Team of the U.Porto reaches podium at the World Data League Final

A team of PhD students of FEUP and researchers of INESC TEC reached second podium position at the World Data League (WDL) Final.

The Tech Moguls team, which includes researchers Tiago Gonçalves, Tomé Albuquerque and Joana Morgado (PhD students at FEUP and alumna of the Faculty of Sciences, respectively) and Paulo Maia, data scientist at NILG.AI, (alumnus of FEUP and also collaborator of INESC TEC), competed with other 49 teams, from 34 countries and won second place following a jury evaluation composed of data science experts.

In order to reach the Data Science “marathon” podium, researchers had to overcome the four phases of the competition. For over two months, the team sought to present solutions for the various challenges cities are facing at present, namely road transport, traffic, cycling and environment, which included implementation steps (code and data analysis), as well as all theoretical, social and financial underpinnings that are necessary to reach robust and viable solutions in these issues.

The solution that the U.Porto team put forward “targeted” the Italian city of Turin, and it would enable to measure the level of noise throughout the day, as well as detect the probability to register an effective noise related complaint – enabling public managements institutions to optimise decisions making processes and informed decisions, to improve the quality of life of citizens.

“As people that are passionate about problem solving, we consider that our participation at the WDL was an experience to test our knowledge and our will to learn, always taking into account the goal to generate a positive impact on people’s life. These have been very fun work weeks, where we harnessed team work and were reminded how important is it to learn about topics that are unusual in our everyday lives”, mentions Tiago Gonçalves Albuquerque.

According to the INESC TEC researcher, this second podium place, “is an acknowledgement of the solutions we put forward, in an open-source format; we hope they can be used to be utilised by the civil society, to create added value to people’s lives“.

On World Data League

World Data League is a platform devoted to data science and to the development of high social impact solutions, in order to promote the establishment of online and offline communities, and the organisation of events to experts in the area.

See here all the solutions developed in the scope of this competition.