SCET is excited to announce the winners of the Amazon Collider Project. The winning team members are Valentin Marek, Zied Alaoui, Kevin Olivier and Nathan Berrebbi. The runner-up team members are Abbey Chaver and Ben LeRoy.
As SCET’s first collider project, Amazon Logistics offered students a chance to tackle challenges from the real-world—they can either forecast the number of vehicles required for package delivery, or create a supply/demand proposal for the available capacity in Amazon’s line haul network.
“We were involved in every aspect of the project,” said Valentin Marek, who was part of the winning team. “We came up with four different models to compute the optimal number of vehicles required.”
Marek first focused on the solutions to each optimization problem with his teammates Barrebbi and Olivier, and Alaoui worked on the parameters of their models (cost for each type of vehicle). Later they ran simulations using Python and designed the final models.
“The Collider Project itself was great,” Marek said. “It is really motivating to work on a core and real problem faced by a company like Amazon.” The fact that it lasts two weeks makes us stay very focused on the project during these two weeks, he added.
Abbey Chaver, a member from the runner-up team, said it was awesome to talk to the Amazon team. “It was really validating to hear that our model was an intelligent approach to this problem,” he said. “Neither Ben nor I were looking to get hired—we really did it for the experience.”
A Collider Project is specific type of project available to all students, ranging from undergraduate to Ph.D. and from all disciplines. Ph.D. and Postdoctoral students may receive credit for collider projects as part of the Management of Technology Innovation Program (MTI) while undergraduate students may count their experiential Collider projects towards the Undergraduate Certificate.
Upcoming Colliders and Past Case Examples:
October 20: Yahoo Collider
October 6: TiVo Collider Project
September 22: Radius Collider – Project in Formation
June 2, 2015: Summer Collider with Foundation Capital for New Venture Teams
May 5, 2015: Steve Blank Lean Launch Program
April 23, 2015: Amazon Logistics
Learn more about SCET’s Collider Philosophy:
http://engineeringleadership.net/2014/10/17/whats-next-for-entrepreneurship-centers/