1. The Graduate College Travel Summary Presentation
Presented by Bogdan Gadidov

2. SAS Global Forum 2018 4/8 – 4/11 Denver, CO
This is the largest conference for SAS each year, which is a statistical analysis software which we use in classrooms and for projects for data management and modeling. It is a good conference to learn about new SAS products, some of which our university may be able to gain access to, and see what other users of SAS are doing in their respective fields and industries.

3. Reducing Traveling Times for the Cobb County Fire Department (CCFD)
I presented two different projects at this conference. The first was a poster session.
I worked with 2 other Ph.D. students on this project: Yiyun Zhou and Lili Zhang. Our faculty advisor was Dr. Joe DeMaio.
Our project was to work with the CCFD to reduce their traveling times. Our method to solve this was an integration with Python and Google Maps API to read in real time traveling times in an effort to improve how the CCFD assigns emergency vehicles when responding to incidents.
We received good feedback from people attending our poster presentation, including someone from SAS who wanted to include our work in a blog he writes highlighting government related projects which are presented at the conference.

4. A Case Study of Mining Social Media Data for Disaster Relief: Hurricane Irma
My second presentation at the conference was a 20 minute session in front of a room which accommodates for roughly 75 people. I presented this with another Ph.D. student: Linh Le.
In our project, we collected over 5 million Tweets around the one week period surrounding Hurricane Irma in Florida. We used these Tweets to perform topic modeling and tracked the trends of what people were talking about on Twitter during the week of the storm. After identifying 4 key topics pertaining to Hurricane Irma, we performed analysis at the hourly level to observe and model trends over time with a time series model.

5. Benefit of Travel
This conference is a great place to build the Kennesaw State University brand. We are one of the top universities that attendees at analytic conferences are recognizing. For example, I went to the Informs Business Analytics conference in Baltimore this year and even at a conference which we do not regularly attend, other business professionals and universities are recognizing KSU as one of the leaders in analytic programs.
Additionally, attendees of my two presentations gave positive feedback and ideas to consider for continued work on these projects.

6. Publication(s)
We are currently still working with the CCFD as they are implementing some of our recommendations. Over the next months we will see how our recommendations affect their traveling times. We submitted this paper for a journal but were told that some results of our recommendations would make it a better journal paper, so this will add some value and help toward a publication.