CDS Partners with Understood on Datathon
The CDS Data Science Club (DSC) recently partnered with Understood on the DSC @ NYU 2020 Datathon, which took place on November 20–21, 2020. The event was held online for 27 hours from Friday 11/20, 2pm EST until 11/21, 5pm EST. The event was a 3-way collaboration among the Data Science Club at NYU, Understood and the NYU Bobst Library.
The Data Science Club at NYU (DSC) was established in September 2020 with the objective of fostering a tight-knit community of young data scientists at NYU, aimed particularly at undergraduate DS Majors, Joint-Majors and Minors. The group hosts events, invites established speakers from inside & outside the NYU circle, and organizes teams for events such as this including other hackathons and Kaggle Competitions.
Understood is a social impact organization dedicated to serving the 1 in 5 people in the U.S. who learn and think differently. During the Datathon, Understood provided assistance throughout the event and evaluated the work of participants. The Data Science Club at NYU (DSC) provided graduate student level tech assistance and managed all teams and other stakeholders. NYU Bobst hosted a technical workshop as well as a Q&A.
The Datathon focused on collecting information to support Understood’s strategic decision making process, including identifying potential partners.
The primary directive for participants included the following tasks:
- Build an automated tool to create and populate a dataset of companies that have potential to partner with Understood.
- Build logic for Understood to score how closely each company aligns with its mission statement.
- The approach should be built with latency in mind although participants can determine how to score alignment with Understood and each company .
- Participants can explore the content of the websites of the companies analyzed. NLP projects may flourish here.
“The students had unique and exciting approaches. Some groups chose to use NLP to assess the similarity in different non-profits’ mission statements using GloVe embeddings while others used clustering on publicly available financial data. All of the students made meaningful contributions in such a short period of time and we were extremely impressed by the quality of their submissions” says Francisco Javier Arceo, executive director of data science at Understood.
Understood declared the winner of the Datathon as Charlie Chen from Quantized in their announcement letter. The Understood team expressed to its participants that they were extremely impressed by both the breadth and the depth of work they completed. They described all their participants as creative and impressive and all their approaches to their work as powerful.
For more information on Understood or the Data Science Club at NYU (DSC), please see the list of resources below.
Resources:
By Ashley C. McDonald
