DSU among top eight in global analytics competition

March 15, 2016

SAS, a leader in the analytics and data management software and services, named a team from Dakota State University, as one of eight winners in its inaugural Student Symposium competition.

The DSU team, Ideamonk, was made of four graduate level analytics students who will now get the chance to travel to the SAS Global Forum to present their winning solution. The Forum will be held in Las Vegas, Nev., April 18 -21. Graduate students in the analytics major formed the team. 

According to the SAS academic blog, “Generation SAS”, the teams used SAS to perform analysis on data in attempt to solve a real world problem. They were provide SAS software and had the ability to choose from eight different data sets. These data sets included things like Department of Energy electricity and petroleum outlooks, Medicare payment data, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data, and Enron email data.

The competition brought out 63 teams from around the world with the top eight teams from Laval University, Kennesaw State University, Oklahoma State University, Bryant University, York University, University of Arizona, North Carolina State University and Dakota State University. 

The DSU team consisted of Yousra Harb, Pradeep Bista, Pramod Bhandari and Ishan Gajurel with Dr. Surendra Sarnikar, Associate Professor for Information Systems, and Dr. Lance Deng, Assistant Professor of Information Systems, serving as advisors.