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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/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/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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