Company: University of Brasilia
Company background: The University of Brasilia (UnB) has a partnership with SAS since 2004, where SAS is a official software to teach statistics together with R and Python. In 2023, the University of Brasilia joined the Specialization SAS program, being the first of South America.
Contact: Alan Ricardo da Silva
Title: Associate Professor
Country: Brazil
Award Category: Innovative Problem Solver
Tell us about the business problem you were trying to solve?
In the last 15 years, I have published several papers in SAS Global forum to help many SAS users in solving problems in Economics, Statistics, Data Visualization, Sampling, Health etc. I have received many acknowledgments from SAS and users a lot of citations from these papers.
How did you use SAS to solve that business problem? What products did you use and how did you use them?
I basically used SAS/IML to write my codes, because it is faster and easy to read. In general, I have written SAS macros because some techniques are not implemented in SAS, and I would not like to use other softwares to solve my problems.
What were the results or outcomes?
Because I have created SAS Macros, the outcomes depend on the application, but I have received emails from several areas such as medicine, economics, and statistics from researchers around the world. I think they are like me, trying to find out a solution in SAS prior to moving to other softwares.
Why is this approach innovative?
This approach is innovative because several SAS users can use techniques already implemented in other software such as R, Stata, and Python. As an example, in 2008 I published a paper about "Spatial Autoregressive Models", but only in 2018 SAS created the SPATIALREG PROCEDURE.
