IIT AGNE conducted a unique all day event focused on the new upcoming field of Data Science on March 16 2016 at the Cambridge Innovation Center. This event, which was conceived and led by Nishant Gandhi, the youngest member of the IIT AGNE board, Akash Anand and Durriya Doctor, attracted a large number of enthusiastic data scientists, and those interested in learning more about the field.

The IIT AGNE Data Science Challenge, was organized around an all day team-based data modeling competition or “Data Kaggle”, featuring a morning program with a keynote speech and Data Science workshop, as well as an evening program that included a panel of expert speakers, before the teams presented their results to a panel of judges.

The event started with a keynote speech by Mr. Anurag Wakhlu,Global Business Director at Dassault Systemes, who is an experienced data scientist with 25 years of experience in data science and business analytics. He outlined the challenges and opportunities of big data and data analytics. He also talked about what the future might bring in this field.

Then the Data Competition or Kaggle was kicked off by Mr. Venkat Chalasani, Director of Globeflex Research India and Founder of Virtua Research Corporation, who provided the data set and explained the scope of the challenge to the participating teams. The dataset contained 60,000 entries with 128 input and output variables related to the financial industry. The goal was to model the dataset in the most efficient and elegant manner, and make accurate predictions. He was assisted by Goutham Nayak, student at Northeastern University & data scientist.

The Data Science workshop, conducted by NEU AI Skunkworks group, was a two hour introduction to the Data Science. They held the interest of the audience by introducing various methods and practices as applied to a real world problem they are working on.

The participating teams then sequestered themselves around the CIC with their laptops for the rest of the day working hard to understand and model the dataset. There were nine teams of  1-5 people each. Participants included students from the local universities, such as Northeastern, MIT and BU, as well as a team from NYU; experienced professionals and young data scientists working in the field. IIT AGNE provided lunch and snacks to the participants.

The evening program started with a fascinating panel of expert speakers, which included Dr. Venki Nagesha, who works at Apple on Siri; Dr. Preethi Raghavan, from the IBM Watson AI Lab in the Boston and an expert on Natural Language Processing; and Mr. Deepak Mittal, CEO of Xtlytics, a data startup focused on the healthcare field. Dr. Nagesha provided an overview of the data processing architecture behind Siri, with illustrations on the challenges and complexities faced in understanding ambiguous requests. Dr. Raghavan described the algorithms that are being developed and applied to applications in healthcare, which include both rigorous analytical models and Artificial Intelligence methods. Mr. Mittal took the audience through the process and structure of starting and running a data-based business with a technology platform that contains flexible techniques and tools that can help hospitals and doctors by solving challenges in healthcare.

The program ended with the final presentations by the teams on the data models they had developed through the day to an expert panel of judges, consisting of  Mr. Raymond Grossman, who is a Kaggle Top-15 Competition Master & Machine Learning Engineer at Kensho Technologies; and Dr. Rama Ramakrishnan, a serial data science entrepreneur and Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Each team provided an overview of the methods they used and the final results from their model, and answered probing questions by the judges.

The presentation turned into a two hour long event as each team went into an in-depth discussion of the statistical techniques used and overall thinking process, before compiling and comparing their predictions. The judges decided that the top two teams were tied and so both were awarded the same prize of $750 each. The winners were the NYU team and team Andrew by himself.

The IIT AGNE Data Science Challenge was an immersive experience in a new and upcoming technological field of critical importance to the economy and the future. All participants got a chance to learn from each other, and hear from and network with expert speakers. Additionally, Slack channels had been opened up for all participants to continue the discussion before and after the event. IIT AGNE will conduct this event again next year and invites all members who are interested in organization and sponsorship to contact Bala Balasubramanian at pa.balas@iitagne.org.

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