STILLWATER, Okla. - Twenty-three Oklahoma State University students received the SAS/OSU datamining certificate on Dec. 2, 2008. The SAS/OSU data mining certificate program is housed in the Spears School of Business and is the largest data mining program in the United States. Data mining is the exploration and analysis of large quantities of data in order to discover meaningful patterns and rules. The SAS/OSU data mining certificate program began in 2004 when OSU partnered with SAS, a leading provider of data analysis and data mining software.

“There are currently more than 20 universities that have partnered with SAS to provide students with a certificate awarded jointly by the university and SAS in the area of data mining,” said Goutam Chakraborty, professor of marketing and founder of the OSU data mining certification program.  “OSU is the largest provider of such data mining certificates among all U.S. universities.”

STILLWATER, Okla. - Two student teams from Oklahoma State University earned second and third place honors at the national “data mining” shootout competition, which was part of the 11th annual data mining conference “M2008.” The conference was hosted by SAS and held Oct. 27-28 in Las Vegas.

Members of the second place team are Samyog Bhattarai, Amjad Elsamen, Fengchun Tang, Xing Wan, Xuequn Wang, and Leila Zelnick from OSU’s management information systems, marketing and statistics programs. Members of the third place team are Gary Hatfield, Miriam McGaugh, and Jason White from OSU’s educational psychology, management information systems, and statistics programs. These students competed against 35 other teams from across the nation.

OSU teams took four of the top ten places at the Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD 2006), a worldwide data mining competion, which was open to faculty, students, consulting companies and others.