Reflections on Organising an 850-participant Data Analytics Competition

18 February 2022 • Axel Lau & Harry Chang

Overview

What is DAC2022?

Serving as the annual flagship event of NUS SDS, this year’s Data Analytics Competition attracted over 850 participants across 230 teams from our 6 local universities. Originating as a Data Science Competition a few years ago, our organising team opted for a new format this year, choosing to focus on exploratory data analysis instead to make it more beginner-friendly. This year’s competition was a great success, which ultimately led to over 100 submissions and 5 top teams over the course of a week’s efforts. This year’s competition featured a geospatial dataset graciously sponsored by Grab and participants got to work with real-life transport data across countries in the region. This allowed them to practice their technical skills that they have learnt in class, giving them a glimpse of working as data analysts over a span of four days.

To view the submissions made by our top 5 teams, you may check them out here!

Background

With the success of last year’s Data Science Competition hosted by the previous organising team, we wanted to ensure that this year’s competition was similarly successful to reach a wider audience base. When we initially started planning the competition back in August 2021, we wanted to find a reputable sponsor for the event. Thanks to the Career Advisors at NUS Centre for Future-Ready Graduates (CFG), we were given the chance to pitch to Grab the idea of collaborating for our annual datathon event. Given the impromptu opportunity, we swiftly customised a pitch deck for Grab to explain the benefits of working with us for DAC 2022 such as raising awareness of Grab’s job/internship opportunities for students in NUS. It is not often that we get the opportunity to put our personal presentation skills to good use and convince an external party to host an event that would be beneficial for both parties.

A screenshot of our Opening Ceremony, featuring the introduction video of the dataset by Grab

Learnings

A smooth sea has never made a skilled sailor

Organising such a large-scale datathon isn’t easy and will never be. There isn’t much information online as to what you need to have and what key points that you will need to take note of. Fortunately, NUS SDS does have previous experience hosting these kinds of events that we could tap into while we were planning for DAC 2022. Previous batches’ proper documentation of past planning mistakes and general competition guidelines helped us to gain a bigger picture of the event that we wanted to host and visualise the roles that we needed to fill.

When we had first received the dataset from Grab, our organising team was stumped at extracting insights from it as no one on the team had prior experience with geospatial data. Our Workshop Team members, who were supporting the organising team, kindly volunteered to do more research on handling geospatial datasets. Their eagerness and confidence in dealing with the dataset allowed the organising team to confidently move forward with planning the rest of the competition.

One major issue that we had faced midway through the planning of the competition was that we had underestimated the amount of work the organising team had to do to get the event up and running. There were indeed many administrative matters to resolve, which included the collation of Non-Disclosure Agreement forms as well as confirming the schedules of our judges to ensure their participation in our event. Handling all these processes in the right manner was indeed crucial to ensure the smooth operations of this event.

On top of this, our initial plan was to host DAC 2022 on the 2nd week of January, when NUS students just started the semester in hopes of getting more teams to sign up. Yet, by the middle of December 2021, the organising team had not much to work with yet, with merely a skeletal structure of the event flow.

After assessing the situation that we were in, where much of the event was not planned yet and the Grab personnel were currently on leave for the holidays, we decided to postpone the event to the start of February, right after the Chinese New Year celebrations to give ourselves more time to plan for the event. The main thought process behind this decision was that a delayed event will always be better than a rushed barely planned event.

Fortunately, our efforts paid off in the end, as there was an increase in the number of signups overall. This was particularly impressive, considering that we hosted our competition at a much later period compared to last year and were in fact expecting a decrease in participation rates. In fact, one of our main considerations of planning this event was to reinvigorate student life given the current COVID-19 situation. We were indeed glad to see that the large number of signups was a testament of this.

Of course, this would not have been possible without the help of our Publicity Team members, who reached out to nearly 40 other student clubs to help us increase our outreach for the event. Other NUS departments such as CFG, Faculty of Science and School of Computing also helped us to publicise our event, which was much appreciated. Indeed, we’ve learnt that it’s vital for us to maintain good relations with other like-minded student organisations to ensure the success of organising such events.

2. Communication is key (by Axel)

It is one thing to have a vision for the competition and another to execute it. For myself, I tend to keep my ideas to myself and prefer to execute simple tasks by myself to not inconvenience others. However, in the scenario that I was in, having to juggle internship and planning of DAC, communicating my ideas to the team for them to execute was becoming increasingly important. After all, hosting DAC is a team effort and not an individual effort.

Delegating tasks to the Events Team allowed for planning to occur even when I was occupied by my internship’s tasks. Delegating tasks to my team members also had a positive effect, as I was more able to focus on the big picture of the event and realise which areas of planning that we had neglected. Giving freedom to team members to resolve their own tasks at their own prerogative gave them a greater sense of ownership and an incentive to seek out innovative solutions.

One thing that I’m really proud of in this competition came out of our member’s initiatives. One of them suggested using Discord as a central hub for disseminating information about the competition and providing a common platform for groups to discuss their projects. Discord has lots of useful bots and functions for running hackathons, such as user-defined roles and room assignment for teams. With Discord, we were also able to allow for Q&A questions to be publicly viewed and referenced by other teams. Using Discord did immensely help to streamline competition communication and I would wholeheartedly recommend other competition organisers to use it as well.

