The Software of Choice for Business at IST

Arlindo Oliveira, a professor at IST (Instituto Superior Técnico of the Technical University of Lisbon), leads the undergraduate program in information systems and computer engineering. He is also president of INESC ID (Instituto de Engenharia de Sistemas e Computadores Investigação e Desenvolvimento – the Institute of Engineering Systems and Computers, Research and Development), and a researcher with the ALGOS Group.

A history of excellence
Created in 1911, IST is Portugal's largest and most reputable school of engineering, science and technology. The Institute's mission is to contribute to the development of society by promoting higher education of outstanding quality in the areas of engineering, science and technology at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and by carrying out research and development activities in accordance with the highest international standards. "We see it as our job to find new and better ways to contribute to the social and economic development of the country through teaching, research and development and, very importantly, direct links with business and society," says Oliveira.

IST is a member of CLUSTER (Consortium Linking Universities of Science and Technology for Education and Research) – the network of leading European academic institutes in the technical and engineering areas – meaning that some of its students, attending IST on exchange programs, are among the brightest and best from countries across the continent. The Institute consists of 10 departments (and one autonomous section) that are responsible for teaching undergraduate and postgraduate programs. Oliveira leads the undergraduate program in information systems and computer engineering and informatics at IST's Alameda campus. Each year, approximately 140 computer engineering and informatics students plus another 70 from other programs – in subjects as diverse as mathematics, biotechnology and management science – take a fourth-year course in decision support systems.

"We looked for suitable software for teaching the data mining element on this course and decided that SAS offered the best solution. SAS is now central to the course, in particular SAS Enterprise Miner and SAS Enterprise Guide," says Oliveira. Students are assigned data mining projects using real live data and a commercial objective. "The students are free to use whatever tool they like, but in practice SAS has been the solution of choice for most of them over the past five years," says Oliveira.

Reality-based teaching made possible with SAS
"When we started the course, we simply taught the students algorithms and asked them to go and try them out with various software packages. But as we got more experienced, we started giving students projects that are as close to the reality of the business world as possible. We felt that they needed an integrated platform that would expose them to a variety of methods and approaches: Part of the education is working out which of these is most appropriate, implementing it with some real data in a data warehouse, and performing some analysis." "With SAS their work becomes less abstract. That means on the one hand their understanding becomes much deeper, because they are thinking things through for themselves, with the help of one of the best software tools on the market. And on the other hand they are learning to analyze problems and use software in a way that reflects the way things actually work in business," says Oliveira.

"In short, with SAS they get a real sense of the practical applications of data mining and how they will use it in their future careers," he adds.

One step ahead
As a result these students have a huge advantage when it comes to finding employment. Graduate unemployment is relatively high in Portugal, and being qualified in computer science is not necessarily a meal ticket. IST graduates, however, face few difficulties in this respect. "Our graduates rarely experience problems finding appropriate and rewarding jobs, largely because of the orientation of our courses to meeting business needs, and also because there is significant interest in people with skills in data mining," says Oliveira. "Typically they find employment in software engineering, often with a data mining or data warehousing element, but this can be in any industry sector. Whenever I attend a meeting of SAS user organizations in Portugal I run into former pupils, and, most commonly, they are in challenging and very rewarding jobs!"

Those who choose to stay on and do a master's degree or Ph.D. at IST can continue using SAS as part of their studies. The Institute has published scientific papers using SAS in business and biotechnology fields.

SAS Academic Program
Under the SAS Academic Program, IST has a campus-wide license for SAS software, which effectively means that every student and every member of the academic faculty can use it. "The SAS Academic Program enables a large number of students to become familiar with software that is widely used in business, so we are delighted to be part of it," says Oliveira. The point of the SAS Academic Program is to bridge the gap between the academic and business world, and in this respect Oliveira himself is something of a role model. In addition to his teaching and research duties at IST, he is a sought-after consultant in the private sector and has undertaken a number of data mining projects including market analysis for one of Portugal's leading online stores, and credit scoring for one of Portugal's leading mobile telephone service providers, Optimus. "We used some very innovative techniques in the Optimus project, and there is no doubt that our many years of experience in data mining, and our academic status, helped to get the project initiated and executed," says Oliveira.

He says that the main strength of SAS Enterprise Miner for these projects is that it is a complete product with many strong and well-documented algorithms. "It is also very well integrated with SAS data warehousing and data management and ETL tools, which is very important in the conduct of time-critical projects," says Oliveira. "Also I think with SAS there is a very good relationship between customers in business or academia and the research and development people at SAS. They are very responsive to our needs as users," he concludes.

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