SAS Hackathon

Our two SAS Hackathon awards and experience.

In this page we describe our two SAS Hackathon awards and experience at the SAS Innovate Conferences.
The projects, the competition and our partecipation to the two SAS Innovate conferences to receive our awards:
the first in Orlando in 2025,
and the second in Dallas in 2026.
In addition, we partecipate also at the SAS Innovate Conference 2026 in Milan, including the bootcamp.

Our Experience at the SAS Innovate 2026 conference in Texas

Rationence attended to the conference at the Gaylord Texan Resort in Grapevine, Texas (near Dallas) as the winner of the international competition SAS Hackathon 2025 in the User Experience category. We had the chance to attend to the most updated Bootcamp to learn and test the recent SAS Tools, such as:

the SAS Data Maker: a fast tool to extract data and augment samples for IA with low/no-code interface.

the SAS Viya Workbench: a new SAS Jupyter like interface that integrate SAS, Python and R code optimizing the resource available to each user.

the SAS Copilot: a new set of AI features and capabilities within SAS Viya, that uses the power of Azure AI Foundry to be more productive.

SAS Customer Intelligence 360: SAS Customer Intelligence 360 offers GenAI assistance to optimize marketing planning, customer journey design, content and creative asset development.

SAS Visual Analytics: SAS Visual Analytics powered with Copilot features.

Here the Award Ceremony with the Rationence Team reppresentatives and some other special moments.
our presence at the SAS Innovate conference 2026
the Hackathon award ceremony and our team

the final award ceremony

our interview at the SAS Innovate conference.

a special dinner with all the SAS Hackathon winners and SAS personnels.

A wonderful evening at a Texan Ranch with about 5 hundreds SAS attendees, and finally... we are back in Italy.

Our interview at the SAS Innovate 2026.

See the version of our videos published on our YouTube channel!

SAS Hackathon 2025
Awards Ceremony
Ratio Team Winner declared
(YouTube link)

Rationence Winner
at SAS Hackathon 2025!

We won again at the SAS international competition Hackathon 2025, this time the special award:
UX: Excellence in User Experience !

We are proud to announce our winning at the SAS Hackathon 2025 competition for the second year with an innovative AI solution that detects barriers to the human walking. An efficient algorithms for object detection of YOLO type (You Only Look Once) classified more than five thousand images of potential human barriers, so that the SAS application can detect easily new human barriers analysing photos of the city, the stations, the shops, the hospitals...

On the official SAS winner page, SAS wrote:
"UX: Excellence in User Experience – Ratio Team [Italy]. This team from SAS Partner Rationence developed a computer vision model that promotes urban accessibility for all people, including those with disabilities. Powered by SAS Viya and open source tools, the model demonstrates exceptional usability and design thinking. It detects objects – steps, stairs, ramps and grab bars – with extreme precision in thousands of photos from public repositories. The model offers a concrete way to improve how barriers are detected and managed in cities."

And, on our Hackathon 2025 Diploma, the SAS jury wrote:
"The winning solution, Ratio team, demostrates exceptional usability and design thinking, creating a platform that is both practical and scalable. The project stands out for its potential to deliver lasting impact."

Our solution can detect barriers such as steps, ramps, stairs, grab bars through photo or image detection that can be acquired in multiple ways.

And technically the solution:

1. takes advantage of SAS Viya leveraging the power of CAS Server integration in a distributed environment, even without a GPU
2. trains an AI thin YOLOv2 model starting from a huge library of photos with the position of the barrier objects
3. loads also an external YOLO model trained in Python
4. integrates an intuitive map interface able to load images to be analysed
5. shows position and data about each discovered barrier within a SAS Visual Analytics dashboard thanks to the access to the SAS Data Driven content solution

Here, in the SAS Hacker's Hub community, you can find all the videos with the interview, the abstract video, and the technical presentation

Here, an Italian interview in relation to our partecipation to the SAS Hackathon 2025. presenting our winning application Breaking Barriers as a tool with a real social utility, and not just an advanced and user friendly AI application.

Breaking Barriers, our winner solution to support detection and analysis of barriers to the human walking!

The solution integrates a serie of Python coplex programs with several SAS products of the Viya suite, including SAS Visual Analytics. Below you can find our presentations at the Hackathon competition in 2025, and the more technical presentation for the jury. And more, the links to the two videos loaded on our Youtube channel.

Our version of these videos published on our YouTube channel!

- Rationence Winner at SAS Hackathon 2025 (Pitch Version)!

