UTS students completing the Master of Data Science and Innovation (MDSI) degree again achieved amazing success at this year's Unearthed Sydney hackathon, winning all three cash awards.
More than 30 UTS MDSI students in eight teams competed against other universities and professional companies. Five challenges saw them achieve their wins with first prize, tied second and Young Innovators Award.
20 teams competed in the 54 hour long Unearthed Sydney 2016 event that challenged participants with developing prototype solutions to solve Big Data challenges in the resources sector.
The winning MDSI team (team Data Cake) developed a predictive algorithm by analysing 9 GB and 173 million rows of data to help South32 improve their alumina production output.
Industry partners and mentors at the event showed interested in working with the students on future data projects. Microsoft offered $5000 credit using a Microsoft azure cloud computing platform for the winning team to operationalise their idea.
UTS's Connected Intelligence Centre (CIC) has integrated data challenges or ‘Hackathons’ into the MDSI curriculum, as a vehicle for very authentic learning, also leading to back-to-back hackathon wins and consistent position at the top of the leader board.
CIC Director Simon Buckingham-Shum said the the impressive triple win built on previous success and was further evidence the ground-breaking work of the Centre in new approaches to learning were paying off.
- UTS Master of Data Science and Innovation students have won all three prizes at the 2016 Unearthed Sydney hackathon
- The 54 hour long event challenged participants to prototype solutions to solve Big Data challenges in the resources sector.