Hone Your Data Skills by Hacking COVID-19

Dear data enthusiasts, 

I wanted to share with you an exciting new data science challenge series being hosted by the Research Center for Open Digital Innovation (RCODI) at Purdue University! 

What is IronHacks?

IronHacks is a Kaggle-style platform that supports a multiphase data science hacking competition. It gives you access to big, granular, actual and pre-processed temporal data from partners like SafeGraph, the State of Indiana and others. This data is exclusive (typically it would take data scientists a lot of time and money to get access to it) and captures social movements (including mobility graphs). In addition, it offers participants a no setup programming environment and many powerful features to create novel and useful models and visualizations, such as a JupyterLab, BigQuery integration, along with individual tutorials and a dashboard.

What is your task?

This special IronHacks is an opportunity for you and you to make a real-world impact as the hack’s results will inform policy-making as well as creating transparency about how our communities navigate this pandemic. Your task is to use your programming skills to predict the weekly foot traffic across thousands of places of interest around Purdue using highly granular temporal data about foot traffic and social distancing, COVID-19 incident data and other socio-economic data.

All you need is to have basic programming skills  in either  R or Python. You will use this data to develop a predictive statistical model and communicate the results using data charts. Your models will be very important for Purdue. Purdue is one of the universities that has opened for face-to-face teaching in fall 2020 (and will continue to do so in spring 2021). And as the leadership has learned, the COVID-19 virus isn’t arising from in campus buildings, It is mainly emerging in those places around Purdue where people move and interact with others (coming from many other regions in the US). 

How will you be evaluated? 

  • Your effort to explore and experiment with different models
  • The prediction accuracy of your models (e.g. mean squared prediction error) 

What’s in it for you?

  • All participants can win a share of $5000 across different group and individually-oriented categories
  • Creators of the best models will be featured on the Ironhacks website and will showcase their results to the Protect Purdue leadership team and other IronHacks partners
  • All data scientists are invited to work with the IronHacks as fellows to publish the findings in scientific outlets and popular press
  • Everyone who participates helps to Protect Purdue.

Register now to save a spot in the competition and warm-up using a set of tutorials, training-data in the IronHack’s workspace.  

The COVID-19 IronHacks Data Science Challenge: Protect Purdue will open for submission soon. The last day to join the challenge is December 5th, 2020. However, it is recommended to register now to get familiar with the platform, the task and the data.


Sign up today at www.ironhacks.com/covid19 and register for the COVID-19 Data Science Challenge!