Mukta Pillai | Science Editor
This past weekend, April 4-6, multiple students at The College of Wooster participated in Datafest under the guidance of Colby Long, assistant professor of mathematics. The annual competition is associated with the American Statistical Association (ASA) and was held at Miami University, Ohio this year.
ASA, founded in 1839, “is the world’s largest community of statisticians” and “the second-oldest, continuously operating professional association in the country.” Miami University wasn’t the only campus to host a Datafest; OSU, UCLA, Emory, RIT, ASU and Penn State are just a few of the other nationally known campuses that hosted Datafest.
Students competed in small groups of four to five, working on an intricate data set with the support of consultants. This year’s judges included Charles Malone, senior data scientist from Worldplay; Andrew Lightner, lead data scientist at 84.51°; Jacob Pieniazek, data scientist at 84.51°; Flavia Saldanha, assistant vice president of modern data strategy architecture at Fifth Third Bank and Matthew Cook, principal product owner at Fifth Third Bank.
“We left campus at 12:30 on Friday so we could make the drive to Miami and get checked in before the Friday kickoff at 7:00pm when they give the teams the problem and release the data,” Long said. “The teams then worked through Sunday morning when they made their presentations to a panel of expert judges.”
A wide range of majors were competing, from comparative religion and political science to computer science and data science. In total, six teams from four different schools participated. The Data Falcons from BGSU, the BANA Bearcats from the University of Cincinnati, the Binary Belles and the Gerberrians from Xavier University and the Scot Statisticians and Ctrl+Alt+Defeat! from Wooster. The Scot Statisticians included Ethan Juhasz ’27, Aditi Jha ’26, Ha My Pham ’25 and Yongchan Lee ’25. Ctrl+Alt+Defeat! included Jun Kang ’26, Suraj Acharya ’27, Faiaz Azmain ’25 and Zanna Anderson ’27.
“I have never had an experience quite like Datafest,” Anderson said. “It was incredibly challenging but also extremely rewarding and I feel like I learned so much over such a short period of time.”
The Miami Datafest concluded this past weekend, but nationwide competitions are ongoing through May 4, leaving much of the data still undisclosed and confidential. Congratulations and a job well done, Wooster students!