The UP Data Science Society launched the Philippine Junior Data Science Challenge on March 24, 2021 as the first exploratory data analysis (EDA) competition for college students nationwide. The official partner was Thinking Machines Data Science, a technology consultancy founded in 2015 with offices in Bangkok, Manila, and Singapore. The poster gave the competition dates as March 29 to April 24, 2021. The prizes were cash and an internship, and the society published a primer at bit.ly/PrimerPJDSC21.
Registration and datasets
Teams of two to four members with coding, analytic, presentation, and data visualization skills signed up at bit.ly/UPDSSoc2021 and answered a questionnaire sent by email. Individuals could also sign up alone and be grouped with other participants. Teams chose between two datasets, a COVID-19 vaccine dataset and a movie dataset. Registered teams got preliminary access to the datasets on March 30, 2021. Registration closed on April 2, 2021, and the datasets were sent to everyone who had signed up on April 3.
Top 30 and workshops
The Top 30 teams were notified by email on April 5, 2021. The society’s look back in May 2022 said thirty teams took part. On April 10, the teams joined half-day workshops and breakout room discussions with two Thinking Machines data scientists, Sam and Joxx, who taught data storytelling and how to think like a data scientist. EDA decks were due on April 12.
Top 5 and finals
The Top 5 were announced on April 17, 2021: Dark Turtles of Evil, ParetoPo, EbenneJulA, PBB Stars, and SimplePi. The finals were streamed live on April 24, 2021 from 9:30 AM. The five teams gave their EDA presentations and received certificates of excellence, signed by society president Cyan Pascual.
Judges
The panel was three representatives of Thinking Machines: Andre Tan, Chiara Ledesma, and Chip Bautista.
Winners
The results were posted on April 27, 2021.
- Champion: Team EBenneJuLA, 15,000 pesos and an accelerated internship opportunity
- 1st runner-up: ParetoPo, 10,000 pesos and an accelerated internship opportunity
- 2nd runner-up: Dark Turtles of Evil, 5,000 pesos and an accelerated internship opportunity
Entries from that year that participants published on GitHub include an analysis of COVID-19 cases against vaccination data and a study of COVID-19 discussion on Twitter, in the repository cashewpillar/ph-el.