Two of our MSc in Data Science and Analytics students won a First Prize at a data hackathon competition organised by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts on the 4th and 5th March 2017.
The winners: Kamalkanth Behera and Cheng-Kai Lu (Ken)
The prize was won in the GetCreative category of “#OpenDataHack @ECMWF - Beyond weather: explore creative uses of open data”. The competitors included professional data scientists, analysts, academics, developers, meteorological professionals and founders of start-ups.
The team studied the impact of weather precipitation on animal migration – the Kruger buffalo. They analysed ECMWF datasets along with data from MoveBank on land cover and animal migration to find correlations between the weather, migration and vegetation. They used the knowledge, skills and tools they learned during their degree.
In the future, they plan to use online machine learning algorithms like Hidden Markov to predict the optimal routes of animal migration to help them survive.
We are very proud of having so many talented students and so many graduates who are leading successful careers in Big Data (see this page for some of them).
