Graduate Students Put UNC Charlotte on the Data and Analytics Map

The purpose of this challenge is to allow students to present their business analytics research to professionals within the business analytics community. The final presentations were given Oct. 22 – Oct. 23 in Anaheim, CA. 2 out of 3 of the teams were finalists in the competition. The third team was recognized by the TUN.

From the DSBA program, Esra Alshammari, Aysha Nahan, Noelline Dsouza, Shaarvani Karvula and Vinaya Tinguria won first place, “Overall Winners,” as well as the People’s Choice Award. This team was supervised by Belk College of Business faculty member Reza Mousavi.

According to Nahan, “it was [a] moment to cherish forever!” The team worked hard on their project from February to October. The Rise Against Hunger Organization announced that the team’s analysis was, “the most useful for [us] and one of the best of its kind.”

Another team member, Dsouza, says, “Ultimately, winning two awards when representing the university is like icing on the cake.”

Also supervised by Mousavi, DSBA students Robyn Levine, Rowena Palima, and Lyndsay Ricther received an honorable mention in June from the TUN. They did not compete in the finals in Anaheim, CA but their hard work and contribution to Rise Against Hunger did not go unnoticed.

Ricther says, “the competition allowed us to apply our classroom experience to a real-world challenge by helping Rise Against Hunger use its existing data to uncover opportunities related to donor relationships, volunteer engagement, and gift completion. We were thrilled to be recognized by TUN with an honorable mention and are very proud of the achievements by the other UNC Charlotte finalist teams.”

DSBA students Saritha Ramkumar, Madlen Ivanova, Kartik Niyogi, Sampa Sanyal, and MBA student Sugndha Mann were awarded The Best Use of Analytics and Visualization Tools under the supervision of Sangkil Moon.

Ramkumar explains their project, “[it] focused on providing recommendations to the potential restaurant owners to scale themselves to varied preferences within the locality. To achieve this, we merged the Yelp text reviews with the Charlotte county zoning dataset to have each of the restaurants mapped to their locality which could be business, residential, uptown/office etc. The foremost challenge was in handling large volumes of data within our laptops.”

It’s safe to say that these students have made UNC Charlotte proud. Congratulations to each of the team members and their supervisors. Here are some pictures from the competition.