Carolina Data Challenge

The Institute’s students participating in the Carolina Data Challenge — a weekend-long hackathon that brings together hundreds of participants from across the region — have brought home two jury prizes!

Three teams from the Institute participated in the 2023 challenge. Carlos Castillo, Bartola Garcia, Shaun Gillie, and Emi Planchon took home first place in the natural sciences track for their analysis of US wildfire data from 2000-2010, and Manisha Kasam, Teresa Meng, Kush Patel, and Anusha Tummallapalli placed first in the pop culture track for their analysis of Spotify tracks by audio features. Also participating were Andrew Burnette, Pooja Gattamaneni, and Lillian Lecca. MSA students Edward Baker and Yang Chen led a workshop for attendees on regression modeling techniques.

CDC 2023 attendees from Institute

Institute alumni from the Class of ’23 — Wyatt Freeman, Michael Long, Derek Summers, and Nish Torane — served as mentors and/or judges for the challenge.

The CDC is hosted by Carolina Analytics and Data Science (CADS) in partnership with the Department of Computer Science at UNC. The Institute has been a proud sponsor of the CDC for 7 years, since its inception.