April 2024

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Using SAS Visual Analytics, SAS’ Falko Schulz analyzed more than a hundred years of Social Security Administration Data to discover popular baby names in the US. Was your name ever popular?

Dear Reader:

I look forward to seeing new infographics in the SAS Visual Analytics Gallery. The one pictured above uses cluster analysis to reveal American baby-naming naming trends for more than a century. My name? Nary a blip, but my son’s first and last names made a splash back in the day! Olivia and Liam dominated in 2022.

SAS Innovate lives on through presentations on demand. A major headline out of the conference: general availability of the SAS Viya Workbench developer environment for building AI models. Did you go or watch the livestream? Hit reply and tell us the top three things you learned or enjoyed.

A total solar eclipse cut a swath through the US earlier this month, delighting millions who experienced the spectacle in person. That’s it for Americans till 2044, but there are other (sooner) opportunities elsewhere in the world. The NETWORK procedure and action set in SAS Viya equips SAS users to find the best vantage point.

Scroll on for more tips, user-group news, webinars and more.

Thanks for reading!

Beverly Brown
Editor, Tech Report

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SAS Viya at SAS Innovate
Want to know what’s new in SAS Viya? In this SAS Viya Release Highlights Show, we’re packing our bags and heading to Las Vegas to showcase the latest SAS Viya announcements. We’ll be covering what’s new when it comes to SAS Viya Workbench, generative AI, copilots and even dive into topics like quantum computing. You’ll hear from SAS experts about how SAS is investing in these exciting technology areas.

Through the years: SAS Enterprise Guide versions
SAS’ Rick Wicklin maintains a nifty chart that shows the timeline of SAS releases since Version 8. By request from perhaps many of you, Chris Hemedinger created a similar chart for SAS Enterprise Guide.

How to manage and govern prompts of large language models with SAS
Find out how SAS^® Viya^® fosters excellence in Generative AI by letting you build a prompt catalog and prompt-evaluations framework to govern this whole process. In Xin Ru Lee’s blog post, learn how the LLM application enables better prompts and systematic evaluation of prompts, leading to the best responses and outcomes.

Python integration to SAS Viya: executing SQL on Snowflake
SAS’ Peter Styliadis demonstrates the effortless connection of Snowflake to the massively parallel processing CAS server in SAS Viya with the Python SWAT package. Learn more about SAS and Snowflake by checking out this communities article, SAS partner page and/or watch the SAS Viya release highlights.

Add a second axis to a SAS graph
Rick Wicklin shows how to control the location of horizontal and vertical axes in SAS graphs. He uses this trick to explain and improve a popular graph that has been in the news lately: The “dot plot” from the US Federal Reserve Bank.

4 common email authentication mechanisms
SAS’ Dietmar Burgfeld introduces techniques and protocols that verify the legitimacy of email messages and prevent fraud, such as phishing and spoofing.

developerS.sas.com

We are proud to announce our new developer portal, developers.sas.com! That's “developers,” plural. What will you find? API documentation, use cases open source and SAS programming resources, and much more. And, we’re just getting started and will continue to add more content. For now, the new portal will live alongside the old one as we've got some redirect work to do. Eventually, we’ll move the new site back to “developer,” singular. Stay tuned.

PharmaSUG 2024: early-bird rate available
Here’s how to secure the $999 early-bird rate for PharmaSUG, May 19-22 in Baltimore: Send the hotel confirmation number for your stay of three or more nights to the registrar, and you’ll receive an email invitation to register for PharmaSUG 2024 for the special discount. Details are available on the website.

WUSS: call for content now open
Western Users of SAS Software is accepting abstracts for the 2024 WUSS Educational Forum and Conference. Deadlines are May 3 for papers, May 31 for paperless presentations. The conference is Sept. 4-6, in Sacramento for a one-of-a-kind professional development experience. Submit to WUSS.

SESUG 2024: important dates
We look forward to seeing you Sept. 22-24 for this year’s conference at the North Bethesda Marriott. Currently, early registration, abstract submissions and grant applications for SESUG 2024 are open. Make sure you take advantage of the early registration rates, and check out our list of pre-conference tutorials.

MWSUG: call for presentations now open
MWSUG 2024 will be Nov. 16-19 at the Milwaukee Marriott West in Waukesha, Wisconsin! Registration opens in June, but the Call for Presentations is open. MWSUG is a conference by SAS users for SAS users, so don't miss your chance to contribute a presentation, paper or poster.

SAS Bowl XL, SAS Innovate 2024 - Recap
We learned so much and had so much fun at SAS Innovate 2024. So many activities, so many announcements. We're going to try and cover as many highlights as we can in May's rendition of the SAS Bowl. The SAS Support Community trivia event, SAS Bowl XL, SAS Innovate 2024 - Recap is scheduled for Wed., May 15, at 10:00 a.m. ET. Register for the event and receive an invite to a Microsoft Teams meeting and a calendar event.

How Can You Use Deep Learning for Personalized Pricing and Revenue Optimization?
Join SAS’ Gunce Walton at 11:00 a.m. ET on Thurs., May 2 to learn how you can use the power of machine learning and apply its capabilities to achieve personalized pricing.

SAS® Enterprise Guide® Is Now Integrated With SAS® Viya® 4
Join SAS’ Wilbram Hazejager at 10:00 a.m. ET on Tues., May 7 to learn about the benefits of the SAS Enterprise Guide integration with Viya 4.

How Do I Streamline AI Project Workflows?
Join Microsoft’s Natalie Kershaw and Aaron White, Rik de Ruiter and Daniele Cazzari of SAS at 11:00 a.m. ET on Tues., May 14 to learn the flexibility, efficiency and scalability of combining SAS® Event Stream Processing with ONNX Runtime and Microsoft Azure, addressing common challenges in AI model deployment and execution.

What’s New in SAS Optimization?
Join SAS’ Rob Pratt at 11:00 a.m. ET on Thurs., May 23 to learn how SAS Optimization continues to improve on its powerful modeling language with unified access to a broad suite of solvers.