Innovation Spotlight: Meet our Women Patent Holders

At SAS, we foster a spirit of creativity and encourage new and innovative ideas. Our people love asking, “What if?” to find unique solutions to our customers’ toughest problems, and each year, a number of our employees’ inventions are awarded patents by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Thanks to the bright minds of our talented inventors, we now hold over 800 patents, and our people continue to raise the bar.

Our women patent inventors gathered for a photo at the annual Patent Dinner, held at the Umstead Hotel.

In honor of Ada Lovelace Day, we thought it’d be the perfect time to highlight some of our brilliant women inventors. As innovators, we rely on our creativity and differences to create great products and solutions. We believe empowering women is critical for innovation and business success and are proud to celebrate the on-going achievements of women.

Read on to hear a bit about their experiences as patent holders at SAS and be inspired by their accomplishments.

Yan Gao, Sr Manager, Advanced Analytics Testing

My invention improves testing efficiency and effectiveness by leveraging advanced machine learning algorithms. In the beginning, I shared my idea with several leaders, and they were very excited about it. They introduced me to colleagues who were interested in my idea, and internal advisors carefully reviewed our demos and advised us how to make the prototype better. I’m grateful for the opportunity to turn my idea into a new product feature: I learned a lot from the process, and I got a lot of great advice and support from my colleagues and SAS’ patent law team!

At SAS, there are many opportunities to explore new ideas for good. Our leaders are open-minded and supportive of people who want to make our products more valuable to customers or our work more efficient.

Hardi Desai, Data Scientist

Over the past few years, I’ve worked on multiple patents related to building and deploying computer vision-based AI models for real world customer use cases. Through this process, I’ve learned that not all patents are limited to those who do research and development – we implement innovative ideas each day as we work with our customers!

SAS has an amazing team of patent lawyers in-house who were always ready to help me during the patent process. Having filed a patent outside of SAS, I can say that the amount of support we have truly makes the process easy for inventors.

Neela Vengateshwaran, Data Scientist

My patent focuses on using multi-stage computer vision pipelines to improve model performance and accuracy on high-resolution imagery. This is my first patent, and I’m so proud to be a patent holder. Data Science has been my passion since grad school, so to have an invention in an area I love working in makes me really happy.

My team at SAS has always been very supportive of me learning and working with new technologies; and having the opportunity to work on novel analytical techniques allowed me to publish this patent. The culture at SAS is amazing; my colleagues are incredible to work with, and I learn so much from them. Being a new mom, the work/life balance SAS provides is just great.

Sujatha Pothireddy, Principal Software Developer

I have had the opportunity to obtain several patents here at SAS. Most of my patents have been issued in the area of analytics, and more specifically in data analysis and time series forecasting. Some of these inventions have made their way into our analytical solutions over the years.

SAS is a leader in patents, so it’s no surprise that they encourage innovation and provide a lot of support to inventors. We have a ton of help from SAS’ patent team to identify the intellectual property to protect. It means a lot to me to be recognized as an inventor, it’s a win-win for the inventors and for SAS!

I love working at SAS because of the people, our SAS culture and the amazing AI and analytics work that I feel so proud to be part of.

Yeng Saanchi, Analytics Software Tester

I never expected to become an inventor – particularly because earlier in my career, I was not aware that advanced statistical methods and related computer techniques could be patented!

My first patent was developed with my team and is called “Optimization under disallowed combinations.” Essentially, it helps identify the best optimized settings for complex experiments with respect to certain combinations that can’t work together due to restrictions (i.e., “disallowed combinations”).

Holding a patent is a significant accomplishment for me, especially because my first patent was granted while I was completing my Ph.D. Our legal team and patent committee have made the entire process seamless, straightforward and efficient, and their support has been invaluable.

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Did you know that around the world in 2023, only 17% of inventors holding international patents and 10.9% of inventors holding US patents were women? We’re excited by the achievements of these leading women and our entire inventor community at SAS, and we can’t wait to see what they come up with next.

Interested in bringing your big ideas to SAS? Learn more about our culture and explore open roles .

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