Purdue/Yale Team Win this Year's DataHack@Yale

04-13-2018

Purdue Statistics PhD students Tianyang Hu and Hanxi Sun, along with their two Yale teammates Scott Gigante and Adam Erickson, won this year’s DataHack@Yale. Hosted by the Yale Institute for Network Science, the hackathon is an open, annual competition in which students and post-docs from schools all over the U.S. are invited to participate and use their data science and statistics skills to solve real-world questions.

This year’s DataHack included 16 teams of four students each. The teams were presented with four sets of data from various Yale labs and sponsoring companies and were asked to choose one set. Tianyang and Hanxi and their teammates decided to work with a particularly rich and detailed dataset of forestry inventory provided by SilviaTerra. They applied manifold learning techniques to reveal the underlying structure of the data, combined lumber prices and transportation costs to pick the best location for the next sawmill, and built an interactive website where people can visualize different attributes in the entirety of Butler County, Pennsylvania.

Each member of the winning team received a certificate for their achievement and a Nintendo Switch with one game.

Congratulations, Hanxi and Tianyang!