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2023 Customer Awards: Georgia Pacific - Curious Thinker
slcoyne86
Obsidian | Level 7

GP Logo.jpg

 

Company: Georgia Pacific

Company background: Georgia-Pacific is a manufacturing company fully owned by Koch Industries. Georgia-Pacific owns operating facilities in Packaging & Cellulose, Building Products, Consumer Products, and Corrugated. Georgia-Pacific (GP) has a large presence in the Southeastern part of the United States. GP also has a large analytics capability in IoT and business analytics. Please see the company site for more info. https://www.gp.com/

Contact: Samuel Coyne

Title: Director Artificial Intelligence

Country: United States

Award Category: Curious Thinker

Tell us how you are inspired by the work you do?
I'm inspired by the work that I do by seeing models I've built or helped build running in production and tying those to real business results. I get an enormous amount of inspiration from my team of data scientists. Particularly, they are an inspiration in proactively sharing knowledge.

How has SAS played a part in your journey?
SAS has played a huge role in my analytics journey. My passion is time series analysis; SAS and our use of ESP helped me become much more proficient in deploying prototype models quickly that I can then refine over time. SAS also enabled me to share my knowledge of IoT through the IoT Slam in 2022.

What products do you use and how do you use them?
I use a combination of SAS Viya, open-source, and SAS Event Stream Processing (ESP). We have found that Viya and ESP are accelerators for our team: allowing us to iterate through the data science lifecycle quickly. Viya also enables our citizen data scientists to build data science solutions.

What is your greatest lesson learned that you'd like to share with others?
The lesson I'd like to share is to find the 'thing' in analytics that you're truly passionate about. Being a data science generalist is great, but everyone needs a 'super power' to reach their potential. My main interest is time series. Keep experimenting until you find yours!

4 Comments
Vatche
SAS Employee

Sam is curious thinker and tremendous partner and friend to SAS.  Thanks for all your support Sam!  Looking forward to seeing you at SAS Explore.

janehowell
SAS Employee

Sam has been a great contributor to SAS and SAS-sponsored events, like SAS Innovate and IoT Slam (2022).  His participation in presentations and panels always make the content compelling for the audience.  

Lonnie
SAS Employee

G-P's journey to operationalize complex analytics across their sites is impressive. Sam's leadership with others is driving foundational improvements in their manufacturing processes. 

DethWench
Obsidian | Level 7

I love it that you are the director of AI, but your specialty in time series analysis gets back to basics. It just demonstrates how a good foundation provides fertile ground to create with complexity. Awesome!