The best Master theses in Data Science and Machine Learning awarded by Nethone
The premiere edition of “Data Science Masters” competition for the best MA theses in Machine Learning and Data Science has just been concluded. During the final gala at the Warsaw University of Technology, the world has got to know the titles and authors of the most outstanding Polish theses written within this field in the last two years. The winners were awarded financial prizes sponsored by Nethone, one of Daftcode ventures.
The idea of creating Data Science Masters competition came out of the desire to promote knowledge of data analysis and encourage students to undertake research in this developing field. The goal of the project was to identify the most interesting Master’s theses, which every year arise in this area at Polish universities.
We are witnessing a revolution that is caused by the application of modern methods of data analysis. Autonomous cars, personalized medicine, recommendation systems — these are just some examples of the vast number of extremely interesting problems in the area of Machine Learning and Data Science. Every year, more and more of these issues are solved in Poland, also in the framework of MA theses research. That’s why we decided to organize a competition for the best thesis to highlight to a wider audience the most interesting works on new methods’ development and innovative applications of data analysis. Let the best works inspire the next generations.
— says the chairman of the Competition Commission, Ph.D. Przemyslaw Biecek from the Faculty of Mathematics and Information Science, Warsaw University of Technology.
Setting the bar high
The popularity of the first edition of “Data Science Masters” exceeded all expectations of the organizers. Over 70 theses were submitted by the graduates of the most prominent academic centers in Poland, all of which educate high-class specialists in the field of Data Science. The subject matter of entries was extremely varied — from deep neural network applications and analysis of the mathematical properties of the statistical tests to the econometric models.
After a long and stormy session, the Competition Jury selected three winning works. Due to the very high level of submitted works, the Jury also decided to recognize three other authors. The prizes of a total pool of 8 500 PLN were handed out at the official gala held at the Warsaw University of Technology by Jury chairman Ph.D. Przemyslaw Biecek and Hubert Rachwalski, CEO of Nethone.
Top three
During the event, the key assumptions and results described in the awarded theses were presented to the wider audience. As we all learned the topics of the winning triad varied greatly. Aleksander Nosarzewski in his research had decided to apply the power of Machine Learning to comprehending Polish political landscape and analyzing a collection of words used by the parliament members in their weekly speeches. There was no surprise in finding out that the results have only reassured these massive differences among the investigated parties. Another winner, Mateusz Susik, had also focused on the language disambiguities and proposed an algorithm allowing to identify book authors of multiple names solely on the basis of their ethnicity. The 1st prize in this year’s Data Science Masters was given however to Tomasz Wąs, whose highly mathematical work shown the application of feedback centralities in the financial system.
The next edition of Data Science Masters is scheduled for autumn 2018. Organizers of the project hope that the popularity of the competition is on the rise and the future will bring even a greater number of high-quality works written in the constantly growing fields of Data Science and Machine Learning.
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