Krannert Teams Take the Top Three Spots in Business Analytics Poster Competition

Wednesday, April 20, 2022

Teams of students from the Krannert School of Management’s MS in Business Analytics and Information Management (MSBAIM) program swept the field in the student poster competition at the INFORMS Business Analytics conference on April 3-5, 2022, in Houston, Texas.

The first-place team of Yuvraj Daga, Parth Mau, Drew Bertram, Malay Rai, and Jyotisman Banerjee presented a poster on “Identification of Trends Across Sports for Computational Journalism Using Pattern Recognition and Anomaly Detection.”

“In this study, we discuss the development of a computational journalism model capable of identifying statistical trends within American collegiate athletics,” the team wrote in its abstract. “Television, radio, and print media sources utilize computational journalism to inform their audience of interesting statistics related to the game at hand.

“We evaluated its current use in collegiate sports and the associated limitations. We then collected and analyzed college football statistical data to define and identify significant trends related to individuals and teams. From this data, we used an enhanced machine learning algorithm to create a model capable of identifying significant trends across college football, basketball, soccer, and baseball.”

The second-place team was composed of MSBAIM students Xue Han, Su Tien Lee, Mu Hua Hsu, Li Ci Chuang, and Hsiao Chien Wei, who presented a poster on “Experiments and Perceptions in Machine Translation” that examines off-the-shelf machine translation (MT) models provided by Google and Microsoft platforms to gauge how well they translate.

The third-place team presented a poster on “A Hierarchical Approach and Analysis of Assortment Optimization” that examines the applications of analytics in retail. The team, which was composed of students Dhruv Shrivastava, Utkarsh Bajaj, Prerana Das, Manandeep Gill, Aaron Chen, and Toolika Agrawal, also won the best student paper award from the Midwest Decisions Sciences Institute.

SAS sponsored an award of $1,000 for the top student poster, and certificates were awarded for the second- and third-place student posters. Scoring was based on content, layout, and presentation. Each participant among the top three posters also received a free SAS certification exam voucher. SAS develops and markets a suite of analytics software, which helps access, manage, analyze and report on data to aid in decision-making.

According to Clinical Assistant Professor of Management Matthew Lanham, academic director of the MSBAIM program, “This was another amazing year of student engagements with companies, and we were blessed to support so many to attend the conference and present their work. Ninety-six percent of our students who attended the INFORMS Business Analytics conference were satisfied with their experience and would also recommend future students to attend.

“Our students averaged almost three interviews at the conference career fair and had the opportunity to network with several analytics practitioners. Next year, I would love to see some of our MSBAIM alumni who have been working for a few years come present their work and show the impact they are having in their organizations.”