A team of management information systems and operations management students earn award in “Best Data Visualization” category at annual competition organized by the American Statistical Association.
Charlton College of Business students recently participated in the DataFest 2018 Competition where they competed with students from Stonehill College, Bridgewater State University, and Bryant University.
Organized by the American Statistical Association (ASA), DataFest is a celebration of data in which teams of undergraduates work around the clock to find and share meaning in a large, rich, and complex data set, according to the ASA website.
As part of their presentation, students Trevor Faria, Ratna Jujjavarapu, Shivam Rai, and Sarah Riecke incorporated skills acquired from using the interactive dashboard capabilities within Tableau. Tableau is a business analytics software tool introduced to students as part of taking MIS 475: Business Intelligence and Analytics taught by Tim Shea, UMass Dartmouth Associate Professor of MIS and coordinator of the MBA concentration in business analytics. “Students gain hands-on experience and an understanding of the underpinnings of how to make a great visualization using Tableau, one of the leading software packages in business analytics,” said Shea.
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“The students used a lot of creativity in their presentation, which impressed the judges and earned them an award in the Best Data Visualization category,” said Bharatendra K. Rai, Associate Professor of Business Analytics at UMass Dartmouth’s Charlton College of Business and faculty advisor of the team. “It was a great learning experience for our students to compete at Stonehill College over the course of three days. The competition involved working on real-world problems with more than four million rows of data, and interacting with students and faculty from other universities as well as industry professionals.”
Shivam Rai '18 discussed the overall and personal benefits of participating in the competition. “DataFest was an excellent opportunity for me to work with the big data and utilize my skills to create visualizations,” said Shivam. Learn more about the DataFest 2018 Competition.
About Charlton’s business analytics courses
MIS 475 is a required course for all MIS majors who are taking the Technology option. The course is also available as an elective for all business students. The graduate version of the course, MIS 674: Applied Business Analytics and Information Visualization, is part of an available Business Analytics concentration within the MBA.