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SAS Hackathon winners decode real-world dilemmas with data

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International teams awarded for innovative AI and analytics solutions to humanitarian and business challenges

CARY, N.C., June 22, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — SAS, the leader in analytics, today announced the winners of its 2022 SAS Hackathon. From 70 qualifying teams from around the world and 50 business case submissions, SAS recognized 13 teams for innovation using cloud-native SAS® Viya®artificial intelligence, Microsoft Azure and other technology. Tasked with tackling a real-world business or humanitarian problem, the winning teams’ projects ranged from optimizing disaster response to reducing food waste.

Experience the interactive Multichannel News Release here: https://www.multivu.com/players/English/8827854-sas-hackathon-2022-winners/

More than 100 judges from diverse backgrounds recognized international winners across eight industries, six technologies and three regions. The awards ceremony was broadcast live on LinkedIn and YouTube.

Unique SAS Hackathon format boosts innovation
Rather than a traditional in-person hackathon that gathers coders for a few days, SAS Hackathon participants collaborated online for a month, enhancing their data science skills under the guidance of a SAS mentor through a variety of industry tracks. Each team had access to a learning portal and the ability to try SAS techniques such as machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, data visualization and IoT on SAS Viya, powered by Microsoft Azure. Participants were encouraged to network while solving real-world issues that affected their communities.

“There’s a stereotype that hackathons are just a bunch of coders hunched over computers tackling fluff challenges for the sake of it — and it isn’t true,” said Einar Halvorsen, Global Hackathon Lead at SAS.

“The end goal of the SAS Hackathon is to bring together sharp minds from many backgrounds to create a commercially viable solution for real-world problems. It’s a learning experience, an incubator and a trial for taking world-changing ideas to market.”

2022 SAS Hackathon Winners by category
Global Industries

Banking: Green Swedbank (Sweden): Record-breaking rain and flooding spurred by climate change battered Sweden last year. Team members from Swedbank and KPMG created a dashboard in SAS Visual Analytics to assess flood risk to properties — and price potential losses — for 100-, 200- and 1,000- year flooding scenarios.Energy: Innova Data Hub (Spain): As the European city with the most deaths linked to traffic emissions, Madrid wants to prioritize green transportation. To improve BiciMAD, Madrid’s bike service, Innova Data Hub from Innova-tsn compiled datasets on bike usage, then used predictive modeling to design an optimization solution that can be implemented in less than six minutes and reduce impossibilities by more than 90 percent.Health and Life Science: The Chart Chasers! (U.S.): While value-based care ties doctors’ paychecks to the efficiency of their care, doctors can be underpaid when mistakes are made in the medical coding process. Team members from InformedHC and Pinnacle Solutions built an automated system to uncover lost revenue for medical providers due to mistakes in the use of the International Classification of Diseases codes.Insurance: LiveEO #2 (Germany/Mixed): Dennis Schmargon, head of business development at LiveEO, used SAS analytics, LiveEO and open-source public and commercial satellite data to create a model that monitors and predicts flooding events, empowering insurers to make informed decisions about risk potential.Public Sector: Jakstat (Indonesia): Team Jakstat from StarCore applied SAS and Python to map and optimize the disbursement of COVID financial aid for the micro-, small and medium-sized businesses that make up 97 percent of Jakarta’s economy.Telecom & Media: Funka (Sweden) To improve the accessibility of web forms for people with and without disabilities, team members from company Funka Nu AB used computer vision, optical character recognition, machine learning, and test automation to create a solution for website owners to evaluate the accessibility of their forms — and apply solutions to any indicated problems — by inputting their site’s URL.Retail: TrendsPro (U.S.): Team TrendsPro from Maypro Group LLC used search engine trend analysis to forecast consumer demand for products to optimize ad campaigns. Their solution allows business owners to allocate inventory, discover the most appropriate advertising channels, and decide how many and what kind of ads to deploy.Mixed/Manufacturing: Notilyze (Netherlands): Notilyze created an insight tool for a food manufacturer that monitors processing and quality control. This allows the food manufacturer to optimize the manufacturing process for maximum profit while reducing energy consumption and food waste.

