Brothers Sam and Jeremy Bowles took top prize of €4,000 worth of equipment at the first AIB Datathon. Held at AIB Bankcentre in Ballsbridge the one-day competition required entrants to develop a predictive model based on a supplied data set. Both third level students, Sam studies Computer Science in DIT and Jeremy studies Commerce in UCD.
On the day, students were asked to create a movie recommendation model based on 100,000 movie ratings from 1,000 users. The challenge was to build a movie recommendation system that would deploy similar techniques to Netflix or Amazon, such as “You may also like”. Participants were free to approach the problem in whatever way they choose.
Ten teams from all over the country took part, including entrants from University College Dublin, Dublin City University, Trinity College Dublin, University College Cork, NUI – Galway, NUI – Maynooth, Dublin Institute of Technology, Blanchardstown Institute of Technology, Cork Institute of Technology and Letterkenny Institute of Technology.
“I had no idea what to expect,” said Jeremy. “I had a module on this last year and I really enjoyed it. The Datathon has really showed me that it is possible to pursue a career in this field.”
The two runner up teams of Kamil Orłowski and Matthew O’Neill from DIT who and Silvia Planella and Marcin Dziduch from CIT each won tech equipment worth €1,000.
Seamus Murphy, chief data officer, AIB said: “AIB hosted the Datathon to give Irish graduates an insight into our work at AIB and show case how we use to data to best understand what the customer needs and thus provide the best possible service.
“The function of the Data team at AIB has changed a lot in the last two years. We have hired people from a variety of academic backgrounds from computer science and astrophysics and have broadened the scope of work across the bank. We would hope to see many of the great competitors we saw today, applying for our 2015 graduate programme.”
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