A Big Data Analysis Festival was held at Rostov State Economics University on 4 — 5 December 2018 as part of the II Open Russian Statistics Congress. Public lectures and masterclasses, an analytics competition, and a big data hackathon attracted over 500 students and young scientists from Russia and abroad.
Center-invest Bank both initiated and organised the Festival. The bank provided RUB1m as a prize fund for the analytics competition and big data hackathon.
The programme included seven lectures and masterclasses on big data trends and tools, given by experts from business and higher education and big data analysts. The following companies were partners of the Festival: Rostelecom, Mobilnye TeleSistemy, Graph Grail, Statzilla, and Andata.
The final of the analytics competition was held on 5 December. Vsevolod Maltsev, a master’s student at Rostov State Economics University, won first prize: RUB250,000. His project focused on the creation of a software solution that uses a neural network trained on big data to identify harmful operations. A second prize of RUB200,000 was shared between two entrants, and there was a third prize of RUB50,000.
The hackathon participants were tasked with using publicly available statistics to decide in which region to invest RUB1bn or USD10m. The following sectors were selected as promising: agriculture, transport and communications, IT, and mineral resources. The following were identified as promising regions: Krasnodar krai, Kemerovo region, Rostov region, Perm krai and Nizhny Novgorod region.
In just five hours one of the teams developed a neural network that analysed the volume of lending, compared it against non-performing loans, and identified patterns. The team from Southern Federal University managed to forecast the volume of lending and non-performing loans for the following year.
"As well as the ability to work with big data, the hackathon participants demonstrated excellent knowledge about financial analysis, different sectors, and macroeconomics," said Sergei Smirnov, Chairman of the Executive Board of Center-invest Bank. "The bank will use the results to further develop lending and support for small businesses."
The award ceremony was held straight after the hackathon. The winning team, receiving RUB200,000, was from the Southern Russian State Polytechnic University. Second place and RUB150,000 was awarded to a team from Rostov State Economics University, and teams from Southern Federal University, Rostov State Economics University and Donetsk National University came third, winning RUB50,000.
Chairman of the Board of Directors of Center-invest Bank, Dr Vasily Vysokov, spoke at the Congress’s closing ceremony. He noted that, "The Congress programme was very interesting and intensive, but the most important thing wasn’t what we discussed; it is that from this, students and young scientists will be creating the future. This is why Center-invest Bank and the organisers contributed a prize fund of RUB1m for the Big Data Analysis Festival. The Festival has clearly demonstrated the future of Russian statistics."