Technologies

IoT: Oges (Singapore/India): Accurate reservoir modeling is crucial for oil and gas companies to drill effectively, protect personnel and prevent oil spills. Team members from Oges Solutions incorporated SAS Visual Data Mining and Machine Learning and Python Libraries to create a hyper-accurate AI-based oil reservoir model, ready to be incorporated by any oil and gas company.Machine Learning: The Positive Thinking Company (Germany/Belgium): As climate change intensifies, farmers most vulnerable to its impacts can benefit from protective, inexpensive microinsurance. Using SAS Viya and machine learning technology, The Positive Thinking Company analyzed climate risk in various states in India, then built a tool for at-risk farmers to explore how climate change can affect their livelihoods — and how microinsurance can help.Computer Vision: Funka [See above.]Decisioning: Linktera4Insurance (Türkiye): Digitalizing the customer journey in insurance would reduce paper usage and automate workflow and decision making for faster and easier underwriting and claims management. Linktera4Insurance from Link Tera Bilgi Teknolojileri employed SAS Viya on Azure to render complex insurance data into easily navigable dashboards and graphs, and used Neula Low Code Platform to automate workflow.Visual Analytics: Disaster Response AI (Canada): Globally, natural disasters cause more than 15,000 deaths and cost $173 billion per year. On SAS Viya, Team Disaster Response AI from Deloitte built an interactive map visualization rich with disaster insights and predictions to advise the Canadian government on how best to allocate relief funds.Forecasting: Team 4-kasting (Norway): To keep its ranking as the fastest mobile network in the world, Telenor Norway requires enough network capacity to stay speedy without tipping into expensive and unsustainable overcapacity. Team 4-kasting deployed machine learning/visual forecasting to create a system that forecasts expected usage at any given site, potentially saving the telecommunications company millions.Natural Language Processing: The Chart Chasers! [See above.]

Regions

Asia: JakstatEMEA: FunkaAmericas: The Chart Chasers!

SAS Viya on Microsoft Azure key to scalability around the globe
Microsoft — the hackathon’s sponsor — and SAS offer integrated technology that fueled innovation among the international cohort at SAS Hackathon. SAS Hackathon participants implemented SAS Viya on Microsoft Azure’s cloud-native, integrated technology to build insight tools, automated systems and models and more.

Analytics and AI answer real-world problems at SAS Hackathon
“Whether it’s ensuring doctors are paid for the quality of their care, optimizing sustainable transportation, or rendering hyper-accurate AI models for the world’s largest companies, our 2022 Hackathon winners applied SAS, Microsoft and open-source technologies in ways that inspired our judges,” said Peter Lundqvist, Global Hackathon Program Manager.

“Competition is fun, but collaboration and curiosity are what truly power the SAS Hackathon.”

For more information on the winners and what sets the SAS Hackathon apart, please visit sas.com/sas/events/hackathon.html and follow #SAShackathon on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.

About SAS
SAS is the leader in analytics. Through innovative software and services, SAS empowers and inspires customers around the world to transform data into intelligence. SAS gives you THE POWER TO KNOW®.

SAS and all other SAS Institute Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. ® indicates USA registration. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their respective companies. Copyright © 2022 SAS Institute Inc. All rights reserved.

Editorial Contact:
Julia Norton 
julia.norton@sas.com
919-741-7474
sas.com/news

 

 

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/sas-hackathon-winners-decode-real-world-dilemmas-with-data-301573185.html

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GreenCore Solutions Corp. (GSC) Launches — Agency Partner Program (APP) — AI Agents for Agency CPG Clients

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At 9.5 million AI Agent transactions a month, GSC leads the market — the right choice for white-label B2B in CPG and retail grocery, the accounts agencies already know well. Agencies are the known experts of the CPG space, and B2B just went agentic — 4–6x the B2C market. Let’s do B2B together: your brand, under 10 days to live.

VANCOUVER, BC, LONDON and SYDNEY, Aug. 1, 2026 /PRNewswire/ –GreenCore Solutions Corp. (GSC) today announced the GSC Agency Partner Program (APP) — a white-label partner program that lets advertising agencies power their Beauty & Personal Care (BPC) clients in consumer packaged goods (CPG) B2B agentic procurement. Under APP, GSC white-labels its AI Agents, the CPG Knowledge Graph, and per-client telemetry beneath the agency’s own brand: the agency keeps its accounts, its rate card, and its name on every surface, while GSC runs the managed services on the back end. The program opens a new recurring B2B revenue line for agencies — and a procurement edge at the retail grocery gates — for the clients they already own.

For fifty years, agencies monetized the consumer half of commerce. The other half just changed sides first: Gartner’s Strategic Predictions for 2026 projects that by 2028, 90% of B2B buying will be AI-agent intermediated, pushing over $15 trillion of B2B spend through agent exchanges — with traditional SEO and PPC giving way to agent engine optimization as products become machine-readable and procurement shifts to autonomous machine-to-machine transactions. Cloudflare Radar confirms the traffic has already turned: agentic traffic passed human traffic on the open internet in June 2026 and stands at roughly 60% today. AI agents do not read advertisements. APP gives agencies the successor product line.

