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 SAS® Global Forum Wrap-Up: Canadian Wins “Best Contributed Paper”
As we say “happy trails” to San Antonio and another successful
SAS Global Forum, we do so with fond memories of excellent paper
presentations and demos, exciting announcements, and for Canadians
at the conference, a good dose of line dancing and bull riding
to boot!
Among the outstanding speakers this
year was our very own Greg McLean of Statistics Canada. I’m pleased
to report that Greg took home not just one, but two awards for
Best Contributed Paper – one each for the Applications Development
and Coders’ Corner sections. Congratulations Greg! In all, more
than a dozen Canadians either presented or chaired sections this
year. Be sure to check out all of this year’s papers: http://www2.sas.com/proceedings/forum2008/TOC.html
As is the custom at SAS’ annual conference,
several major announcements were made during Opening Session. To
strengthen SAS’ ability to analyse text and other unstructured
data, the company acquired Teragram of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Teragram’s NLP technology is currently in use at CNN, Yahoo!, Forbes.com,
New York Times Digital, Sony and washingtonpost.com. http://www.sas.com/offices/NA/canada/en/news/preleases/031708/acq.html
Also, coming on the heels of five
months of joint development, SAS and Teradata announced new bundles
for allowing customers to benefit from in-database analytics. The
new SAS
Scoring Accelerator for Teradata enables customers to translate
scoring models created in SAS
Enterprise Miner™ into Teradata-specific
functions to be executed directly within the Teradata environment.
http://www.sas.com/offices/NA/canada/en/news/preleases/031708/Teradata.html
To make the most of their new environs,
over 100 Canadian attendees kicked
back for some good old-fashioned cowboy
fun at this year’s SAS
Canada Night Out [PDF: 2MB]. After noshing on
healthy helpings of beef ribs, chicken,
sausage and pork loin, attendees
packed the dance floor to kick up
their heels to the cowboy beat (aka
country and western). For the most
adventurous, the call of the mechanical
bull was too much to resist; more
than 50 riders in all braved the
beast!
If you have any thoughts or creative
ideas about how we can continue to
improve and grow our user support programs, please feel free to
send me an e-mail at wally.thiessen@sas.com.
Regards,
Wally Thiessen
Manager, Customer Value, SAS
Canada
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