SAF Team Wins One of Three Major Awards at Teradata Competition

Tuesday, September 20, 2016

Jennifer Lo; Arthur Law; Erin Xie; and Michael Zhang
UW's Data Analytics Team made up of SAF Students Jennifer Lo (CFM 2018), Arthur Law (AFM 2017), Erin Xie (AFM 2017), and Michael Zhang (AFM 2017) won one of three major awards presented at Teradata's 2016 Data Challenge Competition this past June.

From September 10-12, Teradata University Network (TUN) held it's second annual Data Challenge competition as part of the Teradata Partners Conference. In this competition University teams from around the world were provided with data by the American Charity Hire Heroes USA, a non-profit organization that aims to help military members, veterans, and their families succeed in the civilian workforce. 

Waterloo's team won the "Most Value to Hire Heroes" award as a result of Hire Heroes wanting to implement more recommendations from UW than any other school in the competition.

All competitors were provided with the same data set to examine, analyze, visualise, and present. They were given options to perform analysis on volunteer management, operations, and/or marketing aspects based on the data provided.

Waterloo's team provided data recommendations to better track information so that Hire Heroes could identify which of their practices were the most effective, as well as areas of improvement.

According to Waterloo's team, "The data given was extremely messy and fragmented - for example, Facebook data was given from 2011-2015 while Twitter data began in 2013 and LinkedIn [in] 2014". This makes the data much harder to organize and compare as there is only one year of overlapping data for all three sites.

The evaluators made note of the fact that Waterloo's team added significant value to Hire Heroes after they implemented their preliminary suggestions. The team of SAF students also decided to analyze both the marketing and operations aspects of the data while most other teams only touched on marketing. 

After reflecting upon their experience, the team said that the conference was "amazing", and they enjoyed meeting many "intelligent delegates from around the world". They were extremely happy with the raving reviews from Hire Heroes and the "friendly organizers".

Jennifer, Arthur, Erin, and Michael are looking to use this positive experience to help them move forward in their respective programs, and possibly in the field of data analytics.