KARACHI: A team of NED University of Engine­ering and Technology won a 30-hour long ‘Data Science Hackathon’ organised at the Institute of Business Administration on Sunday.

It was the first event of its kind in Pakistan in which 28 teams comprising over 100 students from 12 universities across Pakistan competed to promote the use of machine learning to bring social innovation.

The students got a hands-on experience with real-life data provided by Husaini Blood Bank which partnered in the hackathon.

In the event’s first round, students were given a descriptive real-world problem, which they had to address, along with a data set which had to be cleansed and classified with data sciences and machine-learning algorithms.

The students had to come up with an optimum solution to predict the prevalence of various diseases in donors’ data at the end of the hackathon.

Participants stayed on the campus in the 23-hour-long second round and remained busy evaluating, predicting models, analysing and coding through the night. They were also required to present their business cases for application of machine learning to blood banks to the judges’ panel right after the round.

After the presentations, the judges declared the ‘data squad’ of NED University as the winners and F.A.S.T from Habib University as the runners-up.

The winning team was awarded an amount of Rs100,000 along with a paid internship for one of the team members at the headquarter of Inqline, the event’s sponsor, in New York and the runners-up were given a cash reward of Rs60,000.

Published in Dawn, April 24th, 2019