Forestpin sponsore University of Moratuwa team Wins second place in the YES Bank Datathon
View(s):Team “Insight” a Sri Lankan team of third year Undergraduates from the department of Electronics and Telecommunication of the Moratuwa University, Mahendran Sutharasan, Indula Munasinghe, Uththara Chandratilake, Chathuri Jayaweera came second in the finals of the YES bank machine learning competition in Bangalore. – A machine learning competition that attracted 7000 participants and 1700 teams.
The whole team interned on machine learning at Forestpin during the last five months. Forestpin sponsored their air travel and YES Bank hosted their stay in India. On hearing of the performance of the team Dr. Nuwan Dayananda, Head of the department of Electronics and Telecommunication of the Moratuwa University said he is delighted about the achievement of students who are building skills in extremely important areas such as machine learning.
After the finals, YES BANK DATATHON team stated in a message to Ransith Fernando MD of Forestpin “we are pleased to announce that 4 interns from Forestpin & students of University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka (Indula, Uththara, Chathuri & Sutharsan) bagged the 1st Runner up position & the best student team at YES DATATHON-an initiative by YES BANK out of total 7000+ participants/1700+ teams. The team’s effort along with the depth of research & Analysis was highly appreciated by Rajat Kanwar Gupta, President & Head, Business Analytics Solutions & Development COE, YES BANK and other industry experts. We thank you for all the support which was offered to the students in their Datathon journey & we look forward to have more participation from Sri Lankan teams in the next edition.”
YES Bank invited data scientists, companies, researchers and students from all over the world in August to take part in an online machine learning competition that involved access to anonymized data of YES Bank to the finalists.
The competition attracted 7000 participants. The first round of the competition involved four different machine learning tests over a two month period where data was given and each of the teams was asked to make specific predictions. Based on the results 200 teams were selected to the second round which involved building a Data model prototype.
The second round had tough competition with teams comprising of students from top technology institutes like IIT Bombay, Chennai, Kharagpur and ISI Kolkata along with professionals from organizations like IBM, Walmart Labs, Siemens and Amazon Development Centre among others. Some of the data scientists taking part had over twenty years of experience in the field.
These teams were given access to anonymized YES Bank data and were asked to work on specific areas that was of interest to the Bank and were also asked to propose models of their choice based on the available banking data. Over the next three weeks the selected teams received support from over 20 data science experts from across industries who helped them in the product development process.
The Sri Lankan team worked on a model for ‘predicting customer product and service affinity’. This model was selected to the third and final round with 20 teams who were invited to Bangalore to present their solutions.
23 year old Mahendran Sutharasan who hails from Chunnakam Jaffna studied at Jaffna Hindu College prior to University said that when they first presented YES Bank with the model on “‘predicting customer product and service affinity’” the YES Bank mentor Mr. Rajat Kanwar Gupta challenged us to present a new way of looking at the problem, they were very happy with our second model that was selected to the finals. Indula Munasinghe who studied at Maliyadeva Collge, Kurunagala prior to entering University said that after their 20 minute presentation in the finals they were recalled and asked to do a second presentation, this was the first clue that they had done well. When the winners were announced he was elated.
Forestpin is a Sri Lankan company that helps companies reduce operational risk by identifying transactions that are different from past patterns and use machine learning to improve the relevance of alerts. Each year Forestpin offers a few full time machine learning internships. 23 year old Uththara Chandratilake who had a school education St.Joseph’s Balika M.V. Kegalle said that she was very proud as a Sri Lankan to know that they can successfully compete in Machine Learning not only with the best Indian students from IIT’s also with experienced data scientists. She hopes this would be an inspiration for other Sri Lankan teams to compete and win machine learning competitions outside Sri Lanka.
Chathuri Jayaweera who also studied at Maliyadeva Girls College Kurunagala wanted to thank the mentors from YES Bank, Sillenza team for the super event organization and Forestpin for introducing them to the event. She hopes similar events would be organized in Sri Lanka as well. Dilanke Hettiaratchi, Director Forestpin was thankful to team “Insight”, Mr. Rajat Kanwar Gupta the visionary behind the event from YES Bank, the mentors and organizers from YES Bank Deepak Bisht, Sanglap Banerjee ,Shruti Bist, Manya Joshi, the Skillenza team who provided the event platform, The University of Moratuwa who have given us awesome hardworking interns, Chirath Hettiratchi and others who supervised their ML training and the Indian Analytics Magazine from whom we first got to know of the event.
Photo Courtesy of YES Bank, Left to right: Priyank Tiwari, President & Regional Head-Corporate Marketing, Strategy & Fintech YES Bank, Chathuri Jayaweera, Indula Munasinghe, Uththara Chandratilake, Mahendran Sutharasan from team “Insight” Rajat Kanwar Gupta-President & Head- Business Analytics Solutions & Development COE, YES BANK Subramanian Ramakrishnan-CEO, Sportsmechanics Pvt Ltd.