Loads of data, byteloads of memories!
In this article, Shrey Jani, Dept. of EEE, chronicles his experience at the Inter IIT Tech Meet 2019.
My experience was full of surprises and, of course, learning. We will rendezvous with some of them as we go through the journey!
The team was formed in early November, and I was lucky enough to be chosen.
The data science competition was organized by Bitgrit Inc. along with IIT Roorkee. Bitgrit is a relatively new up and coming online platform that hosts various data science competitions, like Kaggle.
The event had three rounds. The first two rounds took place in teams’ respective campuses, and for the third and final round, we went to Roorkee.
ROUND 1:
Lots of data were given: numerical market parameters and news data converted into numerical embeddings, and the target variable was the USD-JPY exchange rate at the end of the month.
Our team started working on the couch of the most luxurious room of the SAC building: Robotics club!
We used to wake up late, meet around 1 O'clock, and after 4–5 hours of coming up with different solutions and many submissions, we used to chat our way to the Khokha market, have 2–3 back to back cups of tea with samosa or kachori and head back to our rooms.
Four/five days into round one, desperate to improve our position, we had a breakthrough where our rank rocketed from 17 to rank 3! What we did was to drop almost half of the data for training our model after some analysis, and it worked wonders and put an end to our desperation.
The quote,
“Big data is not about the data.” — Gary King
finds its place here.
Jumping from our seats, shouting, and high fiving each other, other module teams were left looking at us in bewilderment.
Round one ended with IITG in the third position.
ROUND 2:
“The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.”–Carly Fiorina
In round two, we were given the employee data of some company and asked to analyze and draw inferences from it, specifically about the attrition rate of the company. It took a lot of going through the internet and python notebooks full of visualizations to form a 3-page PDF file.
IIT ROORKEE & ROUND 3:
This was during the time of the unfortunate CAA incidents. We were to land in Delhi and take a bus from there to Roorkee. Most of the IITG contingent had already reached Roorkee. Our team traveled separately. At the Delhi airport, misinformation about the situation of the area panicked us. We booked an overnight cab, and after 5 hours of travel and 10 km of thick, blinding fog, finally reached IIT Roorkee in the biting cold of the Uttarakhand winter, which appeared enthralling in the misty fog. Our contingent was accommodated in one of the student hostels.
The next morning, the results of the second round were to be announced, and I was convinced that we wouldn’t be anywhere near the top 5. Sitting in a room with results a few moments away, I said to my buddy sitting next to me, “Dude, we are losing our rank after this.” But to everyone’s surprise, our team stood second in the round two rankings, and I was thrilled by the unexpected good news!
Our overall rank was three after the second round.
The next evening top 3 teams were invited to dinner with Bitgrit folks at a nearby restaurant. Everyone on the team was thrilled (well, who doesn’t like special treatment and good food😁).
We began round three with jubilant enthusiasm after performing well in the first two rounds. But round three was unfortunately scrapped due to some issues with the problem statement.
Throughout the course of preparation, our fantastic and team-spirited seniors went out of their way to help us with any problem we had and made sure that everything was done right.
We finished on the third position bagging the silver medal!
The inter-IIT was a highlight of my rather boring third semester and definitely a highlight on my CV.
At the risk of sounding phooey, I will say that working in a team and the contingent meetings and different module people trying to solve each other's problems reinforced the values of teamwork in me. When you do something productive that too with your friends, it makes one hell of an adventure!
