As the cornerstone of data science activity at LSE, the LSE Data Science Institute (DSI) was proud to support the recent Data Science Weekend.
This hybrid event was open to all university students in the UK, with participants taking part in a range of workshops and challenges organised by the LSESU Data Science Society and industry partners.
The first day of the event commenced with a keynote speech from DSI Director Professor Ken Benoit. Representatives from industry partners Huawei, FNA, and TrueCue then introduced their respective organisations and briefed participants on their challenges.
Following this, participants took part in workshops on 'Finding Problems in Time Series Data' led by Sean Tracey (Senior Developer Advocate for AWS), and 'Classification Principles' led by Dr Jonathan Cardoso-Silva (LSE Data Science Institute). Speaking about the event, Jonathan said "I was really happy to see the creativity and passion LSE students have for data science. The event was very well organised, and I was very happy to participate."
LSESU Data Science Society President Ethan Cheong also noted this enthusiasm: "It’s heartening to see so much interest and support for our society. I think we're in a unique position at LSE to apply data science to finance, economics and the social sciences and I’m excited to see how the data science community here grows over the coming years".
Participants worked on their projects across the rest of the weekend, accessing support during the development stage of their hacking in the form of 'office hour' sessions. Each of the partners provided mentors to guide progress and troubleshoot technical issues.
Secretary of the LSESU Data Science Society Shahzeb Khan explained that this approach allowed participants to experiment: "One of the things I enjoyed was seeing participants collaborate with each other to come up with innovative solutions to the problems given. I think one of the key things about data science is that students learn much more from practice than by theory and I believe our event helped to reinforce this."
Once projects were submitted, partner firms were then invited to select the best-performing team in their respective challenge category. These teams gave a short presentation to explain and illustrate the vision, methodology and findings of the project. Prizes included fast-tracked summer internships and cash prizes of up to £2500.
Congratulations to each of the prize winners listed below!
FNA
First place: Mukun Liu and David Chen.
Second place: Xiaoxiao Zeng and Matthieu Jeanjean.
Third place: Myungchan Kim, Steve Hong and Xiao Cheng.
TrueCue
First place: Luna Baalbaki.
Second place: Zhi Yu.
Third place (joint): Ben Steiner, Patrick Braun and Michail Christodoulou.
Third place (joint): Arnav Jaitly, Lance Ng.
The LSESU Data Science Society organise events, projects and a community platform to introduce members to the applications of data science in different fields and industries, and have built a community for LSE students to learn, accelerate and support each other on their data science journeys.
