Cal Poly Student Named to SAS Student Ambassador Program at Software Maker’s Global Convention in Dallas

SAN LUIS OBISPO — A fourth-year Cal Poly statistics student was named an SAS Student Ambassador — one of seven in the nation and only two in California — for innovative use of analytics in research. 

Isabel Litton presented her research at the SAS Global Forum, a gathering of more than 5,000 business and information technology SAS software users, held in April in Dallas.

The competitive program is designed to recognize and support students around the world who are using SAS technologies in innovative ways that benefit their respective disciplines.

Seven students from U.S. universities, including Tulane University, University of North Carolina and Oklahoma State University, were named to the program, as well as six from universities in Great Britain, India, New Zealand and Singapore.

“I was shocked and honored to be chosen out of all the applicants,” said Litton, who plans to graduate in June. “I’m grateful they considered my work significant enough to merit the title of a SAS student ambassador.”

Litton, whose primary areas of interest are data mining, text mining and sentiment analysis, has SAS certifications in basic and advanced programming. She was one of only two students selected from California universities.

Her presentation, “Tweetomatic: An Automated Approach to Batch Processing of Tweets,” described how to automate data retrieval from Twitter “through an algorithm that assesses the rate of tweets for the specified topic to simplify downloading large amounts of data.”

SAS Global Forum conference leaders and the SAS Student Ambassador Program judged the ambassadors’ works.

“With more and more students realizing the value of analytics expertise for research and their careers, the competition to be named a SAS Student Ambassador has never been more fierce,” said Jerry Oglesby, senior director for the SAS Global Academic Program and Global Certification. “We applaud them for brilliant research that advances the knowledge in their fields.”

Litton, of Santa Clara, plans to pursue a master’s degree at the University of San Francisco and become a data scientist.