Business Wire India
SAS and Goa Institute of Management (GIM) recently concluded the third edition of the Bitathon, a platform for aspiring minds to analyse data and solve problems for the modern world. The annual Data Analytics and Mining Championship saw an overwhelming response with over 1,000 students from more than 500 institutes participating in it. The theme for this year was bridging the gap between data and the human element by analysing customer complaints and grievances around financial products, especially loans and credit cards, on account of COVID and other factors. The space has seen several dynamics at play in recent times with changes in interest rates and payment terms, coupled with dropped income levels leading to non-payment issues and other grievances.
Speaking at the launch of the Bitathon, Dr. Ajit Parulekar, Director - Goa Institute of Management said, "Data is the new oil. When GIM embarked on the launch of the PGDM Big Data Analytics, we envisioned the omni-presence of data analytics across sectors and realized that there is an urgent need to educate managers to be able to lead and manage organisations in a data driven world of business. The pandemic accelerated this and nations used data to identify, track, and solution approaches to manage the pandemic. Bitathon is now an annual calendar event at GIM that attracts participants from leading institutions in the country and it is heartening to see the bounce back post pandemic in terms of the huge number of participants who participated in Bitathon this year."
Bhuvan Nijhawan, Sr. Director Education – Asia Pacific, SAS Institute India Private Limited said, “SAS continues to challenge young minds with problems that matter to the modern society. It is exciting to see an overwhelming response to Bitathon and efforts put by the teams to come up with pragmatic solutions to the issues that society faces today.”
One of the key findings of the Bitathon was that Corporate and Business Houses need automated Natural Language Processing (NLP) based systems to systematically identify and classify grievances, along with sentiment analysis and dispute prediction models. The competing teams presented a variety of approaches to automate the process and came up with models which classified and scored the complaint based on severity and sentiment involved. The winning team provided a systematic approach to tackle grievances using techniques like oversampling for unbalanced data, data cleaning strategies, applications of Latent Semantic Analysis, Topic Detection, and Machine Learning algorithms that addressed several issues in data. The outcome was a working application that has the capability to predict the probability of a complaint turning into a dispute.
The findings and applications designed at Bitathon showed how such applications could deliver immediate value in the real world. It displayed how several efficiencies and effectiveness could be built into the process of dealing with grievances in an organization in specific and society in general. These approaches would also find resonance in government and non-government organizations dealing in public or customer grievances.
Dr. R Rathish Bhatt, Chair, Big Data Analytics Programme, Goa Institute of Management said, "Events like these give a platform to data enthusiasts to apply their knowledge and understanding to solve real-life problems faced by the industry. This is an attempt from GIM to prepare data-fluent managers to take on various business challenges head-on.”
The winners of Bitathon 2021 were:
- Winner: Stochastically Yours - Arya Shah from Mukesh Patel School of Technology Management and Engineering (MPSTME), Mumbai
- 1st runner up: Kanishk Kavdia from Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies (NMIMS), Dhule
- 2nd runner up: Data Detectives Naik Dhanasri Shivdas, G Likith Chandra and Pritam from Symbiosis Institute of Business Management (SIBM), Bangalore
Bitathon is part of SAS’s ongoing efforts towards using Data for Good. The Data for Good movement encourages using data in meaningful ways to solve humanitarian issues around poverty, health, human rights, education, and the environment. From preventing life-threatening illnesses to protecting endangered species to rebuilding after natural disasters, organizations across the globe are harnessing data to make a difference.
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