Over the second weekend of November 2022, the Department of Network and Data Science held the first Social Data Science Student Hackathon for high school and undergraduate students. The event aims to reach out to talented students and promote responsible use of social data for research and addressing pressing societal issues.
The students were tasked to analyze the transaction network of Sarafu, a digital community inclusion currency maintained by the NGO Grassroots Economic. Over 80 students from four continents registered to compete in one of two challenges: participating teams either had to produce a compelling and creative infographic or had to develop a machine learning pipeline predicting which accounts become inactive in the future. After 48 hours of intense coding, 22 projects were submitted in total.
The first prize for infographics was awarded to a team of BA students Kaede Hasegawa and Chloe Turcan (University College London), who carried out a statistical analysis of the demographic features of active Sarafu users and provided recommendations to expand its userbase, while the most accurate predictions were submitted by the team of high school students Mirkó Verő, Ábel Szeszler and János Volk (ELTE Radnóti Miklós High School).
The prizes were sponsored by CIVICA, the European University of Social Sciences.
We congratulate the winners and all participants!
Infographics Category
First Prize / Kaede Hasegawa, Chloe Turcan (University College London)
Runner-up / Bianca Inocencio, Gabriele Nespoli, Giuseppe Lista (Bocconi University)
Best High School Submission / Anika Krishnan (Overlake School)
Prediction Category
First Prize / Mirkó Verő, Ábel Szeszler, János Volk (ELTE Radnóti Miklós High School)
Runner-up / Ahmet Emre Belge, Eren Batuhan Es, Berat Cabuk (Bocconi University)