Master’s in Business Analytics students awarded scholarships from SAS Conference

Monday, October 2, 2017

Eleven OSU MSBAN students attended the 2017 SAS Analytics Conference in Washington, D.C.

Eleven Master’s in Business Analytics students from Oklahoma State University attended the annual SAS Analytics Conference to compete against students from across the nation Sept. 18-20 in Washington, D.C.

The annual conference brings together analytics professionals and students to collaborate and learn more about data analytics. Prominent keynote speakers such as Earvin “Magic” Johnson, chairman and CEO of Magic Johnson Enterprises, presented on a wide variety of topics related to the data analytics industry, and more than 150 sessions and demos were offered to attendees.

“We are delighted to participate for the 11th consecutive year at the SAS Analytics Conference,” said Goutam Chakraborty, SAS professor of marketing analytics and director of the Master’s in Business Analytics program at the Spears School of Business. “Our MS in Business Analytics (MSBAN) students presented 11 posters. This is by far the largest number of posters presented by students from any other university.

“Our MSBAN students also won four out of six best poster awards given by SAS. That is an outstanding achievement of our students. Our students have won best poster awards consecutively for the last seven years. This sustained exemplary performance at the national level over the years is a testament to the quality and the hard work of our students and faculty in addition to the strength of our curriculum.”

Out of the eleven OSU MSBAN students that attended, Mounika Kondamudi, Nikhila Kambalapalli, Rishanki Jain and Varsha Akkaloori were the four students to win Best Poster awards at the conference.

OSU MSBAN student Kambalapalli got to meet former US chief data scientist DJ Patil.

“Attending the SAS Analytics Conference was a great opportunity for me to meet new people from my field and exposed me to better ways of doing things,” Kambalapalli said. “I even got to meet DJ Patil, the former United States chief data scientist who coined the term ‘Data Science.’ I got the opportunity to talk with him about my poster, ‘Mylan’s EpiPen Controversy: Leveraging Text Analytics during PR Crisis.’ Politicians, the media, everyone has expressed an opinion about Mylan when the price of EpiPen was increased drastically last fall. I was excited when I was one of the poster winners at the conference.”

Kondamudi was able to secure a scholarship from the conference with her poster, “Classifying and Predicting Spam Messages using Text Mining in SAS® Enterprise Miner™."

“It was great attending the SAS Analytics Experience conference this year and securing a scholarship for my poster made the experience even more better," Kondamudi said. "Predicting whether a message is spam or not is extremely useful to both carrier companies and customers, and the attendees at the conference could relate to my poster. I met many extremely talented people and spent time explaining the work and effort that I put in to my poster.”

Akkaloori presented her poster, “Identifying Semantically Equivalent Questions using Singular Value Decomposition,” which focused on improving Quora, a question-and-answer website.

“Attending the conference and being a poster winner was a rewarding experience,” Akkaloori said. “Being an avid reader on Quora, solving the challenge released by Quora aimed to improve the experience of its authors and readers using my skilled acquired through the MS in Business Analytics program at OSU was amazing.”

OSU students presenting posters at the conference were:

Varsha Akkaloori, “Identifying Semantically Equivalent Questions using Singular Value Decomposition” (one of six best poster award winners)
Nikhila Kambalapalli, “Mylan’s EpiPen Controversy: Leveraging Text Analytics during PR Crisis” (one of six best poster award winners)
Mounika Kondamudi, “Classifying and Predicting Spam Messages using Text Mining in SAS® Enterprise Miner™” (one of six best poster award winners)
Rishanki Jain, “Sentiment Analysis on YouTube Movie Trailer comments to determine the impact on Box-Office Earnings” (one of six best poster award winners)
Ankita Khurana, “Human Resource Analytics”
Anurag Hardikar, “Identifying the Most Important Cell Nuclei Features for Breast Cancer Diagnosis Using Binary Classification”
Chaitanya Korlepara, “Which smartphone to choose?”
Harsh Gupta, “Text Mining on Donors Conversation with Solicitors”
Jital Patel, “Analysis of Tweets on Demonetization in India using SAS® Enterprise Miner™”
Rosie Nguyen, “Apple or Samsung? Which phone should I buy? Sentiment analysis using SAS® Enterprise Miner™”
Rucha Jadhavar, “Sentiment Analysis of Netflix & Competitor Tweets to Identify Customer Opinions”

For more information about the master’s in business analytics program at OSU, visit https://business.okstate.edu/analytics/msban[BROKEN LINK].