Students and faculty at OSU’s College of Science will now be able to use the influential JMP statistical software for academic research and instruction, and to explore vast amounts of data, thanks to a generous donation by SAS—a leading global statistical software company based in Cary, North Carolina.
Since its creation more than two decades ago, JMP has set the standard for efficient and impactful use of statistical data in scientific research, quality control, modeling processes and engineering.
The software has been donated for a year and will be released to College of Science faculty and graduate students using University-owned computers through the COSine Help Desk. OSU’s Software Licensing office will be managing distribution for the rest of the campus and for personal computers.
“I am very grateful to SAS for donating this and other software. It will ensure that our students can effectively manage and analyze large sets of data and help prepare them for jobs in industry and government,” said College of Science Dean Sastry G. Pantula. “They help the University continue to graduate tomorrow’s leaders in statistical, mathematical and computational sciences.”
SAS created JMP in 1989 to help scientists and statisticians detect and explore trends and patterns in data through graphical, interactive and visual models. JMP, which runs on Windows and Macintosh, combines statistics with the graphical tools of computers and is prized by data analysts in industry, by scientists and various sectors of the government.
John Sall, co-founder and Executive Vice President of SAS Institute, Inc., was recently on campus to deliver the first distinguished lecture for the College of Science, “From Big Data to Big Statistics.”
Sall, who is also one of the developers and lead architect of JMP statistical software, will be recognized in February as a 2014 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society.
SAS has also gifted its data mining software, Enterprise Miner, a powerful data mining software used to create accurate predictive and descriptive models for large volumes of data. Students in the College of Science’s newly developing MS in Data Analytics program, housed in the Department of Statistics, will have an opportunity to use this software. The program is expected to launch in fall 2015 and addresses the increasing demand for a workforce able to manage, analyze and effectively make use of exploding amounts of data.
