Note: This document may be updated as the event approaches; any major updates will be clearly marked.
All information regarding the event can be found at http://bit.ly/df-edi.
DataFest 2021 @ EDI will take place virtually, on Gather. This space will be available to your 24 hours, consultants will only be available until midnight.
Consultant schedule can be found here.
Judges will be communicated the judging meeting time separately over email.
All are welcomed to any parts of the event and the award ceremony!
When you join Gather, please add [Consultant] next to your name. This is how students can recognize you as such.
When you get to Gather, you’ll land in a “reception area” where you can also find an information desk that will be staffed with one of the organizers before the kickoff. For the kickoff session head to the lecture hall. Once that’s over students will head to the workshop room to work. Each team has a designated table. If you approach the team, you join their “bubble” and can start talking to them. We recommend doing a round at the beginning of your shift. If there are no further questions for you, we recommend hanging out on the green “rug” in the workshop room, which is the designated consulting area. If you’d like to join the social hour, those will be held in the rooftop.
If you need to contact an organizer at any point during the event or have comments/questions for the other consultants, you can use the consultants-judges channel on Slack.
You can also reach the organizers by email at the following addresses:
You will receive a description of the data and the challenge prior to the event. Please note that this information is currently TOP SECRET!!! Please do not share this information with anyone else. We do not want it getting out to students prior to the event at UoE, or in other locations in later weeks.
The most important thing is to keep the mood light and encouraging! We suspect by sometime Saturday afternoon things might seem rather dire to some of the students.
On Friday night, students will be busy trying to make sense of the data. We expect that some of them might have technical problems with getting started (loading the data, viewing it, etc.). Throughout the weekend the teams will be on their own, though we might have intermittent “check ins”. We imagine they will get stuck and need advice. Sometimes, the advice could be highly technical and, depending on your background, outside your expertise. Don’t worry. They know that you are not there to solve their problems, but to offer advice. See if you can steer them towards standard problem-solving techniques: break the problem into smaller pieces, go online for advice, etc. Guide them to think about context. What sort of distribution do they expect? Why? What might cause that? How does that compare to what they saw?
This is a competition, but it is supposed to be friendly and collaborative, so don’t worry about revealing any special knowledge. This is not an exam, and so if someone asks, please answer if you can, and don’t worry about other teams over hearing. I’m hoping that, after the first evening, teams will be sharing basic technical advice on their own.
All are welcomed to the presentations and award ceremony.
A note about software: Most students will use R or Python but we also expect many to use Matlab, SAS, Excel, JMP, etc. as well. If asked for support on a platform you’re not familiar with, simply stating so is sufficient. If asked for support on a platform you are familiar with, you are welcomed to assist at any capacity you feel comfortable/up to – from talking through the approach at a high level to sitting down and coding with them.
Judging will take place over the following week and the award ceremony will take place on Zoom on Friday, 2 April, 12pm-12:30pm UK time.
We will award prizes in the following categories:
These are listed in no particular order.
The judges also have the option to name a fourth winner as Judges’ Pick.
Winners will receive medals, and one-year student memberships to the American Statistical Association. See amstat.org/membership for membership benefits and e-student memberships to the Royal Statistical Society with free print copies of the Significance magazine.
ASA DataFest has become an annual event that is officially sponsored by the American Statistical Association and held at numerous locations with participation from a large number of universities. We hope to grow the event further in the coming years. With that in mind, please send me any advice or constructive criticisms that will help us improve this event in the future.
Our primary goal is to provide a rewarding experience for the undergraduates, an experience that sharpens their analytical skills and gives them some confidence that they can take what they learn here out into the “real world”.