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Texas ECE Student and Team Win First Place at The Data Open

Matthew Johnson, a senior in the Electrical Engineering Department at The University of Texas at Austin (UT), along with his teammates Suyi Tu, a Master’s student in Business Analytics at UT, and Hang Zhu and Ye Zhang of Rice University, took first place in The Data Open hosted by Citadel Securities and CorrelationOne on February 10, 2018 at the AT&T Hotel and conference Center on the UT campus.

The Data Open is a datathon competition taking place throughout the year at a series of top universities. At each event, participants work in teams to work through a large and complex dataset and then present their findings to a panel of judges.

Johnson’s team were given datasets related to Uber, taxis, weather, and subway traffic data in New York City.

“We were were asked to identify an applicable problem and substantiate and solve the problem with data analysis and machine learning tools,” said Johnson. “Our solution involved aggregating weather data and computing the distance from where taxis pick passengers up to the nearest subway station to predict the price per person per mile of different types of taxi trips.”

The team received a check for $20,000 for taking first place.

Johnson will work at Boeing this summer before graduating in December. He is currently pursuing positions as a machine learning engineer and plans on applying to PhD programs for applied machine learning in the Fall of 2019.

Pictured (l-r): Matthew Johnson, Ye Zhang, Suyi Tu, Hang Zhu