On January 30-31, CDISE and Softline held an Olympiad on Machine Learning for all MSc and PhD Skoltech students. The winners and high-ranked participants of this contest got the opportunity to engage in real-life tasks and projects from various sectors (industry, finance, telecom, retail, medicine) in the joint laboratory “Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and the Internet of Things”, created by Skoltech and Softline as part of a partnership agreement in education.
The task was based on a sample of real data from e-commerce businesses that included hundreds of thousands of sell records. The participants had to predict sales indicators for a hidden period. The organizers provided access to the information about completed transactions that made the task more exciting and closer to the real-case scenarios. Some participants attended such ML-competition for their first time while other teams had previously participated in international hackathons.
The winning team was decided as one who could develop a model with forecast values that were as close as possible to the actual indicators. The winners are the following teams.
- 1st place. Crossfitters (Aynur Maksutov, Vadim Selyutin).
- 2nd place. Jupyter Invaders (Jamil Zakirov, Egor Gladin, Semyon Glushkov).
- 3rd place. BEST LINE (Ivan Fursov, Evgeny Kovalev, Ruslan Rakhimov).
It is noteworthy that all winning teams and students are first-year students of the MSc Data Science program.
The closing of the Olympiad was attended by Skoltech President, Alexander Kuleshov, who awarded the winning teams and highlighted the importance and educational of intellectual competitions and the value of industrial collaboration as a part of the educational process at Skoltech.
Marina Onishchenko, director of the Softline Digital data analysis department:
“We are very pleased that the Olympics aroused such interest. Students can participate in Softline projects, working with our team of experienced specialists in the field of data science, and in the future become a part of it. This can be a great opportunity for us, and we have every opportunity to work together with laboratories, talk about its advantages and the opportunities that we plan to realize”.
Dmitry Lakontsev, Head of the Center of Excellence of NTI and the joint laboratory “Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and the Internet of Things ”:
“It is noteworthy that interest in the Olympiad was shown not only to students specializing in the field of data, but also, for example, to students involved in Advanced Manufacturing Technologies, Oil and Gas Business. Applications for artificial intelligence are effective, and it is necessary to teach our students how to interact with it and create softlines”.