What Agencies White-Label

Every APP partner operates on the production estate GSC already runs at scale: the CPG Knowledge Graph — 2 billion resolved datapoints spanning 38,350 BPC brands, 15,495 makers, and 15,688 retail grocery banners with 3.29 million points of sale across 50 global markets — carrying 9.5 million+ inbound AI Agent transactions a month, an estimated 15–20% of the world’s agentic grocery procurement traffic. Agencies receive an agency-branded partner portal, agent JSONs and ghost headers carrying their own name, machine-readable catalog feeds, and client dashboards streaming the per-client agent telemetry the Web 2.0 measurement stack cannot see. GSC never appears client-side.

Four MCP Servers, Two Open Protocols

APP runs on the protocols SAP, Google, and Microsoft standardized on for agentic commerce — MCP and A2A — through four MCP servers: the Catalog MCP (the CPG Knowledge Graph, live at mcp.cpgknowledgegraph.ai), the Procurement MCP (the retail grocery gate, with a human command on every purchase order via GSC Navigator), the Telemetry MCP (per-client agent traffic and transactions), and the Partner MCP (each agency’s own agent card and endpoint — the agency itself, discoverable in the agent economy under its own brand). Buying agents meet the program on its dedicated machine surface, gsc-agency.io — an AI Agent surface, not a website for humans.

Book → Brand → Market → Live

Onboarding is a conversation, not a construction project. Agencies map their BPC and CPG client book against the graph — most clients are very likely already mapped — take delivery of their white-label identity, and choose their level: local, regional, or global, across 50 markets in the Americas, UK, EU, Latin America, and Asia-Pacific. The first client is live in the agentic B2B procurement market in under 10 days, billed on the agency’s paper at the agency’s rate card. Against a global 3:1 shortage of the AI software engineering specialists this stack requires, the build-or-partner math is short: DIY waits; partners ship. And everything lands with sustainability and local delivery built in — hyperscale-grade security on Microsoft Azure, served from GSC’s in-region sovereign nodes, at up to 80% lower token use and energy than the generalist norm.

“Agencies are the masters of audiences — and GSC arrives holding a new one: 9.5 million agent transactions a month,” said Matthew Keddy, CEO, GreenCore Solutions Corp. (GSC). “We arm your agency with fleets of B2B AI Agents — CPG and Beauty & Personal Care (BPC), straight to retail grocery procurement, where grocery spends over $2 trillion a year. Come to the B2B side: bring your best and brightest, put our AI Agent Stack under your brand, and expand your agentic portfolio — your agency, your accounts, your clients, with GSC working the back end quietly. Here’s the audience. Call us — we’ll meet you. 3.29 million retail points of sale across 15,688 banners are waiting — partner local, regional, or global.”

Availability

The GSC Agency Partner Program launches as a limited, exclusive market run for advertising agencies with Beauty & Personal Care and CPG client portfolios — starting in London, UK (uk.gsc-agency.ai); Paris, France (eu.gsc-agency.ai); and Mexico City, Mexico (latam.gsc-agency.ai) — partnering at local, regional, or global level across 50 markets. Placements are limited per market. Agencies start the conversation at gsc-agency.ai for more insights. Thousands of GSC AI Agents stand pre-positioned on Microsoft Azure, in each region — ready for APP fleets from day one.

About GreenCore Solutions Corp. (GSC)

GreenCore Solutions Corp. (GSC) builds AI Agents with the CPG Knowledge Graph, powered by SPARKS, delivered on MCP + A2A + ACM-68000. An estimated 15–20% of the world’s agentic procurement transaction traffic across retail grocery runs on GSC. GSC AI Agents run sustainable, transact safe, human in the loop, and live on Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. GSC is a Microsoft AI Cloud Partner — Crunchbase Global Rank 393 of 4.3 million as of July 2026. D-U-N-S 24-336-6774.

About GSC Agentic Pty. Ltd.

GSC Agentic Pty. Ltd., headquartered in Sydney, Australia, is the Asia-Pacific joint venture delivering the GSC AI Agent Stack across APAC markets.

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/apac/news-releases/greencore-solutions-corp-gsc-launches–agency-partner-program-app–ai-agents-for-agency-cpg-clients-302840467.html

SOURCE Greencore Solutions Corp.

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OneGov Launches “Pro”: A Dedicated Research Desk on Every Seat for Government Affairs Teams

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New tier brings AI Deep Research, policy dossiers, and committee intelligence to legislative professionals across all 50 states and Congress

AUSTIN, Texas, July 31, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — OneGov, the 50-state legislative intelligence platform, today announced the launch of OneGov Pro, a new tier built for government affairs teams that need to go deeper than tracking. Pro turns the everyday work of a research analyst — the kind that used to take a week of desk work — into cited answers and briefing-ready dossiers the same afternoon.

