The WiDS Datathon is a community-driven program that encourages  all data science enthusiasts to hone their data science skills. This year, the WiDS Datathon social impact challenge was focused on climate change. Dozens of WiDS ambassadors hosted WiDS Datathon workshops where they helped their communities to get started on Kaggle, form teams, get mentorship, and even submit their first models. 

Two women on different sides of world who had never participated in a Kaggle competition came together as a team to compete in the WiDS Datathon 2022—leading to new skills, confidence, and a lasting friendship. The datathon goal was to analyze the energy efficiency of buildings. Participants analyzed regional differences in building energy efficiency, creating models to predict building energy consumption, an important first step in understanding how to maximize energy efficiency.
 
We asked Pravallika Myneni and Anissa Amziani to tell us more about themselves and the experience of working together during the datathon competition.

The 6th Annual Women in Data Science (WiDS) Datathon launches in January 2023, in the lead up to the WiDS conferences in March 2023. In this year’s datathon challenges participants will use data science to improve longer-range weather forecasts to help people prepare and adapt to extreme weather events caused by climate change.

Millicent Ochieng is a Data and Applied Scientist at Microsoft Africa Research Institute MARI, a WiDS Kenya Ambassador & WiDS Africa Co-Ambassador.

The WiDS Datathon is a community-driven program that encourages  all data science enthusiasts to hone their data science skills. This year, the WiDS Datathon social impact challenge was focused on climate change. Dozens of WiDS ambassadors hosted WiDS Datathon workshops where they helped their communities to get started on Kaggle, form teams, get mentorship, and even submit their first models. Around 40 workshops were hosted in over 22 countries including Kenya, Nepal, the UK, and Peru.

The 5th Annual Women in Data Science (WiDS) Datathon is now open on Kaggle, and the competition has begun! This annual datathon encourages women to hone their skills through a  data science challenge focused on social impact. Watch the recording from the WiDS Datathon Welcome Event to learn about how you can get started with the WiDS Datathon competition. We’ll guide you through the first steps on Kaggle, datathon resources, tutorials, workshops, and more.

Climate change is one of the critical challenges facing humanity today. Over the past few years, there have been widespread climate-driven disruptive events such as floods and wildfires. The devastation caused by these events has resulted in an awareness of the urgency of the issue. Indeed, people and governments have started working together in the direction of climate-focused coordinated action. At WiDS, we believe that it will be important for future data scientists to gain familiarity with mathematical and statistical models used to model climate data.  For this reason, the focus of the WiDS Datathon this year is a climate-focused challenge: prediction of building energy consumption.

​Dr. Zaher Ali Al-Sai, a WiDS Ambassador in Jordan, says creating and leading a workshop for the WiDS Datathon expanded her skills and confidence by empowering women in her region.

The 5th Annual Women in Data Science (WiDS) Datathon will launch in January, in advance of the WiDS Worldwide Conference to be held on March 7th, 2022. This year’s WiDS Datathon, organized by the WiDS Worldwide team, Stanford University, Harvard University IACS, and the WiDS Datathon Committee, will address an important way to mitigate the effects of climate change with a focus on energy efficiency. The WiDS Datathon Committee is partnering with experts from many disciplines at Climate Change AI, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and MIT Critical Data.

The WiDS Datathon 2021 has seen record-breaking participation, with 1,773 individuals on the leaderboard, 24,479 entries, and with nearly 4,000 registrants from over 85 countries around the world! Congratulations to the leaderboard winners Dihydrogen Oxide, EPFL, and .IL. ​