Spears graduate student Yasha Pastaria wins best paper award at SAS conference

Wednesday, September 11, 2019

Master in Business Analytics student Yasha Pastaria was the recipient earlier this month of the Best Contributed Paper in Business Analytics Award at the 2019 Western Users of SAS Software Conference in Renton, Wash.

Pastaria, one of three Spears School of Business graduate students in the Master in Business Analytics program attending the conference, won the award for her research paper, “Analyzing Factors Influencing Viewer Count of TED Talks Through Text Analytics.”

“It feels great to receive the award for all the hard work I put into the paper,” said Pastaria. “Having networked with a lot of professionals in the field of analytics, I have learned that everything boils down to the story that you tell with data and that is the key to any business. I would try to incorporate the same in my academic and professional life in the future and look forward to winning more such accolades with my work.”

Also attending the conference and presenting papers were graduate students Amarjeet Singh Cheema (“Loan Default Prediction”) and Aakash Dwivedi (“Telecom Industry: Customer Churn Prediction”).

“This is the fifth time our students participated in this conference and the first time we won the best contributed paper,” 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.”

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