Urbanlytics 2019 Datathon for SmartCities sees over 200 participants

Over the course of the next three decades, 70% of humanity will be living in cities, though they only take up less than 2% of the earth’s surface. This incredible population density brings its own challenges – pollution, unequal opportunities, traffic congestion and more. It is critical for policy makers to address this and one of the key ways to tackle that is by harnessing the power of big data analytics which is where the Urbanlytics 2019 datathon comes into the picture.

For the uninitiated, the Urbanlytics 2019 datathon sees participants grouped up into teams and then tasked with finding solutions to business problems by creating data models via the analysis of complex datasets.  Previous installments of Urbanlytics were held in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. This time around, Urbanlytics 2019 will take place in Malaysia and is the second time it has been held in the country.

Taking place over the course of a weekend, the upcoming Urbanlytics 2019 will take place on 21and- 22 September 2019 with over 210 participants from all across the region including Cambodia, Indonesia, India and Bangladesh, with over 30% of them female, slated to take part. For Urbanlytics 2019, the key theme that participants have to address is – you guessed it – Smart Cities.

Participants for Urbanlytics 2019 will be tasked with harnessing big data to create cashless and low-carbon city solutions with a specific emphasis on low-carbon mobility planning, with everyone vying for a slice of  RM40,000 in prize money. On top of the winning team, there will also be individual titles awarded to individual participants such as Best Data Scienties, Best Data Engineer and Best Business Consultant.

At the commencement of Urbanlytics 2019 on 21 September 2019, the competing teams will be issued anonymised data sets that mirror real world data and will then have to find ways to visualise and analyse this raw data to gain practical solutions which can impact real-life business.

To determine the winners, Urbanlytics 2019 will have a judging panel that has invited worthies that include Pedro Uria Recio, Head of Axiata Analytics Centre, Alexandros Paterakis, Chief Information Officer of Celcom, Paul Morrissey, Ambassador for Big Data Analytics and Customer Experience of TM Forum & Technology Entrepreneur and Bruno Gagliardo, GLobal Director of Data Analytics of iflix.

“This is the fourth datathon organised by Axiata. The successes of previous datathons have unearthed talented individuals, whom we are mentoring and nurturing even after the competitions. Our goal is to develop a pool of world-class data lovers who can hack it out in the real world, providing better solutions. In our increasingly connected environment, making sense of data is a success differentiator in serving customers better. Axiata places emphasis on this aspect more so with our footprint of 350 million subscribers in 11 countries,” says Pedro Uria Recio from Axiata Analytics Centre Head. For more details on Urbanlytics 2019, swing by https://urbanlytics.hackathon.com/