WiDS Maastricht Datathon 2023
Welcome to the 4th edition of Women in Data Science (WiDS) Maastricht Datathon 2023, that will take place on the 3rd and 4th of February! This year, we will host the event IN PERSON. All genders are welcome to join!
During this event you will:
- Gain or improve your data science skills by solving a global data challenge
- Team up with fellows and get a chance to win the global and local prize
- Support women in the data science domain and work in a gender-balanced team.
You will be given a dataset and a limited amount of time, you are challenged to use your creativity and data science skills to build, test, and explore solutions. Try something new, apply what you know, learn from other participants and improve your data science skills along the way!
Introduction
This is the fourth year that the Institute of Data Science hosted the WiDS Maastricht Datathon to inspire women to learn more about data science and to create a supportive environment for women to connect with others in their community.
WiDS Datathon is open to individuals or teams of up to 4 participants, at least half of each team must be individuals identifying themselves as women. Everyone is welcome to participate in the WiDS Datathon: students, faculty, civil/public servants or anyone coming from the private sector. We encourage everyone to join regardless of their level of knowledge in data science!
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Description
WiDS Datathon Global
The WiDS Datathon is a Stanford University initiative preceding the Women in Data Science Conference (WiDS). WiDS aims at inspiring and educating data scientists worldwide, regardless of gender, and supporting women in the field. The WiDS Datathon builds upon these same objectives by enabling a diverse team to work together in a data-related challenge.
Stanford University as the initiator will release a data challenge on the Kaggle platform. You can join the WiDS Datathon 2023 as an individual or with a team to tackle this data challenge competing with other teams from all over the world. Aligned with WIDS missions, we mandate at least 50% women in each participating team to encourage more women to learn data science and create a supportive environment for them.
General Information
- The event is a 2-day in-person event, FREE of charge
- ALL genders, backgrounds, and positions are welcome to participate
- You will have 2 days of Data Science learning and hacking within a team
- You will tackle a data challenge to improve longer-range weather forecasts to help people prepare and adapt to extreme weather events caused by climate change.
This year's data challenge
The data challenge for this year is to use data science to improve longer-range weather forecasts to help people prepare and adapt to extreme weather events caused by climate change.
Accurate long-term forecasts of temperature and precipitation are crucial to help people prepare and adapt to these extreme weather events. Currently, purely physics-based models dominate short-term weather forecasting. But these models have a limited forecast horizon. The availability of meteorological data offers an opportunity for data scientists to improve sub-seasonal forecasts by blending physics-based forecasts with machine learning. Sub-seasonal forecasts for weather and climate conditions (lead-times ranging from 15 to more than 45 days) would help communities and industries adapt to the challenges brought on by climate change.
This year’s datathon is organized by the WiDS Worldwide team at Stanford University, Harvard University IACS, Arthur, and the WiDS Datathon Committee. The dataset was created in collaboration with Climate Change AI (CCAI). Participants will submit forecasts of temperature and precipitation for one year, competing against the other teams as well as official forecasts from NOAA.
Program
Please consult the program of the WiDS Maastricht Datathon 2023.
Previous Datathons
Read about WiDS Datathon Maastricht 2021 and WiDS Datathon Maastricht 2022
WiDS Conference Maastricht
You are very welcome to register for and and attend the WiDS Conference Maastricht 2023 on Tuesday 7 March.
Pre-training and tutoring support
If you have not participated in Kaggle competitions before or if you do not have sufficient data science skills, please join our pre-training sessions on 3rd and 4th February. We invited Tiantian Wang, Afsana Khan, and Maryam Mohammadi as speakers to help you to use Kaggle platform, understand the dataset, introduce data analysis pipeline, brainstorming on possible solutions, etc.
As a warm-up for the Datathon, People who have experience in data science are also very welcome to join to help others and get to know your team members in Datathon.
Organisation
WiDS Maastricht is an independent event that is organized by Institute of Data Science at UM as part of the annual WiDS Worldwide Conference, the WiDS Datathon, and an estimated 200 WiDS Regional Events worldwide. Everyone is invited to attend all WiDS conference and WiDS Datathon Workshop events which feature outstanding women doing outstanding work.
WiDS Maastricht Datathon is an event organised to precede the Women in Data Science Maastricht Conference. Both events will be held on-site this year and you are welcomed to join both! Participants can be of any gender, and can be students, faculty, government workers, members of NGOs, or industry members.
For further questions, please contact the organisers: