In 2012, Harvard Business Review crowned “Data Scientist” the sexiest job of the 21st century. Since that year, the field of data science – which combines statistics and computer science, to interpret data and inform decision-making – has leaped from milestone to milestone. Data science techniques have been widely applied across a gamut of fields, ranging from self-driving cars to natural language parsing for smart home devices.

To encourage the adoption of modern data science skills, in 2017, Yale-NUS College, with support from Data-Driven Yale, organized its first hackathon, Data 1.0, for undergraduates around Singapore to come together and generate data-driven insights on various datasets. A rousing success, over 50 Yale-NUS undergraduates attended Data 1.0, delivering data-driven insights into issues such as the “hawker travelling salesmen problem” and Singapore’s housing market. This year, Data 1.0 returns as Data 2.0, Yale-NUS’ second iteration of its annual hackathon, with a focus on developing data-driven solutions to sustainability problems.

The one-day hackathon, held on March 17 at the DBS Asia X office in Singapore, will bring together undergraduates from the Singapore Management University, Nanyang Technological University, the National University of Singapore and Yale-NUS College to hack datasets donated by DBS and Data-Driven Yale. After an introduction to these datasets, participants will form teams and begin hacking. Data-Driven Yale researchers Matt Moroney, Sophie Janaskie, John Brandt, TC Chakraborty and Diego Manya will mentor the hackers, roving among teams to troubleshoot questions and offer advice. At the end of the day, participants will present their findings at the Yale-NUS Performance Hall, in front of judges Mikkel Larsen, Chief Sustainability Officer at DBS, Yale-NUS College Assistant Professor Robby Tan (Science Division) and Yale-NUS Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Data-Driven Yale Director Angel Hsu.

To help prepare participants for the datathon, Data-Driven Yale researchers Matt Moroney, Sophie Janaskie, John Brandt, TC Chakraborty and Diego Manya will lead workshops to equip hackers with tools that are useful in a data analyst’s skill repertoire. The workshops, held on the days leading up to the datathon, March 15 and 16, will cover web scraping, geospatial analysis, statistical analysis, and data visualization.

For more details and to sign up for Data 2.0, head over to yncdata.com!

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