06 Arrival

5:49 PM Fri, Phil: I’m just awaiting feedback from the final 2 judges…

9:09 PM Fri, Phil: The finalists will be announced within the hour (hopefully)

3:34 AM Sat, Phil: The finalists are…

Here’s an idea for the dataset to be used at next year’s datathon - the heart rate, blood pressure and other vital signs over the hours before and after the announcement of the finalists 😅.

The competition had two categories this year.

  • Insights
  • Data2App

These two categories were further divided into student teams and ‘all comers’.

On Monday we received an email that our video was in the final for Data2App…

…and we became optimistic.

On the Wednesday, there were talks in the morning by Scott Wilson, Felicity Splatt, Eugene Dubossarsky, Sally Grove, Borislav Savkovic and Megan Vassarotti. Thankfully they were all very interesting and relevant.

Scott posed the question - aside from CEOs, are data scientists also dinosaurs (going to go extinct). In my opinion, we are all going to be extinct eventually, some professions sooner than others. It is worth reading the future of the professions by the Susskind brothers. They mention a trend that professionals tend to think that other professions will go extinct before their own - which was consistent with the audience reaction 😳.

Felipe Flores compered enthusiastically. He has a podcast interviewing data science leaders in progressive companies. If you are trying to decide which company is good to work for, this is a great resource.

In the afternoon, the Insight finalists presented and were judged. Footy finals and congestion were common themes. The insights came thick and fast, were well thought out and sprinkled with valuable nuggets - I hope PTV contacts the winning teams to incorporate these insights and ideas into their future plans.

Questions asked by the judges included

  • did you adjust for annual changes
  • explain how you trained your neural network
  • did you do any testing for variations to your assumptions
  • what would be the next thing you’d look at immediately
  • did you come up with the approach after or before analysing the data

and a lot more. I’ll be updating these with more questions at uniformly random time intervals in the future, so make sure to keep clicking the reload button on this page frequently between now and next year’s competition 😁.

Then at 4:34 PM, “first prize for Data2App category goes to Mathemagicians”.

Woop! Looks like I might look back on this blog next year after all.

Our video submission was played to the crowd.

We celebrated and mingled with data science celebrities such as Phil, who made the entire event possible - thanks Phil!

Great achievement team!!

View our video submission on youtube.