People Power: Tao Wang

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Meet the people behind The Power to Know™ in a SAS Data Mining Community series devoted to highlighting developers, product managers, technical support staff and others at SAS. Find out what makes them tick – from their day-to-day job to current “pick.”

Let’s kick off the series by profiling Tao Wang, Senior Manager, SAS Enterprise Miner R+D.

What do you do?
I manage the C development group within the SAS® Enterprise Miner™ R&D team.

What surprises you most about your job?
The innovation of my co-workers. With such innovative employees at SAS, we are not only creating software and solutions to meet the needs of SAS customers today, but also we are precisely predicting their needs in the future and building solutions to meet those needs.

What aspect do you like best?
The great atmosphere here at SAS. SAS employees are always ready to help each other. Most of us have their own office. I enjoy my colleagues and my workplace.

Fill-in-the-blank: Because of what I do ...
SAS customers can take advantages of our cutting edge data mining and machine learning algorithms to fulfill their business needs.

Memorable moments?
I enjoy every day here at SAS and certainly have a lot of memorable moments. There are a lot of sports events in SAS. I still remember the day when the SAS badminton team that I lead won the SAS-UNC badminton competition.

What is your fantasy job (if SAS didn’t exist)?
My fantasy job is to be a professional traveler and photographer. I would like to travel around the world and take pictures of beautiful things.

What’s your favorite SAS/coding trick?
The AUTONAME option in the OUTPUT statement of some procedures. It requests that a PROC create a unique variable name for an output statistic when you do not assign the variable name in the OUTPUT statement. Without this option, you have to name each individual output variable and that is very tedious. AUTONAME also automatically resolves conflicts in the variable names in the output data set so that duplicate variables do not generate errors. You may find some examples in the tip, How to choose a SAS procedure to compute percentiles (quantiles).

What is your “pick” – from technology to movies to music, what are you into these days?
My favorite technology is peer-to-peer computing. I believe this is the future of massive distributed computing technology.