Innovation stories
Inspiration and innovation in action
2025 regional winners
Change Bringers
2025 Champion: Americas
Tracking Subtle Parkinson’s Changes With AI Monitoring
Parkinson's Disease affects 10 million people globally, and early detection remains one of the biggest challenges. 2025 SAS Hackathon team, Change Bringers, developed an AI-powered solution that continuously monitors subtle, longitudinal changes (“drift”) in Parkinson’s Disease using wearables, smart phones and clinical data.
BlocKCUbe
2025 Champion: EME-AP Region
Reducing Emissions Through Optimized Routes and Smarter Fuel Use
Aviation accounts for 44.3% of the total carbon footprint, making carbon dioxide reduction in this sector essential. 2025 SAS Hackathon team, BlocKCUbe, developed a solution to decarbonize aviation operations through optimized routing, Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) integration and demand forecasting.
Minority Reporters
2025 Champion: Europe
Preventing Fraud With the Help of an AI Voice Agent
Every day, millions of banking customers face a hidden risk: fraud. And traditional fraud-prevention methods can leave customers frustrated or let fraud go undetected. 2025 SAS Hackathon team, Minority Reporters, developed Agatha, an AI voice agent that proactively calls customers to verify suspicious transactions, investigate possible fraud attempts and take immediate protective actions.
Past Winners
2024
StaSASticians
2024 Champion: Americas Region
Global temperatures continue to rise, leading to a surge in injuries for construction workers. The 2024 SAS Hackathon team, StaSASticians, developed an AI-enabled heat stroke prevention system leveraging real-time data to monitor workers’ health.
Butterflies
2024 Champion: EMEA Region
The flow of misinformation and disinformation in the news causes harm, making it difficult to know who to trust. 2024 SAS Hackathon team, Butterflies, developed a tool that uses advanced models to check the trustworthiness of open source data.
Nupeak Neurons
2024 Champion: Asia Pacific Region
COVID-19 disrupted global supply chains. 2024 SAS Hackathon team, Nupeak Neurons, developed a visual inspection system that detects defective injectables, speeding up the approval process and reducing the risk of faulty products from reaching the market.
2023
End Forced Labor
2023 Champion: Americas Region
An estimated 27.6 million people are in forced labor today. 2023 SAS Hackathon team, End Forced Labor, developed a visual dashboard using SAS® Viya® to explore and predict commodities affected by this hidden crime.
JaWaRA
2023 Champion: Asia Pacific Region, Public Sector, Machine Learning
Jarkata, Indonesia’s capital, is sinking due to climate change and epic floods. 2023 SAS Hackathon team, JaWaRA developed a centralized and integrated flood control system, based on an analysis of real-time data from IoT sensors.
EPAM & Linktera4Good
2023 Champion: EMEA Region, Natural Language Processing
Disaster response organizations needed quick, reliable information after Turkey’s massive earthquake. 2023 SAS Hackathon team, EPAM & Linktera4Good, used SAS® Viya® and open source with real-time data from social media and satellite imagery.
Blogs and articles
Sharing stories ignites creativity and inspires curiosity. From sea rescues to neurodiversity to lung disease, teams tackled some of the most vexing business and humanitarian challenges in the world.
