On April 1, the finals of the “Changellenge Cup IT” case championship took place in Moscow. Two teams in the finals included seven fourth-year students at the NSU Department of Mathematics and Mechanics (MMD), Vladimir Kondratyev, Kirill Kalmutsky, Artem Kravchuk, Danil Vodolazsky (LightGBT team) and Vladislav Suslov, Mikhail Murashkovsky, Polina Rudoman (New Folder team) together with Yevgeny Dedov, a student at the Department of Information Technology. For two weeks, students had the opportunity to put into practice the knowledge gained from their MMD studies.
The championship consisted of two parts, a qualifying distance round and the finals. In the first round, participants had to develop an algorithm for automatic classification and analysis of bank review attitudes. Qualifying round solutions were sent to the judges. The distance round also included a competition on the Kaggle platform to help identify finalists. Participants received points for the Kaggle competition and for their solutions to the tasks.
The results of the distance round placed the NSU students in the top ten that entitled them to participate in the finals. The challenge for the Moscow finals was to build a predictive model assessing whether users would agree to a tariff from a mobile operator.
Danil Vodolazskiy, MMD student, talked about this challenge,
The second task required a special approach to working with data. Standard machine learning algorithms worked poorly, but we figured out how to get around this problem. We were also able to solve the problem of a lack of computing resources with batch processing. The jury greatly appreciated our engineering achievements and understanding of the task from a business point of view so our LightGBT team won third place. We also received invitations for internships and bonuses towards finding employment with the best companies in Russia.
Both tasks were focused on the use of machine learning technologies in business. The goal was to make a model and evaluate the possible profit from its implementation in the company's business processes. The championship consisted of four sections: two in the field of economics and two in the IT field.
MMD student Vladimir Kondratyev described the benefits of the competition,
The tasks were interesting in relation to developing an approach to finding solutions. This format is unusual for MMD students because you are not just paying attention to mathematical models. This provided a good opportunity for students to understand the interests of leading companies in Russia and the problems they need to solve. It was also an opportunity to assess our level of training compared to teams from other Russian universities.
