Analytics

SAS is helping customers gain more value from data with the SAS Platform and its SAS Viya capabilities. These newest advances, such as embedded artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, will further address the needs of organizations that are putting analytics at the core of their business. A variety of industries, countries and organization sizes have embraced SAS Viya products.

With SAS, data scientists, analysts, developers, IT, domain experts and executives can all generate data-driven insights – from the same, consistent data, fostering greater collaboration and driving innovations into production faster. SAS continues to deliver new capabilities, such as image recognition, deep learning and natural language understanding into the SAS Platform.

SciSports develops AI to find the next great football star
With football (that’s soccer in the US) contracts being signed at upwards of US$50 million, it is important that agents and clubs understand as much about a player as possible. SciSports, based in the Netherlands, advises and builds solutions to determine the influence of individual players on team results, track player development, determine potential market value for a player, and predict game results.

Through the SAS and SciSports development partnership, the companies intend to use SAS Viya capabilities and SciSport’s BallJames camera system with the goal of using object detection to access player movements through 3-D images. With cameras capturing footage in real time, SAS AI capabilities can model player movements, and that data can then be used to identify rising stars or undervalued players by benchmarking their performance against others in a given league. To achieve this variety of analysis and insights, the SciSports research requires significant data, deep learning and human expertise.

TruDecision brings efficiencies to auto dealers and lenders
Consumers are increasingly moving away from brick and mortar toward digital, disrupting conventional business models. Fintech firm TruDecision sees this shift as a chance to bring valuable efficiencies to auto dealers and lenders through cutting edge analytic technology. Dealers spend a tremendous amount of money sourcing customers, many of whom do not qualify for financing. Lenders process those customer applications and incur significant expense while only closing on a small fraction of them. Using SAS Viya products, the company is now able to revolutionize the customer acquisition process by performing powerful credit analytics on consumers in real time before the lender or dealer even sees them, driving down costs by as much as 40 percent for each group.

TruDecision deployed SAS Viya products through their US subsidiary, Integrated TruDecision, using SaasNow’s self-service portal for cloud deployment. Dutch company SaasNow offers SAS Viya products in the cloud, making it possible for companies to get started quickly at a low cost with highly scalable services.

New enhancements to the SAS Platform for the remainder of 2017 include:

-Embedded AI capabilities in the SAS Platform, starting with SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning and SAS Visual Text Analytics. Building on a long history of machine learning, these SAS products provide deep learning and natural language understanding to enhance the depth of insights derived from data.

-Single interactive interface that spans a wide range of analytics tasks and disciplines to help non-coders solve complex problems faster.

-SAS Data Preparation for self-service, visual data wrangling, transforming, blending and cleansing data, with application-generated code fit for IT scheduling environments.

-SAS Visual Text Analytics, a modern, flexible and end-to-end text analytics framework that combines text mining, contextual extraction, categorization, sentiment analysis and search. It automates feature extraction and business-rule generation using modern machine learning approaches.

-SAS Visual Analytics for self-service discovery and analytics adds new ways to visualize data relationships, taps into the power of location analytics, and brings a refined user experience.

-Cloud deployment through the SAS Cloud, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and others, including SaasNow.