The Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology, in partnership with Radius, recently concluded an Innovation Collider project last week. The collider consisted of a real-world data science challenge program, that allowed UC Berkeley students to learn and utilize the tools and methods used by the Radius team. Students were asked to estimate the industry of a business given its name, a brief description, and a website URL. The collider challenge was intense, requiring teams of 2 or 3 students to classify 10,000 businesses and explain their code within 10 days.
Despite working with an intended lack of resources, students were able to field excellent results. The winners, Michelle Leon and Victor Chen, from the team ‘Our Data is Bigger than Yours’ received a check for $10,000 after judges from Radius’ data engineering team deemed their pitch and code to be the most accurate.
The competition is one of several Innovation Collider projects recently initiated by the Saturja Dai Center. The aim of collider projects is to bring together students, researchers, investors, entrepreneurs and industry leaders in a learning environment to ‘collide’ and create ventures, solutions, research driven commercialization and opportunities to create impact in society.