We congratulate our CSE Ph.D. students: Alireza Nasiri, Jing Jin and Steph-Yves Louis from the Machine Learning and Evolution Lab directed by Dr. Hu for winning the second place and $2,000 prize in the Big Data Health Science Case Competition organized by the UofSC National Big Data Health Science Conference, Columbia, SC February 7th-9th 2020.

The objective of the case competition is to develop a machine learning or data analytic tool that will accurately identify the culprit chemical for a given patient. The provided dataset has a list of 311 chemicals and 79 corresponding signs and sympotoms and a list of ~1,000,000 patient records. There are total 19 teams from around the nation. The Big Data Case Competition is intended to provide enthusiastic teams of graduate and senior undergraduate students with the opportunity to apply their knowledge to the analysis of big datasets in healthcare. Participating teams will be given the same business problem, datasets and access to software to solve a challenging problem using a data analytics approach. Each participating team will analyze the case and data sets provided by the sponsoring company. During this period, the teams must identify the most prominent issues facing the company and develop a strategy to address these key issues in order to help companies achieve their goals. Team members will work together to present their methods and analysis results at the Big Data Health Science Conference. A panel of industry and academic experts judge the presentations based on teams’ use of the full analytics process, from framing the problem to methodology selection, data use, model building and innovation.