April 16, 2021 •Lisa Jaso
This past weekend, Summit Consulting hosted our seventh annual—and first virtual—2021 DC DataFest with the University of Maryland’s Social Data Science Center. While hosting virtually posed its challenges, the spirt of DataFest was the same: students from different schools, different backgrounds, and different majors working in teams collaborating on a data-analysis challenge that is most likely beyond the scope of what they normally see in their classes.
At the end of the weekend, each team presented their findings in a 5-minute video to the panel of judges. The teams were judged across three categories: best insight, best visualization, and best use of outside data.
This year, we hosted teams from Johns Hopkins University, the College of William & Mary, Mary Washington University, and Montgomery College. Johns Hopkins took home two of the awards, best insight and best visualization, and Montgomery College won for best use of outside data.
The DC DataFest competition has grown significantly since Summit began hosting in 2015, and it’s gratifying to see the growth in the students and across the data science community. “I am very proud of Summit’s ongoing support of DC DataFest,” says Founding Partner Albert Lee. “Hosting DataFest is Summit’s way of paying it forward and growing the next generation of data scientists in the mid-Atlantic region. With each passing year, I have been increasingly impressed by the talents from the participating universities.”
DC DataFest could not occur without the support of our VIP consultants and judges, who volunteer their time each year to help guide students through the challenge and judge them on their final presentations.
We’d like to thank our VIP consultants: Albert Lee (Founding Partner, Summit Consulting); Sarah Cunningham (Director, Summit Consulting); Jay Westreich (Sr. Analyst, Summit Consulting); Stephen Davies (Assistant Professor, Computer Science, Mary Washington University); and Wafer Hsu (graduate student, American University); and our judges, Brian Butler (Professor and Senior Associate Dean, University of Maryland Social Data Science Center); Mike Willis (Associate Director, Economic and Risk Analysis, SEC); Joe Willey (Research Director, Data Foundation); and Phil Killewald (Senior Data Scientist, Mathematica–MPR). Without your dedication to the 2021 DC DataFest, it could not have been such a success.