1. The Graduate College Travel Summary Presentation
Presented by Xuelei Sherry Ni, Ph.D.
MSAS students: Jonathan Boardman, Kyle Biron, and Ryan Rimbey

2. SAS Global Forum 2018 More than 5000 attendees for SAS enthusiasts
SAS, previously "Statistical Analysis System", is a software suite developed by SAS institute for advanced analytics, multivariate analyses, business intelligence, data management, and predictive analytics.
Attracting a diverse audience of international SAS users, executives and academic.
April 8 – April 11, Denver Convention Center

3. Why this Conference Is Important
94 of the top 100 companies on the Fortune Global 500 are SAS customers.
Our MSAS program uses SAS as the instruction program language in almost all the courses in our curriculum.
A lot of our students found jobs because they passed the basic SAS certification exam or the advanced SAS certification exam after taking our courses.
We are one of the academic sponsors of the conference
This is a great opportunity to show off our programs and network.

4. Student Symposium
Our paper, Mitigating the Effects of Class Imbalance Using SMOTE and Tomek Link Undersampling in SAS, won the top 8 among 60+ teams
KSU and the student team was recognized in the general session in front of thousands of audience.
The students, Jonathan Boardman, Kyle Biron, and Ryan Rimbey, are all from the MSAS program
They presented their work in the morning session on April 9.
Faculty supervisor of the team: Xuelei Sherry Ni, Ph.D., Associate Professor in Statistics

5. Workshop
As part of the awards for winning top 8 in the Student Symposium, every team member, including the faculty supervisor, can attend a SAS workshop for free.
I choose the “Introduction to Modern Machine Learning Techniques in SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning” workshop.
Learned machine learning basics on SAS Viya, the platform also installed in KSU most recently.

6. Discussion: Simulation Game Focus Group with HEC Montreal
I was also invited to join this discussion meeting about how we can teach students analytics through the use of games.
HEC Montréal has developed several simulation games, such as their ERP Simulation Game based on an SAP solution, that have helped bring gamification to learning. SAS and HEC Montréal are exploring a similar project that will teach analytics to students through a simulation game using SAS software.
We overviewed the analytics simulation game project and discussed the current trends of gaming in learning and the ways universities and other organizations are using games today

7. Benefit of Travel Show off our programs and our students.
Disseminate our research.
Network with professionals from industry as well as from academia.
Learn SAS new products and other new products using SAS.

8. Publication(s)
The paper, Mitigating the Effects of Class Imbalance Using SMOTE and Tomek Link Undersampling in SAS, will soon be published in the conference proceedings.