Day one of SAS' Analytics 2011 conference is in the books and wow, what a great opening day. As I mentioned in my post from yesterday, Anaytics 2011 is SAS' analytics conference and covers all areas of analytics, including forecasting, data mining, visualization, text mining, and optimization.
When I took the stage this morning (with my co-chair Dr. Sven Crone, professor from the Lancaster Research Centre for Forecasting), I found myself looking out at a veritable sea of analytical professionals. This year's conference, I am happy to announce, has attracted nearly 1,050 of my analytical colleagues from approximately 30 countries around the world. That's a 25% increase in attendance from last year and the most attended conference in our history...by a lot. Even more important, though, is that early feedback suggests our content was a big hit as well.
Our opening keynote featured SAS Vice President of Advanced Analytics Radhika Kulkarni and Oliver Schabenberger, lead architect of SAS' High Performance Analytics. Radhika and Oliver kicked off their talk outlining the numerous challenges today's analyst face and offered some hope for managing the rising expectations organizations have for their analysts. Their talk, High-Performance Analytics: Empowering the Analytical Expert, discussed obstacles like big data; requests for granular analyses; and rising expectations of near-real time data analysis that can be delivered from anywhere and at any time. The glimmer of hope, they offered, is high-performance analytics. High-performance analytics allows analysts to solve the common problems quicker, but more importantly, tackle problems that wouldn't even be considered using traditional tools. The talk was fascinating and we hope to share the slides soon.
After the opening keynote, attendees were treated to multiple breakout sessions covering a variety of topics. With track sessions in predictive modeling, text mining, forecasting, optimization and many others, attendees could explore issues in a more in-depth way. Session talks took a deeper dive by sharing the latest trends and highlighted case studies and best practices to drive home ideas. Though we organized tracks in each of the major areas, attendees weren't shy about exploring topics outside of their discipline. I was stopped by one attendee, in fact, who wanted to make sure I knew how pleased he was with the conference's new format. (If you recall from my last post, Analytics 2011 combines our popular data mining conference, and its 13 year history, with our forecasting conference, which we've offered for the past four years.) I'll admit that while confident that merging the conferences was the right thing to do, I was a little unsure how our attendees would receive the change. Any reservations I had evaporated after this conversation. "I came for the forecasting talks," our attendee began, "but the fact that you've provided tracks that cover other areas of analytics has been a huge benefit to me." We spent the next 10 minutes discussing the non-forecasting session talks he'd attended. He explained how helpful they would be to his work and assured me they were talks he would never have been exposed to had he simply attended SAS' traditional forecasting event.
So, day one, it's in the books and I'm certainly feeling great about how the conference is going. I plan to make a post again tomorrow, so stay tuned.
Thanks for reading,
Jerry
P.S. I want to thank, once again, everyone who is joining me in Orlando for the event. For those of you who can be with us, consider checking out the conference's social media channels, which are buzzing with news from Analytics 2011. Stay informed by following the conference on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter (using the handle #analytics2011), SAS Blogs, and YouTube.
