Top-three spot for Deakin’s ISBA team in Malaysia.
A team of Deakin Business School students has taken out top-three ranking in a prestigious international analytics competition.
Competing in the 2017 IBM Watson Analytics Global Competition (WAGC2017) in Malaysia, Deakin’s Department of Information Systems and Business Analytics team came a close third to the University of Maryland University College’s (USA) second place and Dalhousie University’s (Canada) first place.
By applying Watson analytics, Deakin students Bhupesh Pandey, Diamond Lumba and Frank Cheng, and team supervisor Dr William Yeoh, conducted an in-depth analysis on the health benefits of renewable energy.
‘The findings spur local communities to action by showing the interdependencies of human life’s longevity with the extent a country uses renewable energy sources,’ said Dr Yeoh.
The competition was part of the 5th International Big Data and Analytics Educational Conference hosted by Deakin University and is a highly-recognised inter-varsities competition that aims to generate innovative analytics solutions using IBM Watson Analytics.
‘The WAGC participants could utilise the valuable analytics skills gained from the competition and tackle real-world problems such as climate change,’ explained Dr Yeoh.
Held in Langkawi, the 5th International Big Data and Analytics Educational Conference explored educational programs across all areas of analytics and big data and featured speakers from USA, Canada, UK, Singapore, China, Vietnam, Malaysia and Australia, including an industry keynote on real-world analytics applications by the co-founder of Fave (formerly known as Groupon).
Dr Yeoh, who is also the chair of the conference organising committee and director of Deakin’s IBM Centre of Excellence, delivered the conference opening speech and briefed delegates on the proposed Global Institute of Data Technology and Analytics – an international collaborative centre that is jointly-initiated by academics from Deakin, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU), Singapore Management University, and National Taipei University of Business.
‘Overall, the success of the international conference has again substantiated Deakin’s reputation as a global leader in analytics education. Further, winning the WAGC top-three spot in consecutive year reaffirms the high quality of Deakin’s students as well as the analytics course,’ he said.