Excellence in Research Award

To help encourage deeper exploration and the development of collaborative data science innovations, the WiDS Datathon Committee and the National Science Foundation Big Data Innovation Hubs are hosting a second phase of the​ WiDS Datathon with an Excellence in Research Award. 

​We invite participants to share more details about their work with WiDS Datathon 2021 data through a research paper of up to 3 pages. 

​Submissions will be accepted from March 9 until April 30, 2021.

Submissions will be reviewed by subject matter experts from the WiDS Datathon Committee, the National Science Foundation Big Data Innovation Hubs, and the MIT GOSSIS community. Papers will be evaluated on their potential for real-world impact, rigor in scientific methodology, and clarity of communication.
Papers will also be eligible to be published here on the WiDS website.

Papers should address questions including but not limited to:

• What assumptions did you make in preparing your models and analyzing the data?
• What are the potential implications of your assumptions?
• What are your main insights and contributions?
• What are some of your 'lessons learned' and meaningful or surprising results?
• What unanswered questions do you have about the data, your analysis, and the analysis from the research community? 
• How might you and others address these unanswered questions and/or advance related research? 
• Are there open problems in mathematics, statistics, computer science, applied medical research or related fields that could benefit from deeper exploration of this data set?

Submissions should also include an abstract (4-5 sentence summary) and a list of references (e.g., cited research papers, books, tutorials, or other resources used).

Excellence in Research Award Winners 2020

Congratulations to last year's Phase 2 winners at IBM from Pakistan, Germany, and New York! ​

The team met as a result of their participation in the WiDS Datathon 2020, and did not know each other prior to the contest. They competed in the datathon, then wrote a research paper about their work analyzing 130,000 hospital patient health records to predict survival - and how their predictive models perform across features such as gender, ethnicity, and age.

Madiha Ijaz, Muhammad Ammar Ahmed, Muhammad Usman Zafar, Maria Alejandra Sanchez

Award Details

This year, the winning individual or team will receive:

• $3,000 USD cash prize for the team
• 1 complimentary VIP registration per team member for WiDS 2022
• A WiDS Datathon Excellence in Research Award Certificate for each team member
• An invitation to be featured in a #WiDStory article

In addition to the Excellence in Research Award, up to $2,500 USD will be distributed for honorable mentions across submitted research papers.
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Phase 2 winners will be recognized via WiDS and the Big Data Innovation Hubs' social media channels. Special thanks to Kaggle for providing the cash prizes for the winners.

Eligibility

To be eligible for the award, all entrants must have participated in the first phase of the WiDS Datathon 2021 on Kaggle. Individuals and teams should submit their papers with the same names and contact emails used for WiDS Datathon 2021 registration. The Submittable website will open on March 9th. Papers are due April 30, 2021.

Questions?

Refer to the WiDS Datathon FAQ on Kaggle. If you still have questions, please send an email to widsdatathon@stanford.edu.

The WiDS Datathon Excellence in Research Award 2021 competition is hosted by the National Science Foundation West Big Data Innovation Hub, Midwest Big Data Innovation Hub, Northeast Big Data Innovation Hub, and South Big Data Innovation Hub, in collaboration with the WiDS Datathon Committee. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants 1916573, 1916481, 1915774, 1916613, 1916585, 1916589, and 1916454 as part of a national network of Regional Big Data Innovation Hubs.