“Everything in OneGov, plus a research desk for teams that go deeper,” is how the company frames it. Where the core platform tracks bills, members, and committees across every state, Pro layers on the heaviest research and monitoring tools — on every seat.

A dedicated research analyst, on retainer

At the center of Pro are two flagship capabilities:

Deep Research — AI-powered, citation-backed answers to hard policy questions across every state and Congress. Ask the questions that used to take days; get research-grade answers with sources in seconds.Policy Dossiers — comprehensive, AI-generated issue briefs on any policy area, produced in minutes rather than weeks.

Pro extends well beyond research. The tier also includes:

AI Committee Intelligence — search committee summaries in natural language to surface emerging trends and policy risks, with saved and scheduled recurring queries.Statutes & Regulations monitoring — search state statutes and administrative rules, with automatic rulemaking alerts when proposed rules match tracked bill keywords.Lobbyist and company tracking — alerts the moment lobbyists capture testimony or change clients, plus monitoring of the organizations connected to your issues.Scheduled branded reports, shared workspaces, in-app team chat, a live-action feed window, and integrations with Slack, Google Drive, Outlook, OneDrive, Claude, and Codex.Predictive Voting (Beta) — AI vote forecasting built on district demographics, member history, and past voting patterns.

Basic coverage. Pro intelligence.

OneGov Pro is an optional per-seat upgrade — teams can mix standard and Pro seats, so the people doing the deepest work get the deepest tools without changing everyone’s plan.

“Great government affairs teams have always had a research analyst they wish they could clone. Pro is that analyst — on every seat. Ask the hard question in the morning and have a cited, briefing-ready answer in minutes, across all 50 states and Congress.” — William Fish, Founder & CEO, OneGov

To learn more or upgrade, visit OneGov.AI/Pro.

About OneGov

OneGov is a legislative intelligence platform providing comprehensive tracking and AI-powered analysis of bills, members, committees, statutes, and regulations across all 50 states and the U.S. Congress. Learn more at OneGov.AI.

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The Death of the Manual Bill Tracker: Why the Spreadsheet Era of Government Affairs Is Ending

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OneGov argues that AI research, not another tracking column, is the real shift reshaping how policy teams work

AUSTIN, Texas, July 31, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — For decades, the tools of government affairs looked the same: a spreadsheet, a stack of bill PDFs, and an analyst willing to spend the week reading them. OneGov, the 50-state legislative intelligence platform, argues that era is ending — and the reason isn’t a better spreadsheet. It’s that the analytical work itself can now be done in minutes.

The hidden cost of manual tracking

The manual bill tracker was never really about tracking. It was about the human hours behind it: reading every version of a bill, watching four-hour committee hearings for the one exchange that mattered, cross-referencing lobbyist filings, and stitching it all into a memo before a client call. Multiply that across dozens of state legislatures moving at once, and “tracking” quietly becomes a full-time research operation that no spreadsheet ever captured.

That’s the work AI is now absorbing — not the row in the sheet, but the desk work behind it.

From “where is this bill?” to “what does it mean?”

The shift OneGov points to is a change in the question teams can ask. Manual tools answer where is this bill? The new generation answers what does it mean, where is it heading, and who’s driving it? — across every state at once:

Natural-language questions like “Which states are moving on AI regulation this session?” return citation-backed, research-grade answers in seconds instead of days.Full policy dossiers on an issue are generated in minutes, not weeks.Committee hearings become searchable — surfacing the key moment without watching the whole session.Rulemaking and lobbyist activity are monitored automatically, alerting teams the moment something touches their interests.

The spreadsheet isn’t going away — the manual part is

OneGov’s position is not that structure disappears. Teams will always want a clean view of what they track. What’s dying is the assumption that a human has to manually assemble the intelligence behind every row. When cited research, dossiers, and forecasting are a query away, the week of desk work that justified the manual tracker no longer needs to exist.

“Nobody ever loved the spreadsheet — they tolerated it because the alternative was reading everything yourself. AI didn’t kill the bill tracker; it gave teams back the week they used to spend feeding it.” — William Fish, Founder & CEO, OneGov

OneGov delivers this through OneGov Pro, a research tier that puts AI Deep Research, policy dossiers, and committee intelligence on every seat. Learn more at OneGov.AI/Pro.

About OneGov

OneGov is a legislative intelligence platform providing comprehensive tracking and AI-powered analysis of bills, members, committees, statutes, and regulations across all 50 states and the U.S. Congress. Learn more at OneGov.AI.

View original content to download multimedia:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/the-death-of-the-manual-bill-tracker-why-the-spreadsheet-era-of-government-affairs-is-ending-302840418.html

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