Willamette University’s 2022 DataFest featured its largest and most complex challenge yet.
Eight teams of undergraduates from Willamette, Pacific University, Portland State University and Reed College recently worked 48 hours around the clock to find meaning in a large, complex dataset from Yale School of Medicine.
Organized by Albaugh Assistant Professor of Statistics Heather Kitada Smalley, the event was hosted by Willamette and sponsored by the American Statistical Association.
Mentors for the competition included last year’s DataFest winner Oscar Wecker ’21, president of the Data Analytics Club Hayden Vaughn ’23 and Visiting Assistant Professor of Physics Jed Rembold, who also teaches data science classes. Another mentor, Megan Eichelberger MBA/MSDS ’23, works as a systems analyst at Adidas and taught winning team Copy & Paste how to do sentiment analysis.
Judges included Wecker, Assistant Professor of Computer Science Friday Agbo, Assistant Professor of Computing and Data Science Kristen Gore and Pacific University Professor of Data Science Evgenia Chunikhina.
The winners
Best Insight: Overbooked Algebraists (Willamette University)
Team 5: Alexandra N. Walker ’22 and Juni DeYoung ’23
Best Statistical Analysis: Pain-Stompers (Willamette University)
Team 2: Kendall Leonard ’25, Devyn Mandala ’22, Cami Lawson ’22, Ivy Yeoh ’22
Best Use of External Data: Copy & Paste (Willamette University)
Team 6: Alena Langford ’23, Paulina Konev ’22, and Nathan Garcia-Diaz ’23
Best Data Visualization: Go Boxers (Pacific University)
Team 1: Iris Murakami, April Murakami, Waverly Sudborough, Matthew Zaback
