Welcome to the SAS INFORMS Conference Hackathon 2026 experience. In this session you will cover the full Data and AI Life Cycle.
A description of the use case can be found below. The use case follow certain principals and explain SAS Viya technology along the way.
All data used for this use case is fictional.
MedCare Health System (12 hospitals, 2 M+ patients/year) has an 18.2 % 30-day readmission rate — above the national 15.5 % benchmark — costing $12.4 M in annual CMS penalties alone. Predicting which patients are at risk before discharge can save lives and millions.
This use case is focused on the HLS industry and while going through it we will be hitting the following five topics:
- Synthetic Data enables us to generate more data or data that can be used in non-production systems. For synthetic data generation we will be using SAS Data Maker.
- Developer Experience and Open-Source enable us to code in different language. For this we are going to make use of SAS Viya Workbench so that you can decide if you want to code in Python, R or SAS.
- Trustworthy AI is the foundation of running processes in production that are touching people and have impact on them. Being able to explain model outputs, understand fairness and mask data to ensure data privacy.
- Copilots are an essential piece to get more out of your existing software faster. With the SAS Viya Copilot we will explore some of its capabilities and see how it can help us build.
- Agentic AI is the way to scale agents in your organization to increase productivity. Within our use case we will be focusing on the power of agentic decisioning to automate processes.
The use case is separated into five steps, where each one of the steps is task to complete. The steps usually follow each other and build on each other, but for this exercise we have created them all in such a way that you can complete them in any order that suits your interests. If you are unsure where to start we recommend the order described below, but it is not required.
| Steps | Purpose |
|---|---|
| 1. Ask & Access | Understand the business problem, identify data sources, form initial hypotheses |
| 2. Prepare | Collect, clean, transform, and organize raw data for analysis |
| 3. Explore | Explore variable relationships, select analytical methods, create datasets |
| 4. Model | Build and run analytical models |
| 5. Deploy & Act | Deploy the solution into production, monitor performance. Visualize findings through dashboards, charts, and reports for stakeholders |
The lifecycle is iterative — teams often move backward and forward between the described steps as new insights emerge. During this hackathon we will not have the time to do that, but if you are interested in having a follow up on that topic specifically please reach out by talking to a mentor directly.
Access to the SAS Viya environment, SAS Viya Workbench and SAS Data Maker will be provided onsite at the hackathon event. Please do not forget to bring your own laptop.
It is recommended to open up the URLs in a Incognito tab in your browser, as that ensures you are not logged into another SAS property.
Please use the URL for SAS Data Maker provided by your local hackathon mentor - this link will include the word datamaker in the URL. Once you have opened up that link you will see the following screen where you have to selected SAS Managed Trials:
Then you get redirected to a login screen where you will have to first enter the provided username and then the password.
Once you have entered the password and the login was successful you will be redirected to SAS Data Maker.
Please use the URL for SAS Viya Workbench provided by your hackathon mentor - this link will include the word workbench in the URL. If you already logged into SAS Data Maker than the next steps can be skipped, as you should be redirected to SAS Viya Workbench directly.
On this login screen you will have to first enter the provided username and then the password.
Once you have entered the password and the login was successful you will be redirected to SAS Viya Workbench.
Please use the URL for SAS Viya provided by your hackathon mentor - this link will include the word bootcamp in the URL. If you already logged into SAS Data Maker or SAS Viya Workbench than the next steps can be skipped, as you should be redirected to SAS Viya directly.
On this login screen you will have to first enter the provided username and then the password.
Once you have entered the password and the login was successful you will be redirected to SAS Viya.