SAS is back, in person and better than ever, considering our presence as premier sponsor at PharmaSUG 2022.
The May 22-25 event attracted more than 600 users to Austin, Texas, to strengthen relationships and expand knowledge through more than 150 paper presentations, posters and hands-on workshops in 14 academic sections.
The SAS User Engagement team, which focuses on driving user retention and loyalty, facilitated networking, answered questions and taught new skills. Joining them on site to navigate the opportunities were SAS experts from departments across the company, including Technical Support, Pre-Sales, Education, Social Media and Customer Success.
You can’t grab coffee with a webpage
Senior Technical Training Consultant Charu Shankar was one of the event presenters, offering Intro to Coding in SAS®Viya® with an irresistible session description: “Learn through the yummy analogies of SAS instructor/yoga teacher and chef who drew from her experience of cooking in a yoga retreat in the Bahamas for over 300 guests to understand the distinction between SAS & CAS.” Not surprisingly, the creative write-up led to a room full of curious minds.
“A customer who attended my Viya presentation said she had never understood what Viya was. Now, she gets it,” said Shankar. “Another customer said she could see her clients benefitting from [SAS® Visual Analytics for report creation, data building and data import] when, before, she had no clue how Viya was of any use.” Shankar’s was one of eight SAS employee-led presentations.
Being with people to experience serendipitous encounters, read body language, and gauge facial expressions offers tremendous advantages that played out repeatedly at PharmaSUG. Similar engagement occurred at eight SAS booths, which were oases for demos, hands-on tutorials, questions and feedback.
Pritesh Desai, Principal Industry Consultant, Health and Life Sciences, and Samiul Haque, Systems Engineer, US Life Sciences, experienced those conversations. “Samiul and I were talking to a customer who had some concern about SAS working with open source,” Desai said. “Thirty minutes into our conversation, he started smiling about PROC PYTHON and stuff we are doing with Viya. I couldn’t shake off his expression that we turned him around.” Desai shared details about a PYTHON procedure that enables you to run statements from the Python programming language within SAS code.
Inclusion takes center stage
In addition to topics specific to the Health and Life Sciences field, such as Generating Real World Evidence on The Likelihood of Metastatic Cancer in Patients Through Machine Learning In Observational Research: Insights For Prevention presented by Haque and Principal Industry Consultants Sherrine Eid and Robert Collins, this year’s event also ventured into inclusion.
Jim Box, Principal Data Scientist, presented What’s Your Model Really Doing? Human Bias in Machine Learning to explore sources of bias, consider the impact it can have on people, and look at ways to mitigate harmful side effects of machine learning.
Portia Exum, Manager, Software Development Engineering in Test and a recently named 2022 CEO Award of Excellence winner, was a featured panelist on the main stage Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) Panel Discussion alongside SAS customers from Merck and representatives from the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University and Huston-Tillotson University.
With a full-scale event like PharmaSUG, it’s worth noting that its organizers remain an independent, non-profit, all-volunteer group of individuals who come together to share knowledge, exchange ideas, promote best practices, and sharpen their skills. And they’ll do it again at PharmaSUG 2023 in San Francisco.