- Rationence Winner at SAS Hackathon 2025 (Jury Version)

Our Experience at the SAS Innovate 2025 conference in Orlando

Rationence attended to the conference in Orlando (FL) as the winner of the international competition SAS Hackathon 2024 in the Life Sciences category. We had the chance to test the most recent SAS Tool, such as:

the SAS Data Maker: a fast tool to extract data and augment samples for IA with low/no-code interface.

the SAS Viya Workbench: a new SAS Jupyter like interface that integrate SAS, Python and R code optimizing the resource available to each user.

the SAS Copilot: a new set of AI features and capabilities within SAS Viya, that uses the power of Azure AI Foundry to be more productive.

SAS Customer Intelligence 360: SAS Customer Intelligence 360 offers GenAI assistance to optimize marketing planning, customer journey design, content and creative asset development.

Here the Award Ceremony with the Rationence Team reppresentatives and some other moments.
the Hackathon award ceremony and our team

the final award ceremony

our team applied to the SAS bootcamp reaching all a 7 on 8 score.

our stand where we presented our Pubmed Abstract Finder solution.

some official interviews during the conference.

SAS Hackathon diner and the SAS Innovate party at the Universal Studios.
On the screen the SAS Ideation: a creative game with the QR code to each winning Hackathon video clip.

Rationence at the next conference SAS Innovate 2025

Rationence will participate as winner of the international competition SAS Hackathon 2024 in the Life Sciences category

The SAS Innovate conference takes place in Orlando (Florida).
the SAS Innovate conference

Link to the SAS Innovate conference

During the conference, the final Hackathon 2024 winner will be voted among the winners of all the categories, including the Rationence Team with our solution Abstract Finder. The Abstract Finder project uses generative artificial intelligence to improve searches in the biomedical literature. Powered by the cloud-native Sas Viya platform, the solution enables researchers, students and medical professionals to quickly find the abstracts they need in the PubMed database, accelerating scientific discovery.

Some web magazines speaking about our partecipation:

Link to the Bitmat web magazine "Il team di Rationence, azienda italiana di consulenza IT e partner di SAS, ha sviluppato Abstract Finder, una soluzione che sfrutta l’intelligenza artificiale generativa per migliorare il reperimento della letteratura biomedica. Alimentata da SAS Viya, la soluzione aiuta i ricercatori, i professionisti del settore medico e sanitario e gli studenti a trovare rapidamente gli abstract di cui hanno bisogno all’interno del database PubMed per far progredire la scoperta scientifica."

Link to the Business People web magazine "Tra i vincitori di quest’anno spicca l’italiana Rationence, che ha conquistato il premio nella categoria Global Industry Winners, Life Sciences grazie al progetto Abstract Finder. Il progetto Abstract Finder utilizza l’intelligenza artificiale generativa per migliorare la ricerca nella letteratura biomedica. Alimentata dalla piattaforma cloud-native Sas Viya, la soluzione consente a ricercatori, studenti e professionisti del settore medico di trovare rapidamente gli abstract necessari nel database PubMed, accelerando la scoperta scientifica."

SAS Hackathon 2024
Awards Ceremony
Ratio Team Winner
(YouTube link)

Rationence Winner
at SAS Hackathon 2024!

We won the SAS international competition in the Life Sciences category!

We are proud to announce our winning at the SAS Hackathon 2024 competition in the Life Science category. During the period of the competition, our team implemented an innovative solution to search, summarize and rank scientific articles from the famous PubMed central database.
The solution exploits the capabilities of generative AI to enhance Biomedical Literature Retrieval and it integrates several innovative technologies such as:

1. a chat interface in natural language that is able to translate the request of the user into PubMed queries taking advantages from the modern Artificial Intelligent platforms. The queries are automatically submitted to the database.
2. a text mining system to evaluate and summarize the found articles into short abstracts.
3. a web user friendly interface to browse the ranked articles with direct access to their documents in PubMed.
4. a set of analytical dashboards to explore the search activities and the quality of the results.

The solution integrates a serie of Python libraries with several SAS products of the Viya suite, including SAS Visual Analytics and SAS Visual Text Analytics.

Below you can find the short version of our presentation at the Hackathon competition and a link to a longer and technical video presentation.

Download long technical version of our presentation(about 380 MB)

Our version of these videos published on our YouTube channel!

- Rationence Winner at SAS Hackathon!

- Rationence Winner at SAS Hackathon! (Long Version)