Continuously communicating about what had not been done and what could be improved also helped us to assess the current situation that we were in. This really helped to smooth out the planning process and ensure that we covered any blind spots that we had failed to consider at first.

3. Failure is the key to success (by Harry)

Similar to Axel, I gave my Marketing Team members the liberty to identify potential sponsors that could support our event. Doing this would allow them to learn more about the data/tech industry in general before we would proceed to shortlist our prospective partners and/or sponsors. Our team had managed to identify many different companies from various industries, but had faced rejections in the process. Worst still, many companies did not respond to our sponsorship emails, which felt demoralising at times.

With multiple waves of attempts however, we managed to secure enough sponsors to support our event. Furthermore, we even exceeded our own sponsorship target in the end, leading to an overall increase in the prize pool compared to last year’s competition. The addition of having sponsored t-shirts from an external company was also a nice touch, given that this would entice participants to send in a valid submission to us for the competition.

In summary, pursuing sponsorships was indeed an eye-opening experience for our team. This has taught us to be resilient when facing hardships or dejections, which would only make us mentally stronger over time. Without experiencing prior failures, achieving small successes like these would not be as enjoyable as one would expect.

Jet New, President of NUS SDS, making his Closing Speech to thank all parties involved in DAC2022 during our Closing Ceremony

4. Playing to each other's strengths

Managing DAC 2022 was more than just handling a dataset, as there were a lot of tasks that we needed to complete to make it seem enticing for participants to join. The success of this event would not have been possible without the help and guidance from our fellow members in NUSSDS who excelled at their different roles:

Our President Jet and Vice-President of Events Ananya, for helping to look through our draft event proposals and giving constructive criticism of certain aspects of the event to make it better.

Our Events Team members Fang Ling, Shreya, Yi Fu and Madeline, for working together with Grab to plan out the timeline and problem statement for the competition. The team’s efforts were indeed vital in ensuring that everything operated smoothly without major hiccups throughout the competition week.

Our Marketing Team members: Gordon and Chenxiao for securing sponsors for DAC 2022; as well as Hannah and Aengus, for helping to manage a “Team Finder” feature of the event. This Team Finder matches people to form a team and was a rather important feature that we wanted to have. As most lessons are still taught virtually, we wanted to use DAC 2022 as a chance to connect data enthusiasts together to work on a meaningful project and from this experience hopefully build new friendships. Keeping to the theme of making the competition beginner-friendly, we wanted to make it as inclusive as possible to individuals who might not know many people interested in the field of data analytics. Hence, the Team Finder was important as it helps participants to make new friends and network with fellow data enthusiasts.

Stephen and Rui En, along with their Workshops Team members Keith, Javier and Wei Liang, for helping us to better understand the dataset and were integral in helping us to word the problem statement for the competition. Having them around to work on understanding the dataset really helped to lighten the load on the Events Team. During the actual competition, they assisted to get participants started on the provided dataset by hosting an introductory workshop.

Ethan and his Publicity Team members Briana, Tze Lynn and Yi Xuan, for helping to design cool slides and social media posts to make DAC 2022 look appealing! Their efforts in contributing appealing visuals and increasing social media outreach were also a major contributing factor to the success of this event.

A screenshot from our Closing Ceremony, featuring our organising team, judges and participants

Conclusion

All in all, while organising DAC 2022 was a pretty stressful experience, we felt that this has helped us to achieve some form of personal growth and develop our leadership skills. We would both agree that this was indeed one of our toughest experiences in university so far.

Acknowledgements

To commemorate the success of this event, we would also like to thank the following for their support:

Our main sponsor, Grab and its Data Science Team (consisting of Victor, Kenrex and Keru), for providing us with the dataset, prizes and expertise as judges;
Our other sponsors, AI Singapore and Quest Ventures, for providing us with prizes for our participants;
The NUS Department of Statistics and Data Science, for partially sponsoring the cash prizes for this event;
Gregory He and Emily Tan, our Career Advisors from NUS CFG who assisted us with onboarding Grab to support our event;
Jackie Tan, Head of Tribe Academy, for supporting our flagship event for the second consecutive year through his advanced technical workshop that was vital to the competition;
Prof Carol Hargreaves, Director of NUS Data Analytics Consulting Centre, for accepting our invitation as one of our judges;
And last but not least, the undergraduate population amongst our local universities for either participating actively in our competition or helping to spread the word about our event through various social media platforms.

We hope that all parties involved have enjoyed their experience throughout the competition and had fun in the process. Our society looks forward to organising this flagship event again next year, so that more students will be inspired by the applications of data science and analytics in the real world.

If this post has inspired you and you are keen to take on the challenge of hosting the next iteration of our flagship datathon event, do look out for our next recruitment cycle over the summer holidays.

Axel Lau is the Events Director of the NUS Statistics and Data Science Society (AY21/22)
Harry Chang is the Marketing Director of the NUS Statistics and Data Science Society (AY21/22)

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