Urbanlytics 2019 Data Hackathon by Axiata happening this weekend

Urbanlytics is having its 4th weekend-long Data Hackathon (also known as Datathon) installation hosted by Axiata. It’s a lot more interesting than you would have imagined, really. Before we share more insights and details on this, take a short break and watch what happened in the last year’s Urbanlytics datathon.

Hyped up already? So what happens in a datathon, you may ask? Basically, participants in teams, are given real (but anonymized) complex datasets, out of which they are tasked with finding solutions to the provided business problems by creating the most accurate data models. You’re right, it’s an endurance process and participants are only given a very limited time to figure out their solution. The winning team backs goodies way beyond just cash prizes (which is over RM40,000 this year, by the way). Winners actually get a chance to join any of Axiata partnering companies and materialize their dreams.

This year, the theme would be “Smart Cities” where participants will be solving problems around “creating cashless and low-carbon city”, specifically low-carbon mobility planing by utilizing Big Data. There has been a massive increase in participation this year too which makes it even more interesting. Compared to last year where there were about 110 participants out of 300 applications, this year will see 220 participants out of 600 applications which is a whopping double increase. Since we’re talking data, demographically, there will be 30% female participation compared to 10% last year. This was achieved by having two days Women of Data workshop organized by Axiata that saw 145 women trying their hand at data science field.

The grand prize will be given out by YAB Tun Dr. Mahathir Bin Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia at the Smart Cities 4.0 conference that happens a day after Urbanlytics 2019. The datathon challenge itself is expected to be a ‘no-sleep’ event, pushing the limits of the participants to figure out a solution within 24 hours. The outcomes may include visualizations, insights into specific variables and predictions or analyses involving complex, external datasets.

Judging panel would comprise of Pedro Uria Recio, Head of Axiata Analytics Centre, Alexandros Paterakis, Chief Information Officer of Celcom, Paul Morrissey, Ambassador for Big Data Analytics and Customer Experience of TM Forum & Technology Entrepreneur, and Bruno Gagliardo, Global Director of Data Analaytics of iflix. Urbanlytics will be happening in Lanai Kijang.

At the time of writing, the data science market is standing at 11 data scientists per billion dollars (USD) GDP.

Pokdepinion: Well, I fiddled a bit with R programming language and it’s a lot of fun manipulating data and understanding patterns. I highly recommend this field, it’s a highly paying career path currently.