With Singapore on Circuit Breaker mode, all schools and businesses are required to cease operations at least until 1 June.
Yet, despite the new challenges, the NUS Business Analytics Centre adapts to it by hosting their first NUS-EMC Innovation Challenge online, allowing students to pitch data-driven solutions that help improve real world problems in the Energy Markets.
On the 28 April, NUS Business Analytics Centre conducted the NUS-EMC Business Analytics Innovation Challenge, where eight teams participated in the finals to pitch innovative solutions to the Energy Market Company (EMC) in hopes to win a grand cash prize of $5,000.
The projects, which was presented in a panel of seven judges from EMC and NUS BAC, aim to solve EMC’s business challenge on developing a Uniform Singapore Energy Price forecasting model using datasets, artificial intelligence, and other predictive analytics to improve the accuracy of forecasts.
The teams were assessed based on strict criteria, including how innovative their approach was, the feasibility and reliability of the solution, as well as the creative use of data throughout the challenge.
After 5 hours of intense presentations, Team Stellar emerged as the champion, bagging the NUS X EMC Innovation Challenge trophy, and a cash prize of $5,000. Team Stellar’s solution involves a comprehensive end-to-end pipeline with commentary generation, and a robust dashboard visualisation to help with energy price forecasting.
Screenshot: An Overview of Team Stellar’s solution for EMC.
“We are overwhelmed with happiness for winning this challenge,” said Stella, a member of Team Stellar. “We participated in this challenge in hopes of learning from each other, even beyond the MSBA programme that we went through.”
“It makes us feel like we’re in the MSBA course again, even though we just graduated not too long ago,” she added.
EMC Chief Operating Officer Mr Lim Chew also added that the 5-hour long finale was very engaging, and that the company has had major takeaways from the programme.
“It is really impressive to see such high quality work delivered in such a short span of time,” said Lim.
“We have also learnt quite a fair bit from our participants as well, on the different perspectives on how to interpret the data, as well as operating the dashboards. It was a great learning opportunity for EMC,” he added.
Co-Director of NUS Business Analytics Centre, Associate Professor James Pang added that this was NUS first collaboration with EMC, and he looks forward to future partnerships with the company.
“I look forward to future collaboration with EMC, where we can take the winning team’s solution and combine it with the learning expertise of other teams to deploy their solutions to the EMC environment in the future,” said Pang.
For more information on the Master of Science in Business Analytics Programme, please visit msba.nus.edu.sg
For more information on the innovation challenge, visit:
EMC Bulletin: https://www.emcsg.com/f274,146638/EMC_Bulletin_115_FINAL.pdf
EMC LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6666277015274033153
Other mention: https://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/news/3403-2020nus-emc-challenge/