Beating the odds: Students compete in DataFest

Wesleyan Team Honored for “Best Innovation” at 2017 DataFest

University Teams Take Home Two DataFest Awards

Crunching Numbers

Photo credit Will Barr ’18

We had a really enjoyable weekend with all 75 students participating in this year’s DataFest. Lots of thanks to our sponsors, students, consultants, and judges!

Here are the winning teams:

Honorable Mention: Best Pattern Detection
Team: Coup D’ata (Trinity College)
Subekshya Bidari, Kalyan Parajuli
Tristan Peirce, Dylan Spagnuolo

Best Data Preparation
Team: Unsupervised Leopards (Lafayette College/Wesleyan University)
Joshua Arfin, Benjamin Draves, Tiger Huang

Best Innovation
Team: Data Baes (Wesleyan University)
Tiffany Coons, Jack Gorman, Joli Holmes, Asie Makarova

Best in Show
Team: Anscombe’s Quartet (Yale University)
Valerie Chen, James Diao, Alan Liu, Cameron Yick

DataFest is fast approaching! Here is some important information. As always, email vnazzaro@wesleyan.edu with any questions.

LOGISTICS

• You may come and go as you please, but you will not be allowed to work on the data outside of Exley and Allbritton.
• You will have friendly consultants present until about 10pm on Friday, between 10am-10pm Saturday, and from 9am-noon on Sunday. These are faculty, grad students, local data professionals, or other professionals with field-specific knowledge of the dataset. They all have different areas of expertise, so if you get stuck on something, ask someone else later. Feel free to ask anything; this is not an exam, but a collaborate competition. Consultants are not there to write code for you, but they are there to help point you in the right direction!
• For non-Wesleyan students: You may want to check with faculty members at your institution about coordinating rides and about check-in procedures for Inn at Middletown or the Radisson Hotel in Cromwell.
• We recommend that every member of the team bring a laptop.
• For Yale, Lafayette, and UConn students: Wireless Internet access will be provided through the “eduroam” SSID on the Wesleyan network. Make sure to configure “eduroam” at your home institution before DataFest!
• For Trinity and Conn College students: We will provide you with connection instructions at registration.
• We recommend that you make sure beforehand that the software you will be using throughout the weekend is properly installed and running on your computer.
• You will be working with a large dataset so make sure that you have the space for it on your hard drive.
• We will have coffee, tea, water, and snacks available at all times, and meals will be catered at specific times. Feel free to bring anything additional you might want, including your own mug.
• You are of course free to come and go as you please.
• Power strips will be made available. But you still may want to bring your own.
• At the end of DataFest, delete all data from thumb drives, hard drives, etc. The data are sensitive.

JUDGING

• Each team will have no more than 5 minutes to present their findings to the judges. The time limit will be strictly enforced. You are better off planning your presentation to be under 5 minutes for this reason.
• Each team will be allowed at most four slides, including a title slide with your group name, etc. That means only 3 slides of content. So at some point on Sunday, you might want to set aside time to think about what you want the judges to know. All team members must be present for the presentation, but not all team members need to actually speak (given the time limitation).
• Your presentation must be emailed to DataFestWES@gmail.com by 12pm on Sunday. You may create your slides in any application, but you must submit a PDF. If using a web-based tool like GoogleDocs or Prezi, please export to PDF. If you actually want to demonstrate something on the Internet, embed the link in your slides.
• Along with your presentation you will also turn in a short one-page write-up of your project. You can think about this as the text of your presentation. The judges may refer to these during deliberation. Please send this to DataFestWES@gmail.com by 12pm on Sunday.
• The judges will decide on the most appropriate awards. Typically awards include Best Insight, Best use of external data, Best visualization. But they may decide another type of award is more appropriate based on student work.
• Winners will receive medals, certificates, $50/person, and glory!

One more day left to register! Here is what the breakdown looks like now:

We are excited to announce that DataFest 2017 is a go! We are aiming for March 31 – April 2, 2017 at Wesleyan University. Please stay tuned as we try to confirm this date.

DataFest 2016 photos are here!

Photo credit Will Bar ’18

Check out this article written about DataFest.

Thanks to everyone for a truly wonderful weekend of DataFest-ing! We would like to thank our consultants from Boehringer Ingelheim, Pfizer, SAS, The Hartford, University of Connecticut, Yale University, and Wesleyan University.

Congratulations to our winners:

Honorable Mention: Best Research Question
Team: Databayes (Wesleyan University)
Carlo Medina
Korkrid (Kyle) Akepanidtaworn
Amanda Yeoh
Poom Chiarawongse
Joshua Su

Best Insight
Team: QACs FOR LIFE (Wesleyan University)
Catherine Marquez
Alexandra De Veaux
Ariel Kaluzhny
Stephanie Ling

Best Business Application
Team: Standard Deviants (University of Connecticut)
Jiachen Liang
Peter Tallcouch
Daniel Brink
Nicholas Illenberger

Best in Show
Team: 1,588,506 (Wesleyan University)
Tiffany Coons
Samara Prywes
Jack Gorman

Thanks to our generous financial sponsors, including, The Connecticut Chapter of the American Statistical Association, RStudio, SAS, Pfizer, Google, The Brattle Group, and DataCamp.

Please stay tuned for pictures of the event.