April 28 started early at The George Washington University as students armed with laptops, notepads, and coding manuals filed in for the inaugural “Data Challenge DC” hackathon.
Co-hosted by the George Mason and George Washington University ASA student chapters and sponsored by The George Washington University Department of Statistics, more than 30 graduate students from across the DC metro area participated in the seven-hour event.
The students, organized into eight teams of four people, worked to extract interesting relationships, hidden structure, and new insights from the Global Terrorism Database. After six hours of feverish modeling and analysis, the teams presented their results to a panel of six seasoned data scientists and statisticians for judging.
“Many hackathons are all-night affairs designed with undergraduate students in mind,” said Glenn Hui, lead organizer. “We wanted to arrange an event geared toward graduate students.”
Xiang Li, event co-lead, added, “We also focused on making the competitive aspect secondary. It was more of a clinic. We sought industry professionals to serve as mentor-coaches to help the students instead of simply judging the results.”
Volunteering their time as mentor-coaches were Mikhail Flom of IBM, Tigran Markaryan of Ipsos and George Mason University, Leanna Moron of Child Trends, Gonzalo Rivera of Westat, Pranav Sachdev of Mercer, and Judy Wang of The George Washington University. By encouraging slow starters, inspiring ideas, and motivating progress, they helped every team finish on time and with a sense of accomplishment. The mentor-coaches brought the event to a close by recognizing the three teams winning the visualization, methodology, and insightfulness awards.
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