Pacific Data Science Students Win Data Visualization Award in Multischool Competition

Pacific data science students Iris Murakami '23, April Murakami '23, Waverly Sudborough '22, Matthew Zaback '23 were honored by the judges of DataFest22, a competition sponsored by the American Statistical Association and hosted by Willamette University, for this year's best data visualization.

The judges said the Pacific team did a "really nice job making the connection between time spent and performance. Love the critical thinking displayed in the entire analysis," said Evgenia Chunikhina, assistant professor of data science. 

Chunikhina said the students created a visualization that helped interpret the behavior of users of an educational video game called Elm City Stories. "The data set used this year was simultaneously the most interesting, most complicated, and biggest dataset that has ever been used in the history of DataFest," she said.

Because the competition is continuing, the students said they aren't yet allowed to share their visualization work. But Iris Murakami said competing teams had 48 hours to analyze a complex set of data from a sponsor — in this case, the company that created Elm City Stories — and draw insights from it, then produce a summary document and short video.

Data science is one of Pacific's newest majors. It is overseen by the Math and Computer Science Department of the university’s School of Natural Sciences.