What's your favorite part of attending SAS Global Forum? With the many presentations, networking event and valuable SAS knowledge available, many attendees may find it difficult to pick just one thing. 

I asked the Best Contributed Paper winners from SAS Global Forum 2013 to share both their most memorable moment from last year and reasons they’re looking forward to SAS Global Forum 2014. Together, it’s a pretty compelling list of why you should start planning to be in Washington, DC next spring. Check out the reasons below:

9. Short commutes and new connections: “Since I work in DC I am expecting to see many familiar faces at SAS Global Forum 2014 in National Harbor.  The location will also make it more affordable for organizations in DC to send staff who are not giving a presentation.”     – Dylan Ellis, RUN_MACRO Run! With PROC FCMP and the RUN_MACRO Function from SAS® 9.2, Your SAS® Programs Are All Grown Up

8. Refreshing your SAS Knowledge: “I look forward to hearing about more developments of the SAS software in 2014 and of course meet with people from all different backgrounds.”     – Beinan Zhao, Estimating Patient Adherence to Medication with Electronic Health Records Data and Pharmacy Claims Combined

7. Catching up with Visual Analytics:  “Learning how the SAS Visual Analytics platform has grown.  Extending my own presentations into Visual Analytics (hopefully).”     – Stephen Overton, Escape from Big Data Restrictions by Leveraging Advanced OLAP Cube Techniques

6. Discovering more about Business Analytics.  “Learning more about SAS and gaining a greater understanding on how to effectively use Business Analytics within business to solve real world problems.”     – John Heaton, SAS® Data Integration Studio: The 30-Day Plan

5. Building on last year’s success: “I cannot wait to see all of the new tricks of the trade and have a chance to see what new and exciting projects SAS users have been working on since SAS Global Forum 2013.”    – Lucy D’Agostino McGowan, Multilevel Reweighted Regression Models to Estimate County-Level Racial Health Disparities Using PROC GLIMMIX

4. Rubbing elbows with celebrities:  “[Last year] the most memorable moment was the talk about the analysis of data from Billy Beane. It was interesting to see the importance of statistics in an area where people would not normally associate it with.”    – Leonard Gordon, Using Classification and Regression Trees (CART) in SAS® Enterprise Miner™ for Applications in Public Health

3. Helping the community. “My favorite moment from last year's conference has to be the charity bike build. It was amazing to see how quickly people pitched in for a great cause and had heaps of fun doing it.”   – John Heaton, SAS® Data Integration Studio: The 30-Day Plan

2. Because Facebook just isn’t enough:  “Seeing friends that I only see once or twice a year at SAS user conferences.”   – Art Carpenter, Macro Quoting to the Rescue: Passing Special Characters

1. Gaining (or maintaining) a snazzy title:  “[Last year] a friend crashed my presentation and introduced me as the ‘Sultan of SAS’—flattering, but a title I could never hope to live up to!”   – Patrick Thorton, A Concise Display of Multiple Response Items.

Although the “Sultan of SAS” may be taken, I can think of several titles that are still up for grabs: the Duke (or Duchess) of Data Management, the SAS User Group Guru, the HADOOP Head Honcho, or the Big Kahuna of Big Data.  Registration is now open, so sign up and start making your nominations!