Second place went to an individual entry from India, followed by another Caltech team. The quality of the data science work was surpassing across the board.
“It has been amazing to see such great minds’ collective brainpower applied to these healthcare business predictions. We hope to continue interacting with these leaders of artificial intelligence….”— Vijay Sikka, Founder and CEO of sikka.ai
SAN JOSE, CA, USA, July 27, 2021 — 29 registrants contested sikka.ai‘s AI Model Hackathon, the first of its kind in the retail healthcare realm, which ran for the week starting July 12. While the finish was extremely close, as one might expect based on that level of enthusiasm, the data was nonetheless conclusive – the winning team was indisputably this group of undergraduates from Caltech:
– Agnim Agarwal
– Neha Dalia
– Brandon Guo
– Pranav Patil
Heartiest congratulations go to Agnim, Neha, Brandon and Pranav! They summed up their experience thusly: “The Sikka AI Model Hackathon gave us a unique chance to study and forecast real-world data. We were not given much domain information for the prediction problem, which challenged us to focus on our underlying model as opposed to some prior knowledge on the subject. Because it is difficult to discern signal from noise without domain intuition, we had to use a much more rigorous validation technique than one typically would before making conclusions about the trends we observed.”
Indeed, that “rigorous validation technique” paid dividends – namely, the cash prize of $5,000 for the winning team.
Second place went to Sejal Pitale of Ahmednagar, India – quite an impressive feat for a solo entrant competing against teams in many cases. She will receive a cash prize of $3,000.
Third place went to another team from Caltech, comprised of Ankita Nandi, Clara Wang and Iris Xiang. They win $2,000 in cash for their efforts.
And last but definitely not least, Honorable Mention and its accordant $1,000 cash prize goes to Dhruv Kaul, Atharva Tendle and Manish Agarwal, all of Manifold Computing, a “distributed research group working on significantly improving learning systems and applying them to the toughest problems humanity faces.”
Said David Allen, Chief Technical Advisor – Moneta Ventures and sikka.ai Advisor, “It was exciting to see all the energy and passion from the participants as well as some very interesting approaches to gleaning insights.”
Vijay Sikka, Founder and CEO of sikka.ai, added, “We are very proud that 29 entrants participated in our first AI Model Hackathon. It has been amazing to see such great minds’ collective brainpower applied to these healthcare business predictions. We hope to continue interacting with these leaders of artificial intelligence and machine learning long into the future. Congratulations to all involved!”
This press release was originally published July 27, 2021. View the original article here.