Prof. Saurabh Bagchi proposed and led the IEEE Computer Society North America Student Challenge (NASC) Competition. Preeti, PhD student in DCSL, was part of the Organizing Committee.
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The NASC was held over October through December of 2024. Out of the forty three registered teams, three were crowned winners at the IEEE Big Data Conference in December. The teams were composed of up to three students, with an optional faculty mentor, and they were challenged to solve three problems based on real-world datasets.
The first challenge problem was predicting missing resource usage data from data center traces, which came out of our NSF-funded FRESCO project. The second problem was inferring latent user preference from conversations with a LLM, contributed by Prof. Xiangliang Zhang of the University of Notre Dame. The final problem was predicting the invocation rate of functions in a cloud computing platform, contributed by General Motors and Microsoft.
The event was financially sponsored by IEEE Computer Society and Adobe Research.
The winning team was composed of Bilal Saleem, Syed Hasan Amin Mahmood, and Omar Basit, from Purdue University. The first runner-up team was made up of Daniel Leeds, Harrison Huang, and Jonathan Mak, from Rice University, and the second runner-up team was a team of one, Eliot Hall, from San Jose State University.
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From left: Eric (IEEE CS), Deborah (Rutgers, judge), Haoliang (Adobe Research, judge), Kaiqun (SD State, judge), Bilal (Winning team member, Purdue), Hasan (Winning team member, Purdue), Omar (Winning team member, Purdue), Saurabh (Purdue, chair NASC 24), Eliot (2nd runner up, San Jose State), Daniel (1st runner up team, Rice), Jonathan (1st runner up team, Rice).
The video of the final presentations is available at:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnOkeV_B0Jc
An article on the event was published by IEEE CS at:
https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/insider-membership-news/north-america-student-challenge-2024-highlights