KARACHI – Institute of Business Administration (IBA) Karachi hosted DataScience Hackathon sponsored by a New York-based Data Analytics startup -Inqline at the IBA, Main Campus here on Monday.The 30-hour long Hackathon was a first of its kind in Pakistan in which28 teams comprising of over 100 students from 12 universities across thecountry competed to promote the use of machine learning to bring socialinnovation.The students got a hands-on experience with real-life data from HusainiBlood Bank which partnered in the Hackathon by providing blood donors’ dataas the data set that was analyzed by the competing students to predict theprevalence of various diseases that are typically found in the donateddata, said a IBA release.The event began with keynote speaker sessions : by Associate Dean,Faculty of Computer Science, IBA, Dr. Sayeed Ghani , followed by ChiefExecutive Officer and founder of Inqline, Muhammad Atif. It comprised oftwo rounds.
The first round was seven hours long where the students were given adescriptive real-world problem. They had to address it, along with a dataset which had to be cleansed and classified with Data Sciences and MachineLearning algorithms.The students had to come up with an optimum solution to predict thepresence of various diseases in donors’ data at the end of the hackathon. AKaggle leaderboard was maintained where all the teams had to upload theirdata. The structure, grading, and design flow had been kept competitive toensure that the students put their best foot forward.The next round was 23 hours long where the participants were required tostay on campus, overnight, as was typical in international hackathons. Allof the participants kept evaluating, predicting models, analyzing andcoding through the night, and were also required to present their businesscases for application of machine learning to blood banks to the panel ofjudges right after the second round ended.The judges’ panel consisted of notable Data Science experts and universityprofessors. After the presentations, the judges announced the results anddeclared Data Squad from NED University as the winners and F.A.S.T fromHabib University as the runners-up.
The winning team was awarded an amount of Rs. 100,000 along with a paidinternship for one of the team members at Inqline’s headquarter in New YorkCity and the runners-up were given a cash reward of Rs 60,000.
