequences," Iman Vasheghani Farahani, Alex Chien, Russell Edward King (North Carolina State University) (SD70, 4:30-6:00pm, room 371E)

Monday, October 23:

• "Internet of Things: Promises, Challenges and Analytics," Patricia Neri, Ann Olecka (Honeywell), Bill Groves (Honeywell) (MA43, 8:00-9:30am, room 360B)
• "The SAS MILP Solver: Current Status and Future Developments," Imre Pólik, Menal Güzelsoy, Amar Kumar Narisetty, Philipp M. Christophel (MB77, 11:00am-12:30pm, room 372F)

Tuesday, October 24:

• "Robust Operational Decisions for Multi Period Industrial Gas Pipeline Networks under Uncertainty," Pelin Çay, Camilo Mancilla (Air Products and Chemicals), Robert H. Storer (Lehigh University), Luis F. Zuluaga (Lehigh University) (TC83, 12:05-1:35pm, room 382C)
• "Robust Principal Component Analysis in Cloud-based Run-time Environment," Kyungduck Cha, Seunghyun Kong, Zohreh Asgharzadeh, Arin Chaudhuri (TD70, 2:00-3:30pm, room 371E)

Wednesday, October 25:

• "Pricing Advance Purchase Products," Matthew Maxwell, Jennie Hu (WA23, 7:30-9:00am, room 342E)
• "Effective Methods for Solving the Bicriteria P-center P-dispersion Problem," Golbarg Kazemi Tutunchi, Yahya Fathi (North Carolina State University) (WB58, 10:30am-12:00pm, room 362E)
• "Warmstart of Interior Point Methods for Second Order Cone Optimization via Rounding Over Optimal Jordan Frames," Sertalp Bilal Çay, Imre Pólik, Tamas Terlaky (Lehigh University) (WC83, 12:30-2:00pm, room 382C)

Two additional important notes:

• Patricia Neri is the 2017 Daniel H. Wagner Prize chair, with presentations in sessions MB40, MC40, and MD40. The winner will be announced and the winning presentation will be repeated during keynote session TK04.
• Sertalp Bilal Çay will chair session WC83.

We hope you can make it to Houston to see these and many other excellent presentations! Don't forget to stop by the SAS and JMP booths to say hello!