CHICAGO, May 18, 2017 /PRNewswire/
-- Teradata (NYSE: TDC), the leading data and
analytics company, today announced student winners from the
Teradata and Northwestern University
Hackathon at the school's McCormick Education Center held on
May 2. The winning graduate students,
Lauren Yu and Jessica Chan, will receive trip packages to the
upcoming Teradata PARTNERS conference to present their findings to
a global audience of data-driven professionals.
For this year's Hackathon, the Northwestern
University Master of Science in Analytics (MSiA) Program,
one of the top data science programs, challenged 22 graduate
student teams to put their data science skills to the test while
solving real-world big analytics problems. With only a few hours of
training, the students used Teradata Aster Analytics to compete,
utilizing Teradata Multi-Genre Advanced Analytics™ techniques
including pattern, text, prediction and graph analytics.
Hackathon winners Yu and Chan analyzed 500,000 Amazon reviews to
pinpoint the characteristics that best predicted a review's
"helpfulness." The team built a series of analytical models to
break down a subset of the data consisting of all reviews that had
at least five helpful notifications. They then developed a
"helpfulness ratio" that allowed them to compare the impact of
variables like word count and readability. The results of
their analytical exercise are detailed in the Northwestern University newsletter, included
here.
"In this Hackathon, these students did an excellent job when
tested with real-world challenges such as short deadlines,
unfamiliar tools, and the need to apply soft skills such as
creativity, collaboration, and communication. You can
complete a hackathon with coding skills, but to win the
Northwestern Hackathon you need the full skill stack," said
Roger Fried, senior data scientist
on Teradata Aster's Advanced Strategy team.
"What I enjoyed about the winning presentations in this
Hackathon was that, despite my familiarity with the datasets and
the normal solutions, the students in this program put a fresh spin
on the solutions and surprised me with their approaches," Fried
added.
The Hackathon was led by Northwestern
University Professor and MSiA program director Diego Klabjan
with top Teradata Aster Analytics data scientists including
Greg Bethardy, Adam London, Roger
Fried and Choudur Lakshminarayan.
The Teradata team met with students prior to the Hackathon to
train them on Teradata Aster analytics tools and techniques. After
the eight-hour event, student teams discussed their findings with a
panel of judges that included Teradata members, a recent MSiA alum,
and returning judge Szabolcs Paldy,
vice president of digital marketing at Discover Financial Services.
Teams were assessed based on their analytic approach, creativity,
and final presentation.
Northwestern's MSiA program yields a
15-month master's degree that immerses students in a comprehensive,
applied curriculum of data science, information technology, and the
business of analytics. The program emphasizes hands-on experience
and provides students with a rigorous course of study in all three
areas of analytics: predictive, prescriptive, and descriptive.
Students completing the program have received offers to work for
organizations including Nike, Apple, Google, IBM, NASA, Teradata,
and Facebook, among others.
"I think the analytics discipline is moving in three concurrent
directions: artificial intelligence, self-service data science, and
real-time decision making," said Dr. Klabjan. "None of these is now
completely ready for prime time - with rare exceptions, but
solutions are in good progress."
"Our partnership with Teradata is very beneficial for the MSiA
program, because it gives students access to high-quality industry
instruction and analytic software," he added. "The hackathon
environment encourages students to challenge themselves and
prepares them to solve real-world problems. Teradata's team is
extremely professional and well prepared, and the students learn
substantially from the Aster scientists' expertise and
knowledge."
"Practical business analytics typically involve imbalanced
binary classifications, where the total number of positives is far
less than the negatives," said Greg
Bethardy, data scientist and solution architect at Teradata.
"This is common across all industries, for example in financial
fraud detection, medical diagnosis, and manufacturing anomaly
detection, to name a few. Several of the teams
recognized this in the data sets. They improved their prediction
accuracy using the Aster machine learning functions. The
students demonstrated techniques such as over/under sampling,
averaging together multiple models, and modern ensemble
methods."
In addition to sponsoring the annual Hackathon at Northwestern University, Teradata's academic
program, Teradata University Network (TUN) hosts a variety of
workshops, student competitions, events, and offers through its
web-based portal a cloud environment with materials covering
everything from data science and analytics to big data and data
warehousing, all provided at no cost to the universities, faculty
or students. TUN has over 4,500 registered faculty members and tens
of thousands of students from over 2,500 universities in 117
countries. Finalists for the TUN 2017 annual student competitions,
the 2017 Analytics Challenge and 2017 Data Challenge, partnering
with the charity Rise Against Hunger, will also be presenting in
sessions at the Teradata PARTNERS Conference.
Relevant News Links
- Get involved in the Teradata Aster Community: Here's a
link to the web page
- Northwestern University newsletter
coverage of the Hackathon HERE
- Seamless Advanced Analytics for Everyone – Teradata Aster
Analytics – quick overview
About Teradata
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With a portfolio of business analytics solutions, architecture
consulting, and industry leading big data and analytics technology,
Teradata unleashes the potential of great companies. Visit
teradata.com.
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SOURCE Teradata