The Watson Analytics Global Competition (WAGC) is a global competition aimed at generating innovative analytics solutions from graduate students using IBM Watson Analytics.

Objectives

1. To allow students to show innovation and creativity in applying Watson Analytics and designing useful visualisation solutions and predictive models for different types of analytics problems.

2. To identify talented individuals, among the competition finalists, for possible paid internships with IBM Watson.

Teams

· Teams of 3 graduate/master students.

· Each team must have an academic mentor or supervisor.

Prizes

Grand prize for top two finalist teams: Funding (up to USD$5000 per team to cover economy airfare and accommodation) to premier IBM Insight event in Las Vegas in October 2016 where the grand final competition would be hosted.

Top 10 finalist teams: A finalist certificate for each team member and mentor.

Conditions of participation

This is a worldwide competition which allows students to apply Watson Analytics to develop innovative analytics solutions.

Participation: Submissions are welcome from teams of 3 students at graduate (e.g. US master programs) /postgraduate (e.g. master programs in UK or Australia) levels. The participation of students from analytics, data science or information systems/management courses is highly desired.

Submission: The submissions should include a report (with dashboard screenshots and commentary, predictive models, recommendations etc, and Watson login detail) and a 4 to 5 minute video presentation (to be uploaded to YouTube as a private link) of the team’s solutions. Your presentation document should explain the purpose, benefits and feasibility of your solution. Feel free to make reasonable assumptions as needed.

Submission page: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=wagc2016

Preliminary final for top 10 teams: The selection event will be conducted via video conferencing. Further arrangements will be shared with the participants.

Evaluation criteria: Submissions will be judged based on Innovation/creativity, Practicality/feasibility of the solution, Quality of commentary and recommendations, Expected benefits for users and relevant stakeholders, Organization and presentation of the submission.

Topic

The topic will be on environmental issues. Your main task is to apply Watson Analytics and develop innovative analytics visualisation solutions and predictive models with regards to environment, e.g. climate change, energy consumption, carbon footprint, greenhouse gas emission, pollution dashboard, etc. Besides the suggested datasets/sources, you may apply any other real-world dataset to illustrate your approach (the different datasets can be combined too).

 
Some possible datasets/sources:
http://data.un.org/Explorer.aspx
http://data.worldbank.org/topic/environment
https://data.oecd.org/
http://geodata.grid.unep.ch/
http://open-data.europa.eu/en/data/publisher/eea
https://www.data.gov/

*For more details on Watson Analytics (and sign up a free account):

http://www.ibm.com/analytics/watson-analytics/

Watson Analytics Tutorials:

http://bigdatauniversity.com/courses/watson-analytics-fundamentals/

Watson Analytics -IBM TV How-To Videos:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC6D7Ekh27J6Axp9BNKyLQ3w

Want to learn more? You can:

· Workbook https://ibm.app.box.com/s/6zhj770ep5es0fm5t7y7dxa08ugc1y4g to download step-by-step workbook and dataset

· Online Course http://bigdatauniversity.com/ to enrol in free courses on Big Data University

Note: Watson Analytics is a user-friendly tool and normally students can master the tool within days by working through the tutorials.

If you have any questions please contact us at

Competition Co-Chair: Dr William Yeoh william.yeoh@deakin.edu.au (first contact point)

Competition Co-Chair: Dr Greg Richards richards@telfer.uottawa.ca

More Info: http://ibm-cbap.telfer.uottawa.ca/up-and-coming-events/

Registration

Register your team here: https://goo.gl/bQ3qzG

 
 
Important dates
Registration deadline: 31 December 2015
Submission deadline: 1 March 2016
Preliminary final (top 10 finalists shortlisted): 1 July 2016
Grand final (top 2 finalists judged in Las Vegas): 26 October 2016

Competition Sponsor: IBM Corporation

Co-Chairs:

Greg Richards, IBM Centre for Business Analytics and Performance, Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa, Canada.

William Yeoh, IBM Centre of Excellence in Business Analytics, Deakin Business School, Deakin University, Australia.

Advisory Committee:

Randy Messina, IBM
Ching-Yung Lin, IBM Watson Research Centre
Neil Foshay, St. Francis Xavier University
Michael Gendron, Central Connecticut State University
Barbara Dinter, Technical University of Chemnitz
Ales Popovic, University of Ljubljana
Shan Wang, Renmin University of China
Siew-Fan Wong, Sunway University
Wullianallur Raghupathi, Fordham University
Jie Ren, Fordham University