The department hosted the ASA DataFest 2019 @ CWRU on April 12-14. We would like to thank all those who helped make this event a great experience for everyone.
DataFest is a nationally-coordinated data analysis competition supported by the American Statistical Association, held at more than 60 universities nationwide and internationally. This is the third time we have DataFest at CWRU and participation has grown rapidly, this year about 70 students signed up. On Friday afternoon, 14 teams of energetic CWRU undergraduate students came to meet a large and complex data set, ready for 48 hours of intensive datawrangling and data analysis. We can’t tell you what the data set was since some universities haven’t had their DataFest yet, and we don’t want to spoil the surprise! But we can tell you that our teams came up with creative, insightful and innovative ways to extract interesting information the data set. One team even utilized the high-performance computing (HPC) cluster here at CWRU for their computations.
Eleven teams persisted to the end and presented their findings on Sunday afternoon for a panel of judges. Congratulations to all presenting teams on impressive analysis and teamwork and engaging presentations. Teams that were awarded special prices were:
Best Insight
Life is Soup, I am Fork: Zahin Islam, Noel Mathew, Morgan Miller, Pavan Mody, Jakob Woerner, and Sarah Yurick
Best Visualization
Big Data Energy: Kareem Agag, Shreyas Kamath, and Aayush Parikh
Honorable mention: Team Tennis (Ryan Marett, Yue Pan, and Xiaoge Zhang) and dummy thicc data (Evan Cummings, Josh Rosenberg, and Dante Velasquez)
Best Use of External Data
Surprisingly Average 5: Xinyuan Gao, Xin Hu, Xiguang Liu, Nori Moy, and Han Xu
Honorable mention: The Den by Denny’s (Anthony Brennan and Joshua Lehrberger)
A big thank-you to our judges, Stephen Berhalter (Assistant vice president and Data Management Analyst at Boyd Watterson asset management), Weihong Guo (Professor of Mathematics, CWRU MAMS department) and Jim Weisman (CEO-inResidence at BioEnterprise).
We would like to thank our sponsors: Boyd Watterson, Erie Insurance, Pandata, Mitchells Ice cream, the CWRU Steering Committee on Data Science, and the MAMS department. Their support made sure we had the energy sources needed for Also, special thanks to UTech for not only granting students access to the HPC but also spending time with us over the weekend and helping teams use the cluster.
Last, but not least: We would like to thank all our VIP consultants; faculty, graduate students, and visitors from BioEnterprise and Pandata who spent time with us over the weekend supporting the students and sharing their expertise in all things related to data and computing.