The SAS Forum (previously known as SAS Professionals Convention) brings together programmers, analysts and data scientists from across industry, the public sector and academia for three days of learning, networking and career development.

WBS will host this event on its London campus in The Shard on 10-11 June 2015.

Businesses store massive amounts of unstructured data in the form of electronic text, e.g. social media content, emails, service notes, customer reviews, etc. According to SAS, a leader provider of business analytics software and services and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market, such data can make up to 90 percent of all business data. How to take advantage of this Big Data?

Text analytics provides an answer by using sophisticated linguistic rules and statistical methods to evaluate text, discover topics and patterns within entire document collections, locate sentiment of electronic text in real time from websites, emails etc to spot trends and customer priorities, and much more. Using text analytics, you can interpret customers' opinions, improve products, optimize services, streamline processes and make proactive, fact-based decisions.

Members of the Operational Research & Management Science group at WBS have teamed up with SAS to provide an entire module dedicated text analytics on the MSc in Business Analytics & Consulting programme. The module will be jointly taught and covers predictive modelling techniques using SAS software, model assessment and implementation, report writing, the SAS Text Miner tool and applications. Hands-on exercises and case studies will ensure a learning experience that is both academically challenging and practically relevant.

Moreover, WBS also provides access to extensive, extra-curricular e-learning materials on SAS programming and SQL querying that students can study at their own leisure, and supports students in obtaining official SAS Programmer certifications which, if successfully achieved, will greatly enhance employability prospects. SAS skills have never been in greater demand in the UK and are heavily used in the Financial, Retail and Government sectors. To see for yourself, go to any major UK job website and search for “SAS” (e.g. monster.co.uk, jobsite.co.uk).

Consultants from the SAS Institute will give a Base SAS Certification Exam tutorial this Friday, 24th May, in D0.04/D0.05, WBS Scarman Rd building, starting at 9am.

This workshop is intented for those students on the MSc MSOR or MSc BAC programmes who intend to obtain the Base SAS Programmer certification; it will prepare you for the certificate exam. To be helpful for all participants, it is important that you have prepared yourself by going through the e-learning material provided - it is not intended to be an introductory workshop to SAS programming.

Please make sure that you register here.

Please register only if you intend to come (there will be an attendance list), because if too few participants show up, SAS will likely not offering this any more in the future.