SAS Global Forum 2014 is only a couple of weeks away, and I wanted to highlight what conference leaders are doing for our campuses.  This year’s renewed focus on content successfully allowed for academics and institutional research to be content areas. As such, these selections may be included as target audience paths within your scheduling.

If you have not already heard, this year you can create a schedule relevant to your needs and interests, one that is designed with an initial search criteria consistent with your interests.  After you select a target audience path of Academic Faculty or Institutional Research a list will be displayed and you may choose to add to your schedule, and then conduct additional user input searches or apply further filters.

In addition to the continuum of papers that are often relevant to the classroom, this year we have Academic-minded papers in these areas:

• text analytics and sentiment mining by Dr. Chakraborty
• creating journal ready tables
• how to leverage public use data in the classroom
• papers by Dr. Dickey and Dr. Gardiner
• a panel discussion of analytics in higher education lead by Dr. Koonce.

Institutional Research will also be a focused theme this year starting with two invited papers presented by Drs. Helbig and Kincheloe.  Additional papers spanning the areas of Institutional Research include:

• evaluation of school attendance
• using academic data for a BI dashboard
• Visual Analytics
• mobile reporting.

And don’t forget that if you enjoy campus life somewhere, our Academic Reception from 2:00 to 4:00 on Sunday promises to be a hit with guest appearances by Dr. Jim Goodnight and Jim Davis.  This reception will include an announcement of awards for students and faculty members as well as a panel discussion titled, “You are the Future: The Need for Analytical Talent” with senior panelists spanning industry and academia.  The panel will be moderated by Dr. Thornton May.

I look forward to seeing you all again off campus and at SAS Global Forum!

Tyler