Representing OSU at the 2019 Southeast SAS® Users Group Conference in Williamsburg, Va., were, from left, Pratyush Dash, Luis Martinez, Ashlesha Sampathi, Yash Prakash and Aravind Dhanabal.

Five OSU business analytics students present at Southeast SAS® Users Group Conference

Wednesday, November 20, 2019

A group of Oklahoma State University master’s in business analytics students recently traveled to the 2019 Southeast SAS® Users Group Conference in Williamsburg, Va.

The OSU Spears School of Business graduate students participated in the three-day conference Oct. 20-22 which included paper and poster presentations from other SAS® users, hands-on workshops, live demonstrations and networking opportunities. In addition, they visited with SAS® staff who provided their unique expertise and insight.

OSU students presenting at the conference were:

Pratyush Dash, “Face Recognition Using SAS® Viya: Guess Who the Person Is!”
Luis Martinez, “Improving Employee Satisfaction Through Text Analytics and Predictive Modeling”
Ashlesha Sampathi, “Analyzing Airbnb Reviews Using SAS® Text Miner and Predicting the Factors Contributing for Higher Ratings”
Yash Prakash, “Prediction of College Admission Trend Using Predictive Analytics”
Aravind Dhanabal,“Market Basket Analysis on Instacart”

“This is the fifth year our students participated and presented their research papers in this conference,” said Dr. Goutam Chakraborty, SAS professor of marketing analytics and director of the Master in Business Analytics program at Spears Business. “I am very happy with our students’ performance at this conference.

The students said attending the conference is helping prepare them for a career in analytics.

“I thoroughly enjoyed learning new programming techniques at the presentations and meeting other professionals who use SAS®,” Sampathi said. “I found the conference very rejuvenating. It was really a great opportunity to connect with the greater scientific community, think about new strategies to approach my research, contemplate the bigger picture and establish new connections. I am very sure that the knowledge gained in the conference is going to help me a lot in my career.”

“The conference gave me a new insight about the analytics world,” Prakash said. “The kind of presentation in different sections were extremely insightful. There was one presentation by Ms. Charu on collaboration of SAS® and Python. Through that presentation, I learned how we can use python into SAS® and vice versa. This knowledge opens a new door in the analytics field. With the help of the power of SAS® and the easy availability of Python, we can increase our career in the analytics field many fold.”

Visit the website to learn more about OSU’s MSBAN program.

Media Contact: Terry Tush | Director, Marketing and Communications | 405-744-2703 | terry.tush@okstate.edu