Participants from premier institutions like Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, BITS-Pilani – Hyderabad, Navsari Agricultural Institute, etc., participated in the program. Regionally, the participants were from the states of Gujarat, Maharashtra, Telangana, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamilnadu with domain expertise ranging through medicine, pharma, agriculture, engineering, science and management.

Alumni of Amrita School of Business also attended the program. Dr. Vinith Kumar Nair (batch of 2001), Associate Dean at TKM Institute of Management; Prof. Suresh A. (batch of 2004), Faculty at ASB, Amritapuri campus and Ms. Divya (batch of 2014) were present at the event.

The FDP was facilitated by Dr. Soumitra Das and Mr. John Coutinho, senior consultants from SAS India and Mr. Shubham Chatterji, the senior business manager. The program was delivered through lab sessions with SAS tools like SAS Enterprise Guide, SAS Miner, SAS Visual Analytics, etc. Apart from acquiring SAS working skills, the participant teams designed and presented curriculum for data analytics programs targeting students and working professionals.

The day 3 sessions provided hands-on practice with SAS Visual Analytics, SAS Text Miner for handling unstructured data Analytics and a brief demo on big data management tools like Hadoop. The participants received the certificates jointly awarded by Amrita and SAS during the Valediction session.

he FDP also served as a fertile networking arena for the participants seeking collaborative research. The program was coordinated by Dr. A. Senthil Kumar, Assistant Professor, Amrita School of Business, Coimbatore.