Winning student researchers present at SAS® Global Forum 2008

Sixteen students from around the world presented their research at SAS Global Forum 2008, held in San Antonio, Texas in March, on topics including churn analysis among mobile operators, multiple logistic regression models, creating range formats in SAS Enterprise Guide^®, and PROC PHREG. All were winners in the SAS Student Ambassador Program, which is designed to recognize and support student researchers.

Piotr Sulikowski, a PhD candidate in Information Technology at the Technical University of Szczecin in Poland, counted on the support to travel to the US for the first time to present his paper, Mobile Operator Customer Classification in Churn Analysis. He focuses on customer relationship management and customer churn, a serious problem for mobile operators worldwide, and his research introduces a set of potential churn factors on which data can be extracted from an operator’s databases and analyzed using SAS Enterprise Guide. Watch Piotr talk about his experiences in a short video.

A winner among winners, North Carolina State University applied mathematics PhD student Anjela Govan added to her honors when her paper, Generalizing Google’s PageRank to Rank National Football League Teams, was awarded best contributed paper in the Data Mining and Predictive Modeling track.

Anpalaki Ragavan, a PhD candidate in mathematics and statistics/biomedical engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno, presented her paper, How to Use SAS^® to Fit Multiple Logistic Regression Models, in the Statistics and Data Analysis section. “SAS Global Forum 2008 helped me make new contacts with several valuable people, find new ways of using SAS for my PhD research, and helped me improve my SAS knowledge tremendously,” Ragavan said – an impressive statement coming from this seasoned SAS user who has presented at more than 25 research conferences and already has four master’s degrees. Lida Gharibvand, a PhD candidate in applied statistics at the University of California-Riverside, shared her research, Advanced Statistical and Graphical features of SAS® PHREG, in the same section.

Not all the presenters are PhD students. Petr Hustak is in the first class of the Master of Science in Analytics program offered through the new Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. His paper, Range Formats Made Easy – CreateRangeFormat Custom Task for SAS Enterprise Guide, examines his CreateRangeFormat custom task, a useful tool that can be applied in any industry as long as SAS Enterprise Guide is used. The task graphical user interface made it possible to make the format creation process both simple and flexible as opposed to a macro program.

Other student winners presented in tracks on Applications Development, the BI Forum, Customer Intelligence, Financial Services, and in Posters. Profiles of the 10 SAS Student Ambassadors are available here; a full list from 2006-2008, including Honorable Mentions, can be found here along with links to all presentations. To learn more about this program, listen to Elizabeth Ceranowski, Student Programs Manager at SAS, in this short interview.

Piotr Sulikowski, a PhD candidate from Poland, was one of 16 SAS Student Ambassadors presenting at SAS Global Forum. (Photo credit: Cezary Aszkielowicz / Gazeta Wyborcza).